Sheila Gunn-Reid’s Alberta NDP leadership bid draws sharp contrasts: Peter McCaffrey, a libertarian-leaning think tank president, warns against leftward policies like Sarah Hoffman’s rent control and Nahid Nenshi’s deficit spending, calling them economically unsound. McCaffrey highlights Nenshi’s Calgary mayoral record—60%+ tax hikes and 2017 popularity at 61%, now down to 32-35%—while dismissing his "purple" centrist claims. The episode suggests Nenshi’s outsider advantage, fueled by media narratives like labeling Danielle Smith a "dictator," could sway the race despite skepticism over his electability, hinging on shifting voter perceptions or UCP decline. [Automatically generated summary]
Alberta continues its fight for tax fairness against the feds and the NDP here in Alberta are in the throes of a leadership race, so things are getting wild here on the prairies.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Very exciting time to be an Albertan.
You see, we have a very staunch conservative premier, Danielle Smith, and she seems to get more lovely and more youthful the more she fights with Justin Trudeau.
And the NDP in Alberta, after sort of stagnating and being, you know, just sort of relegated to the fringes since the last Alberta election, while they are in the process of a leadership election,
and some interesting characters have thrown their hats into the field, and I feel like Albertans are going to be taken on a very wild roller coaster ride from now until the next provincial election.
So from the time the NDP choose a leader to the next provincial election, they are going to be in full attack mode and in full rebrand mode.
Will we forget the past as Albertans?
I don't think so.
And if we try, I'm going to do my best to remind everybody just how bad things were under the NDP.
My guest tonight is Peter McCaffrey.
He's the president of the Alberta Institute, and he's got a lot to say on carbon taxes, the Alberta budget, and the NDP leadership race.
I'm going to button it up because it's a long interview with him, but it is a great interview with him.
take a listen so joining me now is peter mccaffrey He's the president of the Alberta Institute.
There's so much to talk about in Alberta politics as our premier continues her fight with the feds on just about everything.
And then there's the whole NDP leadership race, which gets more interesting but further left all the time, I think, if that is even possible.
Peter, thanks for joining me.
It's been a while since you've been on the show, and that is to my great regret.
But why don't you tell us a little bit about the Alberta Institute before we get into more of our topics?
Sure.
Great to be with you.
The Alberta Institute is a public policy research and advocacy organization.
We work across Alberta on a wide variety of issues, everything from economic to social issues to municipal, a little bit of everything.
So we try and research and develop and promote new ideas and advocate for those ideas to be implemented to try and improve freedom and choice in people's lives across Alberta.
Now, you are, you say you're a bit of a libertarian think tank or small government think tank.
One of the ways that the Alberta Premier has said that she will fight back against Justin Trudeau's carbon tax is to create a regulator of last resort, or at least energy retailer, distributor of last resort, so that we may be able to mimic what's happening in Saskatchewan because Saskatchewan has a Crown Corporation, which manages their home heating and electricity.
And so they are not collecting the carbon tax and thus not remitting it to Justin Trudeau.
What is your take on, you know, I'm torn as a small government kind of person.
What is your take on the creation of a Crown corporation, which normally I'm against, to insulate Alberta taxpayers from a hike in the carbon tax?
Yeah, my understanding is it wouldn't be like a regulator of last resort.
It would be like an operator of last resort, right?
So I think if what they're talking about is literally, you know, if the only alternative is we have to turn the lights out and we run out of electricity and, you know, we literally cannot continue to have electricity otherwise, that that would be the last resort, would be having the government come in and actually operate natural gas power plants that the federal government says are illegal.
And I think in that very narrow last resort situation, that might make sense.
You know, we're talking about a situation where the private sector is unwilling to generate electricity because the federal government will deem them criminals if they do so.
And in that situation, having the government step in and say, okay, fine, we will generate electricity so that people's lights don't go out.
I can understand where they're coming from.
As long as we're talking about it only being an option in that absolute last resort situation.
We don't want to get into a scenario of saying, oh, well, there are pros and cons of having the government running a market and running electricity system.
And, you know, one of the pros is this.
Like, no, we want a competitive free market in electricity like we've had in Alberta for a long time.
And we want to protect that.
And only if literally the only other option is we won't have any electricity anymore should we be looking at an option like that.
One of the, I think, selling features that the provincial government has said is this might be a pass-through for electricity because we cannot ask our privatized distributors to break the law and not collect the carbon tax.
