Nominate your picks for this year’s best MLA, best cabinet minister, most effective opposition MLA, and more
It’s that time of year again. I am thrilled to launch the ninth annual Daveberta’s Best of Alberta Politics Survey. There is never a dull moment in Alberta politics so I am excited to hear from you about the big political players of 2025.
I have changed up the categories this year to recognize not just the best MLAs but the work they do in the Legislature and in their constituencies.
Flashy new NDP ad gives a glimpse into what the NDP wants to fight for in the next election
Naheed Nenshi is ready. That’s the main message of a new campaign ad released by the Alberta New Democrats last week. The video reintroduces Nenshi to Albertans and tries to lay out some clear contrasts between his party and Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party.
The new ad is reportedly the result of the Alberta NDP’s new relationship with the US-based Fight Agency, the political consultants behind Zohran Mamdani’s wildly successful campaign to become the next Mayor of New York City. And it’s an impressive ad.
It would be more than 50 years after William Aberhart repealled the recall law before more attempts were made to bring back recall in Alberta.
Riding the same wave of populism that Ernest’s son Preston Manning rode into Ottawa in the early 1990s, the Alberta Liberal Party led by Laurence Decore adopted recall as an official party policy in the 1993 election.
“Recall is vital for Albertans because it gives people an element of control over their politicians between elections,” Decore argued in the Edmonton Journal in June 1993. “It also gives MLAs the power to tell their leader they can’t vote for a bill because their constituents wouldn’t stand for it. This power will encourage more free votes in the house and loosen party discipline.”
It wasn’t until September 1937 that a formal application to start a recall petition against Premier William Aberhart in his Okotoks-High River riding was filed and submitted with the required $200 deposit (which is around $4,000 in current dollars).
“The said member, Hon. William Aberhart, has failed to implement promises and representations made by him to the electors prior to the election. He has supported government policies and enactment of statutes detrimental to the province and has lost the conference of the electorate of Okotoks-High River electoral division,” read the application submitted on September 20, 1937.
Social Credit’s recall law lasted 18 months on the books before it was repealed
A recent proliferation of MLA recall campaigns has fuelled speculation that Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government could repeal the law, just like Premier William Aberhart did when his party’s MLAs faced recall campaigns 88 years ago.
Aberhart’s Social Credit government passed a recall law in April 1936 and then repealed it in October 1937 after the Premier was targeted by voters in his own riding.
The United Conservative Party’s board elections are happening at its AGM at the end of November and the rhetoric is heating up from the party’s bustling separatist wing.
Alberta Prosperity Project co-founder Jeffrey Rath took to the internet to accuse “Danielle Smith’s Death Star team” of abusing their access to party membership lists to purge the party board of separatists.
Albertans’ negative reaction to the government’s handling of the teachers strike was probably a big reason why Premier Danielle Smith was scheduled to leave the country before her UCP MLAs passed Bill 2.
We don’t know exactly what Smith was looking at on her phone when she was photographed sitting at the Calgary International Airport while her UCP MLAs were still in the Legislature on Monday night, but her conveniently scheduled week-long trip to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates means that she will not face questions from reporters about suspending constitutional rights of citizens.
United Conservative Party Premier Danielle Smith’s own approval rating took a beating as well. The Premier saw her job approval drop from 44 per cent in May to 38 per cent this month. And, for the first time, that puts Smith below NDP leader Naheed Nenshi, who saw his approval jump up to 43 per cent in the same period.
Taking his seat in the Legislature this week, it definitely felt like Bill 2 gave Nenshi an opportunity to step into the spotlight and he didn’t disappoint.
Danielle Smith left for Saudi Arabia before invoking Notwithstanding Clause
The fall session of the Legislature started on Monday and Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party government wasted no time pushing through its legislation to force striking Alberta teachers back to work.
In a severely time-limited debate that took less than 12 hours in total, UCP MLAs voted on third reading to pass Bill 2: Back to Work Act at around 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday.
The bill imposed a new contract on 51,000 striking teachers until 2028, threatened hefty fines for any teachers who dared defy the UCP’s rushed law, and used the constitutional sledgehammer known as the Notwithstanding Clause to suspend teachers’ and the Alberta Teachers’ Associations’ rights to collective bargaining under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
One of the biggest questions I get asked about Alberta politics these days is “where is Nenshi?”
