Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley on the election and the path forward

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If Rachel Notley is leaving politics, it’s not going to happen overnight. Her party has begun a painstaking postmortem of its election failure. The report won’t be ready until the fall, and it will help inform her decision on whether to stay on as Alberta NDP Leader.

Conventional political thinking would say it’s time to leave. She’s led her party to two election losses against the United Conservative Party, and there are now other New Democrats with cred enough to become potential successors.

On the other hand, Ms. Notley, 59, is one of the most successful NDP leaders in Canadian political history. She is a woman who managed to take her party – once led by her father, Grant Notley – from the fringes to the mainstream in the country’s most famously true-blue province.

The NDP caucus, at 38 members, is the largest, most diverse Official Opposition in Alberta history. And in an era where Alberta conservatives have cycled through leaders like light bulbs, it’s hard to imagine an Alberta NDP without Ms. Notley at the helm.

In an interview this week, Ms. Notley appears genuinely open to staying or leaving, saying she is taking time to reflect in the same manner she did after other Alberta elections. “Listen, it could have gone either way in 2015 – many people don’t know that,” she says to incredulity on my part, since that was the single election her party won.

“It could have gone any way in 2019, and it can go any way now,” she adds. “You have a responsibility to really give it due consideration.”

But even before a formal postmortem, Ms. Notley will talk about what went right or wrong for her party during the most recent loss. She notes that the campaign was truncated by at least a week because of the wildfires in Northern Alberta. The UCP was successful keeping a relatively low-key profile, which aided its push to appear as a steady, mainstream conservative movement.

She says that since a number of Calgary ridings were so close – the NDP won the popular vote by a hair in the province’s largest city – a few hundred votes could have been influenced by some late-campaign events.

With the issue of parental consent and notification looming large, someone created a fake image of an NDP tweet saying it was party policy that children have access to “gender-affirming surgeries” without parental consent, and that nonsupportive parents could face criminal charges.

Where this came from isn’t clear. But Ms. Notley says she believes it was sent to some religious and racialized communities, and NDP campaigners heard concern about this particular bit of disinformation on Calgary doorsteps in the final days before election day.

There is also the question of whether the promise to increase the corporate income tax hurt the NDP campaign – as the UCP certainly thinks. Ms. Notley said she stands by a policy that the party contends would have helped establish a responsible revenue stream for the province, and she’s not sure it influenced the election outcome. However, she says perhaps they didn’t spend enough time explaining their plan.

“Some people will say we shouldn’t have done it,” she says. “But there are others who will say that if we were going to do it, we should have actually owned it.”

She also speaks to the single televised debate between her and UCP Leader Danielle Smith, and agrees – with relative frankness for an opposition politician – that Ms. Smith came out looking good. Ms. Notley’s side didn’t realize the advantage the UCP Leader would have with the low expectations for her performance – set up in part by the constant New Democratic attacks on her character and steadiness – combined with Ms. Smith’s long experience in TV and communications.

“People were surprised when she showed up and was able to maintain composure for 50 minutes. And that was a win.”

In discussion around the debate, there’s also a deeply superficial query to get out of the way: Was Ms. Notley’s decision to wear blue on debate night an attempt to mess with Ms. Smith, or to appear more conservative? Ms. Notley says the answer is no. Her party colours include blue, she says, and NDP orange just doesn’t work with her strawberry-blonde complexion.

“In hindsight, maybe I should have just worn an orange necklace,” she says.

Sartorial questions aside, the guessing game about Ms. Notley’s political future will continue, with political insiders leaning toward a carefully choreographed departure late this year or early next, in a manner that leads to the long-term “sustainability” Ms. Notley badly wants for her party.

There is wide deference to Ms. Notley making her own decision on leadership, but there are also MLAs who could potentially take on the job – names such as David Shepherd, Rakhi Pancholi, Sarah Hoffman, Kathleen Ganley and Shannon Phillips often pop up.

Ms. Notley doesn’t discuss names but says, “I worry not about the strength of folks who might be interested in coming after me, whenever that happens.”

The idea of renaming the party has also been punted around, as the NDP’s formal connection to its federal counterpart does it no favours in Alberta. Ms. Notley herself has talked about how the party is different here than in other parts of Canada, and the pragmatism of Prairie New Democrats.

But while she’s the leader, Ms. Notley’s personal and political history won’t allow for any formal disassociation with the NDP name. She recalls the dark days in 1984 after her father’s death in a small plane crash, just south of the flight’s destination in High Prairie, Alta. She was 20 years old at the time.

“I remember being at a very sad meeting of about five to 10 of the most senior people in the party, in a living room just outside of Fairview. And they were bemoaning the fact that the party was likely done because of my dad’s plane crash,” she says.

“But the party did not die. It has very, very, very deep roots in this province.”