So this might be a pass-through buffer to protect our privatized industry here and also be able to mimic what's happening in Saskatchewan by not collecting the carbon tax.
Again, I see the benefit, but deep down inside, I'm just fundamentally opposed to crown corporations.
Yeah, and you see the challenge even in Saskatchewan, which, you know, I think them taking the fight to Ottawa is great.
But the reality is as soon as you say, well, we're not going to collect this portion of the carbon tax, the federal government come back with the threat and say, okay, well, then you won't get any of the rebate at all, even though people in Saskatchewan are still paying, what, 90, 95% of the carbon tax and everything else, that the federal government is now threatening to take the entire rebate away from them.
So, you know, you can get into some really tricky situations when they do this.
The simple solution, obviously, is just to get rid of the carbon tax.
Wouldn't that be great?
I want to ask you your opinions on the latest Alberta budget.
There's good stuff in there, bad stuff in there.
I talked to Chris Sims from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, you know, very happy with investing surplus into the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, very happy with, you know, taking some of the surplus and paying down the debt.
Great.
But then there's, you know, there's borrowing in there while we're still in surplus.
So help us make sense of this.
The reality is that spending is still increasing far too fast and the government is still spending way, way, way too much money.
And the current government's plan is to hold increases in spending to below the rate of population increase and inflation.
And therefore, over time, the size of government as a share of the economy will reduce, the size of government, The government debt will reduce, the dependency on oil and gas revenues will reduce so long as you grow the size of government more slowly than the economy is growing more slowly than the population is growing.
But if you come from the starting point that the government is already way too massive and there's huge amounts of waste that we should be getting rid of, then that's really not enough.
We should be going in there and we should be getting rid of programs that we don't need.
We should getting rid of departments that we don't need and making some significant cuts to a lot of the waste that is in there.
You remember that Jason Kenney's government grew the size of government.
Rachel Notley's government grew the size of government.
The government was too big before Rachel Notley even came to power under Alison Redford, Ned Stelmack.
So I think at a minimum, we should look at going back to levels of government spending that we used to have.
And you can adjust for inflation and population growth if you want.
But actually, I happen to think that the more time government has, shouldn't they be fixing problems?
Shouldn't they be resolving the things that government is designed to be working on?
And so shouldn't over time there be less need for government as we resolve some of those problems.
If government is continually growing and continually operating, that's actually proof that government isn't working because it's just continuing to grow and continue and to be dependent on the government.
So I think there's significant areas that we could be cutting spending, and that would be my preferred option.
The other risk with reducing the rate of increase of government spending is it takes a very long time to have a significant impact.
If you control the growth in government to less than inflation and population growth for 20, 25, 30 years, at the end of that decades-long period of time, there will have been a substantial change.
But what happens if in four years or eight years' time, a different premier, whether from the same government or a different government, comes in and increases spending again?
So if your plan is, well, we're always going to be in power and we're always going to control the growth of government at this level, that's not a brilliant plan because you can't control 10, 15, 20, 25 years out from the now.
You can only control what's being done now.
So, you know, God forbid, if the NDP come in and massively hike spending again, then your entire plan of controlling the growth of government for the next 25, 30 years is gone.
So no, we actually need to be cutting some of the waste and cutting some of the useless spending that's been introduced by previous governments and then controlling the growth of government from that lower starting point.
Right.
I remember when the NDP took power, they went on a hiring spree because we had, and, you know, I speculate, but, you know, it's the NDP.
But at the time, I suspected it was to pad their unemployment numbers because we had such massive layoffs in oil and gas in the wake of the NDP.
And I think they hired about 50,000 government workers across the province.
And it sort of drove, artificially drove the unemployment rate down in the province.
But we're still dealing with that hiring spree that happened in 2015.
Now we're responsible for wages, benefits, pension liabilities for all of those people.
How would you, well, if you had, you know, the Peter McCaffrey machete, how would you, where would you start cutting?
Well, you have to remember as well that the NDP and the left in general are coming from the ideological worldview that the government is better at delivering services than the private sector.
So they see a smaller private sector and a larger government sector as a benefit.
They think that having more and more products, more and more services delivered by the government will lead to better and better outcomes.
Of course, all the evidence is the opposite.
When we socialize things, when we have the government take over things, services and quality go down while cost goes up.
