Interview with NDP leader Nenshi; calls 2025 ‘undemocratic’

By George Lee, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Alberta’s Premier steered her party in unpopular directions in 2025 while neglecting critical rural issues like Chinese tariffs on canola, NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said in a yearend interview.

Danielle Smith and the UCP also failed to protect ranch country and the environment in a coal mining policy that threatens the Eastern Slopes, he continued.

And the governing party alienated much of its base within and beyond the two major cities by moving too quickly and undemocratically on multiple fronts.

“I spent a lot of time with people in smaller communities, really hearing all of this. Does that mean they’re going to vote New Democrat tomorrow? You know, we’ve got work to do,” Nenshi acknowledged.

“Our job is to convince people that, look, you don’t have to stand for this kind of treatment. You deserve a better government and Alberta’s New Democrats are ready to be that better government.”

But Albertans shouldn’t trust Nenshi to lead the province, the UCP responded in an emailed statement.

Said Joseph Schow, the UCP house leader: “Nenshi fails to recognize that his party’s disastrous one-term government drove out tens of billions of dollars in investment, invited foreign coal companies into protected areas in the foothills, and attacked the family farm with punitive regulations and a carbon tax that added tens of thousands of dollars in costs.”

Schow, the member for Cardston-Siksika, said the UCP has strong ties to rural Alberta and holds almost every one of its seat.

“Rural Alberta is not just a voting base to us — it is where our MLAs and their families live, and we have invested billions of dollars in ensuring that rural Albertans have the services they need and an economy that creates jobs across the province,” the statement continued.  
 
Albertans are “taking home bigger paycheques thanks to our tax cut, and the education and health care budgets are the highest in Alberta history,” said Schow, who’s also the minister of jobs, economy, trade and immigration.

Nenshi, meanwhile, pointed to three major data collectors that guided the NDP in 2025: a byelection in a rightwing stronghold, a pro-Canada petition that gathered more than 400,000 signatures in favour of a potential referendum question, and an Opposition tour of the province called Better Together.

Alberta’s NDP took the electorate’s temperature in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills during the byelection to fill the seat left open by former speaker Nathan Cooper.

The June 23 race was never close for the NDP in the corridor riding north and east of Calgary. UCP candidate Tara Sawyer easily won to become the government side’s newest rookie member.

But the NDP’s Bev Toews placed second, receiving more votes than Cam Davies, the leader of the pro-independence Republican Party of Alberta.

“We actually got the highest percentage vote the New Democrats have ever had in that riding,” said Nenshi. “We beat the separatists, and we really used it as a learning opportunity to understand what was on the minds of people in quite a rural riding.”

The Better Together tour, which included 10 town halls, was first envisioned as a reaction to separatist sentiments. But it morphed into a broader conversation as many Albertans embraced a pro-Canada movement.

After it started, Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Alberta deputy premier under the Progressive Conservatives, was soon on his way to landing more than enough signatures to qualify his citizen initiative called Forever Canadian.

Between mid-July and mid-October, Better Together dispatched NDP caucus members across the province to hold town halls, knock on more than 100,000 doors, take in rodeos and music festivals, and meet people where they walk their dogs and sip their coffees.

The party wanted to “just sort of chat with people” to find out what was on their minds, Nenshi said.

Albertans are a diverse lot, and classifying everyone as rural who lives beyond metropolitan Calgary and Edmonton is a misnomer, he said.

There are “a lot of different things going on in between” the province’s rural and urban extremes.

“You know, there’s the nurse in Red Deer, the oilfield worker in Fort McMurray, and they don’t always think of themselves as rural Albertans.”

Regardless, there’s “an enormous feeling in the communities, the big cities, the small towns, you name it, that this government has gone way too far,” said Nenshi.

The UCP hit an historic high in invoking debate closure, Nenshi said, estimating the figure at more than 80 times in six years. That’s more than half the total times it’s been used in Alberta’s 120-year history, he said.

Use of the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution brought an end to last fall’s teachers’ strike and later strengthened three laws the NDP considers anti-transgender.

Issues down on the farm, meanwhile, aren’t being properly addressed, Nenshi said.

“The premier talks a lot about energy, but she never talks about agriculture.”

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe went to China to personally intervene about canola tariffs. “We very rarely hear this premier talk about canola or pulses or beef.”

Many farmers and ranchers are also “deeply concerned” about coal mining on the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, Nenshi said.

A proposal for an open-pit mine on Grassy Mountain north of Blairmore remains alive, even though the province has banned that type of coal mining in new proposals.

Exploration and underground mining are permitted, with conditions, in those parts of the slopes not within national or provincial parks or wilderness areas.

Schow said Nenshi’s record as mayor of Calgary speaks to how he’d serve communities across Alberta. He alluded to water infrastructure problems in the city that include two breaks in the Bearspaw south feeder line about 18 months apart.

“We take no lessons on supporting communities from the former mayor that put pet projects and virtue signaling over critical infrastructure such as water pipes,” the house leader’s statement said.

“Nenshi’s legacy is an out-of-touch mayor that failed to support Calgarians with the most basic needs, and today those people are paying the price. It begs the question, how could he ever be trusted to run Alberta?”