Rachel Notley has a key task to finish before leaving politics: killing the idea of a separate Alberta pension plan

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Rachel Notley has attained what many thought was impossible: building the Alberta NDP into a solid, and potentially winning, political brand. But she has one sticky wicket she’d like to manoeuvre through before leaving as Leader in early summer: Putting an end to the United Conservative Party’s proposal for a separate Alberta pension plan.

“It’s such a horrifically bad idea,” she said of Alberta leaving the CPP to forge its own pension path.

Ms. Notley said she would like to see Premier Danielle Smith put the whole proposal to rest. “I could feel that I had something – one last, little thing to accomplish.”

There’s been huge public pushback to a government-commissioned report released last fall that argued the province has a claim on 53 per cent of the country’s CPP fund. This has come especially from a skeptical Alberta public. Blessedly, this fight has quieted down in the past two months as the province awaits a counter-figure from Ottawa.

Ms. Notley is driven by principle, but also surely by the basement-level polling numbers on the APP idea. However, Ms. Smith faces a leadership review later this year that could see her maintain a combative position on the pension question, if only to keep her most conservative party members engaged.

But Ms. Notley, who by coincidence will turn the pensionable age of 60 in April, hasn’t shied away from overcoming challenges with crummy odds before.

CPP board disputes math behind Alberta’s bid to withdraw from national pension fund

In that vein, she is leaving the Alberta NDP better than she found it, in the throes of an energetic leadership race to a June end date likely to feature a handful of strong contenders. That’s a spectacle opposition party members in the conservative-leaning province have never seen.

As party insider Anne McGrath quipped, it’s no longer “a poisoned chalice. Nobody is going to be feeling bad for whoever wins.” The Alberta NDP leadership race will decide who will lead what has become a pragmatic, centre-left political party that came close to beating a united conservative movement last year.

“When I moved back here from B.C. in the early 2000s, people were so scared in so many places to talk politics,” Ms. Notley said in an interview with The Globe, adding that one of her greatest accomplishments is giving Alberta voters an actual choice. “That’s not what it looks like now.”

But whether the Alberta NDP remains popular without the popular Ms. Notley is still an open question. She doesn’t completely rule out future involvement in provincial politics – as she does definitely for the federal sphere – but that’s not the intent. After the June leadership contest, she will spend more time jogging, find some new volunteer and work roles, and perhaps write a memoir (following the advice of “the late, great” public servant Richard Dicerni, she has kept a journal of her time in politics).

The elevator pitch for that book would be the story of the strongest and strangest of progressives on the Canadian political scene: A woman who saw four seats in 2014 morph into a 54-person majority in 2015, who led the province through a punishing commodity price trough, who can list both a leading role in halving child poverty and getting a pipeline expansion to tidewater built as accomplishments.

But then, there were the losses: To Jason Kenney in the 2019 election, and mislaying the high polling numbers the Alberta NDP had held prior to the May, 2023, election. Ms. Notley said this was because Ms. Smith spent millions in public money advertising government spending, and rampant wildfires scuttled any kind of normal public discourse during one-third of the campaign period. To boot, Ms. Smith was quiet on contentious topics, including the pension issue.

Others, however, believe it was a strong performance by Ms. Smith in the leaders’ debate, and the decision of the NDP to say it would significantly raise corporate taxes – a worry in business-focused Calgary – that allowed the UCP to surge ahead.

In the interview, Ms. Notley acknowledged it was her call to make the corporate tax increase a key policy, but she wouldn’t do anything differently if she could go back. Upfront, honest policy costing is how her party differentiates itself from the UCP, which has failed to deliver on a promised tax cut on personal income under $60,000, she argues. “I cannot campaign on the basis of a lie.”

Not every political leader would compare her party to a weed, either. But this is just what Ms. Notley does to say the movement she has led for a decade isn’t going gently into the night without her.

“Sometimes there’s a lot of us, sometimes there’s fewer,” she said. “We’re a little bit like the dandelion. It’s really hard to get rid of us.”