But this is the other problem of not coming in and fixing those issues and cutting programs, is that if you maintain all of those new programs and employees and systems that were brought in by previous governments, not only do you grow the size of government, but then you're also going to take the blame for those things not working.
So yeah, the NDP government massively increased spending on a whole bunch of different social programs.
Those social programs are not working.
If anything, those programs and those deliveries are much worse now than they were when the NDP came to power.
And that's not because, oh, there's a different government now and this different government is worse at managing a socialized system.
It's because socialism doesn't work.
Socialized government programs don't work.
But if you don't come in and you don't correct that, you don't get rid of those programs, you don't return them to the private sector that is better at delivering them, well, then you are going to take the blame for those things not working.
So the current government has this double problem where both government is larger than it should be, but also they're getting the blame for all that extra government spending not working.
So yeah, they really need to get their head around that and deal with that.
The opposite, of course, the corollary is also true, which is that when you return those services to the private sector, when you get rid of the government waste, when you allow the private sector to innovate and improve services, then you see the benefits and you actually get better services and better delivery at a lower cost.
And to the government's credit, they are doing some of that around some of the areas of healthcare.
We're seeing more private construction of surgical facilities, more private provision of surgeries and things like that.
And suddenly when you allow the private sector to do surgeries, you get more surgeries and you get shorter waiting lists and you actually get better quality services.
And then the government can reap the rewards and the credit for improving those services.
But the problem is they need to be doing that across the economy, across government.
And then they'll get credit for all of those improvements across all of those different areas of government and all those different areas of services as well.
You know, and I think there's something to be said for moving fast, to pulling out the weeds of the prior government, because people become, I don't know what the right word is, enculturated, enculturated with the idea that government should be doing these things because in your recent memory, the government has always done those things, but that hasn't always been the way.
And I think the government, if it is to weed out the waste in government, they should do it fast.
They should do it as early from being re-elected as possible so that people have time to mentally deal with the fact that despite what the media and the NDP are telling you, the sky is not falling and the province will not fall into disrepair.
There's two issues.
The first is the speed at which you go allows you to get more done.
Right.
Which allows you to see the benefits of those changes sooner, which allows you to get credit for those changes.
If you go slow, the next government will end up getting the credit for the improvements that you made in your policies.
And if the next government is of a different persuasion, then often, unfortunately, that makes it look like the next government's more left-wing, more socialist policies were responsible for the improvements in services that were made by a previous government.
So that's one risk.
The other thing is that the left and the unions and all those different groups are going to shout and complain as hard as they possibly can, no matter what speed you go.
So if you go slow and cautious and you only make little tweaks and little changes and you do trials and you test things out and you just make a few small tests of having private surgeries or charter schools or things like that, they're going to scream bloody murder no matter what you do.
Fixing Problems All At Once00:14:24
And you're going to get all of the negative political consequences, but none of the benefits from actually fixing the problem.
Whereas if you go and you actually go in and you actually fix the problem and you do the whole reform all at once, they're only going to be able to complain the same amount as they did when you did a small amount.
Right.
So the consequences to the government politically will be exactly the same, but the improvements to the service delivery and the cost savings and ultimately people's lives will be much greater because you actually went in and fixed the problem rather than tinkering around their edges.
So that's one issue.
And then the second issue is really around when you come in as a government and you're trying to fix things.
And you mentioned before, okay, you're dealing with consequences created by previous governments.
The concern is, like you said, this kind of built-in assumptions about the way that things have to be done, right?
And it's a psychological thing that people have a bias towards the way things are done now.
Healthcare.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
But also, if you came in and you said, well, we're going to change how supermarkets work, and we're going to make supermarkets work like the school system.
So the government will build the supermarkets.
The government will hire all the people who work in the supermarkets.
You will only be allowed to visit your local supermarket.
You don't have any choice.
You don't get to go to a different one.
We're going to have a government-run supermarket system.
Everybody would think that was insane.
But when you propose doing that or when you do that for education, people kind of think that's normal.
Luckily in Alberta, we have a decent amount of choice in our education system and people can choose to go to different schools and they can choose to go to charter schools and independent schools.
But that kind of choice is normal for supermarkets, right?
And a lot of the left-wing arguments are like, oh, but education is so important.
We can't trust that to the private sector.
We have to have the government running that.
And yet we do trust things like food to the private sector.
And the private sector does a good job.
Now, we could argue about whether the prices of groceries are going up.
And of course they are because of inflation and the cost of food and things like that.