Well, former mayor of Calgary and current Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi now has a seat in the Assembly and will be spending some time getting acquainted with what levers of the legislative process are available to opposition leaders.
While there will be a temptation to put extra effort into sparring with Smith and scoring points in Question Period, the NDP need to reintroduce a curiously absent Nenshi to Albertans and figure out what their pitch is to the province’s voters — and then get out there and sell it.
Nenshi’s decision to shuffle Sherwood Park MLA Kyle Kasawski into the role of Shadow Minister for Affordability and Utilities this week is a good start.
I’m Dave Cournoyer and this isn’t the Daveberta Podcast but it might be the next best thing.
A few weeks ago I joined my friend and former Daveberta Podcast co-host Ryan Hastman on his new podcast, the Alberta Edge, for a discussion about Alberta politics along with respected pollster Janet Brown.
I’m happy to share that episode of Alberta Edge with Daveberta subscribers today. Be sure to visit TheHub.ca and subscribe to Ryan’s podcasts.
Enjoy the show and thanks for listening.
The steps of the Legislature are a busy place this week as supporters of Alberta separatism are promising a large pro-independence rally on October 25. The rally will feature speakers from the Alberta Prosperity Project including Jeffrey Rath, Dennis Modry and Mitch Sylvestre, restaurant owner, podcaster and COVID-19 restrictions opponent Chris Scott, and former UCP nomination candidate Tanya Clemens.
Describing the rally as the first battle in the fight for an independent Alberta, Sylvestre told separatist supporters in a rambling video posted by the APP yesterday that “before we have to pay in blood we have to pay in time because Communism always comes in on a promise and leaves with a bullet.”
Sylvestre is the president of the UCP constituency association in the Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul riding and is the proponent of the court-delayed citizen initiative to hold a province-wide referendum asking the question “Do you agree that the Province of Alberta shall become a sovereign country and cease to be a province in Canada?”
Former Progressive Conservative cabinet minister Thomas Lukaszuk is on the final stretch of his “Unity Bus” tour to collect signatures for the Forever Canadian petition that asks the simple question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”
Lukaszuk’s question requires 293,976 in-person signatures in order to be approved and sent to an MLA committee to be considered for a province-wide referendum, but there are rumours that the pro-Canada campaign’s more than 4,000 volunteers have already collected more than 300,000 signatures.
A loud crowd of 30,000 teachers and their supporters welcomed MLAs back to the Legislature
When MLAs returned to the Legislature yesterday for the Speech from the Throne and the start of the fall session they were welcomed back by a very large and very loud crowd of around 30,000 Alberta teachers.
More than 51,000 teachers from public, Catholic, and Francophone schools across the province have been on strike since October 6 with workload challenges being their biggest issue, namely class sizes and per-student funding.
Instead of getting back to the bargaining table to negotiate a deal that could satisfy both the government and teachers, Premier Danielle Smith has signalled her government’s plans to fasttrack back to work legislation — and there is wide speculation that it could use the constitutional sledgehammer known as the Notwithstanding Clause to block any court challenges of the law.
The Order Papers for next week shows that Minister of Finance Nate Horner will soon introduce Bill 2: Back to School Act along with motions to severely limit debate at all stages of reading. With a 6 vote majority in the Legislature, UCP MLAs should have no problem pushing it through swiftly, though the opposition NDP can be expected to try its best to delay the passage of the bill.
Knack bests former frontrunner Tim Cartmell in race to replace Amarjeet Sohi
Results from Edmonton’s low-key municipal election were very slow to trickle in but by mid-afternoon today we learned that Andrew Knack will be the next Mayor of Edmonton.
The three-term councillor has represented west Edmonton since he was first elected in 2013 and jumped into the mayoral race after initially planning to leave municipal politics and not seek re-election to council.
Knack bucked what felt like a strong wave of anti-incumbent sentiment going into the campaign and defeated south side councillor and Better Edmonton Party leader Tim Cartmell by a margin of around 8 points with an abysmal 30 per cent turnout of voters at the polls (at the time I am writing this only 217 of 236 polls are reporting in the mayoral election). Knack ran as an independent candidate.
