Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi joins Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins to discuss recall petitions, look back at the fall sitting, and discuss his party’s accomplishments during this year-end interview. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Michael Higgins: How do you feel about the recall petition targeting the premier, and her response? Naheed Nenshi: It’s Christmas time and I want to be generous, but the hypocrisy there is off the charts. This is her legislation. Her government put forward this legislation. When it was used against Mayor Gondek in Calgary, (the premier) was an enthusiastic cheerleader for it. Now it’s being used against all these UCP MLAs, so people are misusing it. She has compared grandmas going door to door in Bowness in Calgary with militants overthrowing her government. If in fact she believed recall should only be used in these extreme circumstances, she ought to have written the legislation that way. The legislation is very clear that anybody can launch a recall against any MLA. The boundary for the number of signatures you need is very high. It’s incredibly flawed legislation, but it is the UCP’s legislation. For them to lash out against citizens using their legislation, I think is a bit rich. MH: There are a plethora of voices out there claiming the NDP is behind the growing list of recall petitions. How do you respond to that? NN: I wish I had that kind of time. Have you seen this legislative session? No, they’re looking for someone to blame. They’re saying it’s the union thugs, it’s the New Democrats who are doing this. The reality is these are everyday citizens who have had enough of this government. To be clear, we have nothing to do with this. I don’t even know most of the citizens who have put forth these nominations. Certainly I think a lot of New Democrat supporters are volunteering with some of these nominations, as they did with the Forever Canada petition. But this is a grassroots movement, and that’s what scares the premier the most. MH: Back to the fall sitting and the contention over a multitude of bills and amendments. To what degree has this session been defined by the government’s use of the notwithstanding clause? NN: This was my very first session. I wasn’t expecting on my very first day in the legislature, the government would, for the first time in Alberta’s history, pre-emptively use the notwithstanding clause, which sounds like a technical term. What it means is, for the first time in Alberta’s history, the government knowingly passed a law they knew to be unconstitutional. Then they did it three more times. What’s happening here is we had 14 bills come into the house. Not one of them was about cost of living. Not one of them was about a job strategy for Alberta or improving the economy. The ones that were about health care, which Albertans care about, were about going after a few dozen trans kids and about privatizing the health care system. The only one about education was forcing the teachers back to work using the notwithstanding clause. There were many, many different options here, but two things happened. Number one is it’s a government that’s largely incompetent. They could have avoided the teachers strike without spending a ton of money, just by doing it correctly. They certainly could have introduced legislation or a rule outside of the legislature to end the strike without needing to use the notwithstanding clause. A couple of their ministers recently admitted they were always planning on using the notwithstanding clause, and they were never planning on giving teachers a good deal because it would have been too expensive for them. Remember, we have the lowest funding for education in the country. And why did they use it again on the trans kids? Those laws had already been passed. They’re already in place, and any legal action on them would take years to unravel and will happen anyway. The Supreme Court has hinted they’re willing to look at these cases even with the use of the notwithstanding clause. Why did they do it? It’s because they feel cornered. They feel scared, their government is threatened, and they wanted to go back to these old culture wars in the hopes it would get people excited for their government again. And it’s not working. MH: When it comes to the Smith-Carney memorandum of understanding, you’ve giving it something of a stamp of approval and said everyone needs to roll up their sleeves. What is your party prepared to do to make a new pipeline to the coast happen? NN: Let’s remember Alberta’s New Democrats did make a new pipeline to the coast happen. The only one in 50 years. Conservative governments have not built one metre of pipeline, one mile of pipeline to tidewater in all the years they’ve been in power. You don’t get to be the mayor of Calgary for 11 years without really understanding the energy industry and without really understanding what it takes to get a pipeline built. The MOU is fine. The part of the MOU that the premier never talks about is how it actually forces her to put some teeth behind her own environmental plan. We’re now committed to net zero by 2050, we have to increase the industrial carbon price. We’ve got to do a number of other things. That’s not a bad thing. By the way, this deal is very similar to the one that Rachel Notley came to with the previous government. The difference is, Rachel Notley’s deal came with a pipeline. It came with $40 billion. It came with a real Climate Action Plan. People always ask me, is this a win for Alberta? Yeah, it’s a win, but it’s more like a goal in the first period of a hockey game. You want that goal, but there’s a lot of game left to play. We’ve got to be able to roll up our sleeves, work with Indigenous communities, work with communities along the coast, work with other politicians and other orders of government. I’ve already talked to (B.C. Premier) David Eby about how he feels about the whole thing. We’ve got to get it done. That’s ultimately what this will, the success will be measured on. MM: What is your key takeaway from 2025 now that you’ve actually been able to sit in the legislature as leader of the Opposition? NN: I’m grateful to be in the legislature. I’m grateful to the people of Edmonton Strathcona for putting their trust in this guy from Calgary. The legislature is sort of everything I thought it would be, and also kind of surprising. My very first day in the house, we stayed until 2 a.m. We’ve had to stay until 2 a.m. another couple of times. I have given three of the longest speeches in the legislature in many decades to try and get our points across. What I’ve really been surprised about is how this government across the aisle is really making it up as they go along. Meanwhile, Alberta’s New Democrats introduced bills on the minimum wage, motions on shrinkflation, motions to protect health care workers, to build out our electricity grid in new ways, many things that you’d think the Conservatives would actually go towards because it gives them some policy options on things that we agree on. They rejected them all. What my goal was this fall was to really show Albertans what a New Democrat government would look like. To help Albertans understand that you have another option and you don’t have to stand for this divisiveness and this rhetoric and these culture wars. Together we can build a better Alberta. I think we really succeeded in doing that.
