‘They don’t know what country they’re investing in:’ Nenshi says separation talk has soured outside investors away from Alberta

Naheed Nenshi, Alberta NDP leader, speaks with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins about the Alberta Next panel town halls and his own party’s engagement campaign.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length

Michael Higgins: Alberta Next town halls, two down, several more to go. What are they serving to accomplish?

Naheed Nenshi: What a debacle this is. It’s just a sham. It’s very clear. The premier is very transparent on what she’s trying to do here. She’s basically saying she started a fire for separatism to get people all mad. She’s going to come back and say, you don’t want to separate. We’re just going to give you your going to give you your own pension plan and your own police force, and everything will be OK.

It’s not going to work. It didn’t work when Jason Kenney did it in 2019, it’s not going to work now. The real problem here is that she started a fire, and now she’s desperately trying to call the fire department. She’s spending millions of dollars of taxpayer money to give separatists a platform, to get other people angry at the separatists showing up at these things, to get people in the audience yelling at each other. What in the world is this going to accomplish? It doesn’t actually give you any sense of how Albertans really feel.

They’re using very bad push polling, very biased videos, to try and get people to answer questions the way they want to answer them. There’s no option to say, ‘I don’t want an Alberta Pension Plan.’ The options are, ‘What’s the best part about an Alberta Pension Plan?’

We know nobody wants an Alberta Pension Plan. We know nobody really cares about getting rid of the RCMP. None of this stuff is actually going to address the real concerns of Albertans. None of it’s going to get a pipeline built. In fact, all this talk of separation has turned into freezing investment in Alberta, just like we saw in Britain, in Quebec, in Scotland and so on.

No one wants to invest here because they don’t know what country they’re investing in. If we want to address the real economic and social concerns of Albertans, let’s address them, because getting our own pension plan is not solving any of people’s concerns with how to make Alberta better.

MH: They are an opportunity though, are they not, to have a say on these contentious issues for Albertans to directly address the premier?

She has faced some angry questions, some criticism, and it’s not every day Albertans get to speak directly to Danielle Smith.

NN: That is true, except if you have a Canadian flag on, they don’t let you in. If you look like you don’t agree with them, they don’t let you in. They don’t let the media film these things or ask any questions. So while they’re open to everyone to register, what we’ve seen is that the folks who believe in separatism have very smartly taken up the slots to give a very stacked room and a very biased view of what’s going on.

You will see that when people speak out against the Alberta Pension Plan, even in a stacked room, they get massive applause. What the premier was saying was really funny, ‘A recent poll shows that some people like the Alberta Pension Plan.’ The question that was asked in that poll is, ‘If you could have an Alberta Pension Plan that costs less and pays more benefits and has no risk, would you be in favour of it?’

That’s counterfactual. Those things don’t actually exist in the real world.

MH: Your party is preparing to hit the highway as well this summer with a handful of town hall meetings. Is that meant to be direct competition with Alberta Next?

NN: Very much not, because we don’t want to just repeat what she’s doing that is ineffective. So we’re calling it the Better Together campaign, Better Together summer, and people can find out more at BetterTogetherSummer.ca.

It’s going to look quite different. Yes, there will be some town halls where we invite people to come and give us direct feedback but we’ll do it in a way that’s authentic, where we actually get people talking to one another, where they have the ability to provide real feedback, not just sound bites in 10 seconds or 20 seconds.

We’re also doing a bunch of other things. Yesterday, for example, I was in Red Deer at the kickoff of the Westerner days. We’re talking to regular people at festivals, at community events. My caucus and volunteers are going across the province door knocking. So you’re going to see people on your doorstep, at your dog park, in your local community, having real, authentic conversations about what it is that’s on Albertans’ minds, and what are the things that we really need to focus on?

We’re hearing number of things already. People are furious about the separatism thing. They’re saying this is a distraction from the real issues. People are worried about the cost of living, they’re worried about jobs. They’re worried about health care and education. They’re worried about crime, and none of these things are truly being addressed by the Alberta Next panels that the premier is doing.

MH: Is there a role for your party to play this summer in helping advance Thomas Lukaszuk’s efforts to spawn an anti-separation referendum question?

NN: There are many folks who are out there being pro-Canada, which is great because the vast majority of Albertans are pro-Canada. Our theme, Better Together, it has a few different meanings. Albertans are better when we stand together instead of fighting with their neighbours. It also means that Alberta is better with Canada.

I am very unabashedly pro-Canadian and will continue to be pro-Canadian. Quite frankly, I prefer to have no referendum because I think that leads to uncertainty in people’s minds. It leads to neighbours fighting with one another and it leads to a real freezing of foreign investment.

That said, the premier has put her cards down. She very clearly wants there to be a referendum, though she pretends she’s just an innocent bystander. She changed the laws to make it easier to have a referendum.

People are going to try different strategies here. I’m just here to talk about the importance of being Canadian.

MH: You’ve been sworn in as an MLA, no more sitting on the legislature sidelines. Does that mean you crank it up a gear for the summer? How does that change your approach to leadership of the New Democrats?

NN: We’re pretty cranked up already but certainly it’ll be helpful to be in the legislature. When the legislature resumes in the fall it’ll mean a lot of changes that are probably pretty boring for our viewers today, but it’s a bunch of under the hood stuff that I can do now that I was unable to do before.

For example, before I wasn’t really supposed to do press conferences within the legislature because I wasn’t a sworn member. So things like that will become easier but our priorities are not changing.

We’re really still focused on the things that Albertans tell us they need. A good economy, decent cost of living, great public services and paying for that and being good with money. Just today we had a bunch of reports from the auditor general showing yet again that this so-called conservative government is anything but conservative when it comes to spending taxpayer money.

This will be a real chance for us to be able to talk more about these things that matter, including, the ongoing corrupt care scandal. The province has pushed off their investigation. They’re still the subject of an RCMP investigation and an auditor general investigation despite their best efforts to stymie those.

We’re going to see a lot of that come up in the next little while too, to see if there really is as deep corruption within the UCP government as the allegations would make clear.