Nenshi eyed as frontrunner as deadline looms in Alta. NDP leadership race
EDMONTON — As a key deadline loomed Monday in the leadership contest for Alberta’s New Democrats, numbers and opinion suggest it remains Naheed Nenshi’s race to lose.
Members had until Monday night — with a midnight deadline — to buy a membership in order to cast a vote on June 22 on who will replace Rachel Notley as NDP leader and head of the Opposition.
Nenshi, a former Calgary mayor, has been drawing hundreds to party events and has already seen leadership rival Rakhi Pancholi read the numbers and quit the race to join his team.
He’s the outsider challenging party mainstays Sarah Hoffman and Kathleen Ganley.
Nenshi, a three-term mayor, does not have a track record with the NDP. He has promised his brand of purple politics — a mix of conservative blue and liberal red — is the common-sense hue Albertans seek.
He’s been running a campaign primarily on what he opposes rather than what he proposes.
He has criticized Premier Danielle Smith’s governing United Conservative Party for regressive social politics on transgender youth and for picking partisan fights with the federal government.
Nenshi said he is depending on party members to develop an agenda ahead of the 2027 provincial election.
“We don’t really know what additional hell the UCP is going to wreak on us over the next three years,” Nenshi said in an interview.
Smith says Albertans lose no matter who wins given the provincial NDP takes orders from the federal wing — given the NDP-Liberal power sharing deal in Ottawa — and makes Notley’s successor yet another compliant errand runner to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“There’s nothing that differentiates them,” Smith told reporters last week in answer to a question about her criticism of Nenshi’s campaign.
Nenshi said the party, which swept Edmonton and captured the most seats in Calgary in the 2023 election, is poised to grow quickly.
“They [Smith’s party] ought to be scared,” he said.
But before taking on Smith, Nenshi must defeat four candidates, including Hoffman, a former health minister, and Ganley, a former justice minister and fellow Calgarian.
Hoffman said sales are only one leg of the race. When the deadline passes, she said, the “persuasion phase” begins.
“Just because somebody bought a membership through one person’s website, or through one person’s door knocking, doesn’t mean that they’re entitled to their vote,” said Hoffman at a news conference last week.
Ganley, who has focused on economic issues in her campaign, acknowledged Nenshi “might be the frontrunner” but said her membership sales have skyrocketed.
“At this point, it’s anyone’s game,” she said.
The remaining two candidates are considered long shots. Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse is a rookie NDP legislature member and Gil McGowan is head of the Alberta Federation of Labour.