The first time I was ever exposed to the charismatic drawing power of Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley was in the spring of 2012.
There was a provincial election under way and I was in Edmonton to follow then-NDP leader Brian Mason on the campaign trail. We stopped at a farmer’s market in Ms. Notley’s riding of Edmonton-Strathcona. As we wandered the aisles, the affable Mr. Mason might as well have been invisible.
Ms. Notley, on the other hand, couldn’t walk two feet without being stopped by someone. You could see people pointing at her from afar. Others stopped to have their picture taken with her. Two years later, Ms. Notley would become NDP Leader. A year after that, in May of 2015, I would see her again on the campaign trail.
That’s when I first sensed that something historic might happen in Alberta; that the NDP had a real chance to upset the Progressive Conservatives, a party that had then held power for 44 years. The crowds Ms. Notley was attracting were enormous, often with people flowing out the door of whichever room in which she was speaking. Something was in the air.
Indeed, the NDP did go on to win that election, arguably the most historic in the province’s history. In her speech, Ms. Notley stifled tears as she acknowledged the impact her father, Grant, a former Alberta NDP leader killed in a plane crash in 1984, had on her as a young woman. She also thanked her mother, Sandy, who instilled in her a sense of social justice, often taking her to protests as a young girl.
This week, Ms. Notley announced she is stepping down as NDP Leader. She does so as the most transformational political figure Alberta has seen in the past 25 years. As things stand today, she is one of the most important politicians in the province’s history.
Since her announcement, most of the retrospectives on her career, and more precisely her time as premier, have focused on obvious achievements such as raising the minimum wage to $15 and helping get the Calgary Cancer Centre across the finish line. Her greatest accomplishment, undoubtedly, is getting the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion built – something her Progressive Conservative predecessors couldn’t.
The pipeline wouldn’t have been given the go-ahead had Ms. Notley’s government not brought in an ambitious plan to fight climate change, one that included a carbon tax that ultimately became a massive political liability.
The worst bit of luck Ms. Notley’s government faced, however, was the oil recession she inherited, one that left her government with little option but to run up massive deficits, something Albertans weren’t used to. That accumulated debt ultimately weighed like a giant anvil, one that eventually helped sink the party in the next election. A perceived friendship with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also didn’t help Ms. Notley, nor, more recently, the fact that the federal NDP inked a deal to help keep the federal Liberals in power in Ottawa.
That pact became a cudgel regularly used by Conservatives in the largely Trudeau-hating province to pummel the NDP.
Throughout the UCP governments of Jason Kenney and now Danielle Smith, Ms. Notley has remained a popular figure. Her authenticity sticks out amid a political landscape in which grifters and flim-flam artists have assumed power positions.
Many thought the NDP’s victory in 2015 was a one-off fluke, or a one-off rebuke, intended to send a message to the province’s conservative politicians that they shouldn’t take Alberta voters for granted. Politics were expected to return to “normal” in the next election, with the NDP rendered to political oblivion once again. But that didn’t happen. The NDP survived and thrived in Opposition. Ms. Notley’s devastating critiques of Mr. Kenney’s leadership certainly helped hasten his downfall.
There is little doubt that Ms. Notley was disappointed that she and her party couldn’t beat Danielle Smith’s UCP in last year’s election. She still believes Ms. Smith grossly misled voters on a number of fronts, not least of which was saying she had no intentions of touching people’s pensions and then setting out a plan to do just that after winning the election. Ms. Notley is not wrong.
Ms. Notley will remain leader until a successor is chosen. After that, who knows. There was a full-circle moment at her news conference announcing her decision. Near the end of her comments, she once again mentioned the impact her deceased parents, Grant and Sandy, had had on her life. Fighting back tears, she said she was sorry they never got a chance to see all that she accomplished as the Leader of the NDP.
They likely never would have believed it. Then again, maybe they would have.
Gary Mason