But the prices going up isn't because the government isn't running the supermarkets.
The prices are going up because of other government interference and not because we don't have a socialized grocery system.
And a socialized grocery supermarket system would not solve the problem of prices of food going up.
It would just make it worse.
Right.
Yes.
the prices at the grocery store are still the problem of the federal government or at least the doing of the federal government to some extent and it's funny you mention that because well although although i will just say you know the the the naivety of some of the proposed policy solutions to the affordability crisis right Like the idea that, oh, well, if electricity prices are going up, we're just going to pass a government regulation to cap the prices.
Right.
And suddenly electricity will be cheaper.
It's like, no, electricity won't be cheaper.
It's just that you'll pay less on your bill and more in your taxes.
And, you know, we could do the same with groceries.
If we had government-run grocery stores, we could cap the price of groceries so that people pay less at the grocery store, but the government would just be subsidizing that and you would just pay more in taxes.
So you didn't magically make groceries or electricity or insurance or anything cheaper just because a government proposes a cap.
Rent cap is the most recent one at the NDP.
I'm glad you're bringing that up.
We just won't allow people to raise the cost of housing.
We'll just have a ban on raising the cost of housing.
That doesn't make housing cheaper.
It just means it's illegal to charge the market price, and that just messes up the market even more.
So, yeah.
I'm so glad you brought that up because we'll come back to that in a second in the bad NDP ideas portion of our conversation.
But it is true when you think about, you know, even just how booze is sold across this country.
Alberta does it much differently than Ontario.
And Ontario makes these bizarre prohibitionist arguments like if we don't sell it in a government-run store and pay the people government wages and benefits to sell you a case of beer, then won't you think about the children?
And you look at Alberta and we're like, we're doing okay.
We're doing okay.
But it's just because it's the way things are always done.
They don't know.
It's like an experiment.
Yep.
Yes, we have private sales of alcohol, but supermarkets aren't allowed to sell it.
So you have to go in one door to get your food and then come out and go in a different door to get your alcohol, which is kind of ridiculous and increases the cost of groceries because it means grocery stores have to comply with stupid rules like that.
And also, of course, we have AGLC, which is a compulsory purchaser of alcohol.
So if you're a liquor store or a bar or something like that, you're only allowed to buy your alcohol from AGLC.
You're not allowed to buy it directly from the producer of the alcohol itself.
And so that raises prices as well.
So there's certainly things Alberta could improve on in there as well.
There's really no reason for the government to act as a middleman there in the alcohol industry either.
So that's another area that we could improve and we could cump some of the regulation, the red tape, and bring costs down as well.
From your lips to God's ears.
Now let's talk about the NDP because the NDP are in the middle of a leadership race.
And it pains me to say this, but I feel as though Rachel Notley, of all people, and I've written two books about the woman, was a bit of a moderating force in the NDP.
And again, I can't believe those words left my mouth, but I believe they are true, given what we're seeing unfold in the NDP leadership race.
We've got Sarah Hoffman, which wants, who wants to nationalize all of the schools.
We've got a proposal for rent control, which will eliminate, I think, rental housing supply.
It's going to compel large developers to just build condos and not rental properties.
And when they tried this in Ireland, it created slums because landlords couldn't afford the upkeep.
And we've got former mayor of Calgary, Nahid Nenshi, entering the race.
And I always kind of thought the guy was a federal liberal.
I never actually thought that he would ever go away.
And I think I was right about that.
But you've got a lot to say about Nahid Nenshi because I think you kept a careful encyclopedia of everything he did wrong in Calgary.
So give us a rundown on Nahid Nenshi, please.
Yeah, so I mean, the first thing is, you know, if I put my political analyst hat on, of course, during a leadership race, the candidates are going to tack more towards the membership to the left.
You know, we know that the membership of the party is more left-wing than the average voter.
And so, yes, they're going to trot out all of these crazy ideas to try and win votes during the leadership race.
The reality is when the NDP were government, to take rent control as an example, there was pressure from the left to implement rent control when the NDP was government.
And Rachel Notley and her cabinet studied the issue and realized, no, this is actually an insane idea.
This would be terrible.
Even almost 99% of left-wing economists agree that this is a dreadful idea.
Never mind conservative or right-wing economists.
And so they didn't actually do it.
So the reality is when you're government, there's a bit of a moderating force there in that, you know, you can't actually be insane when you're governed.
You can only get away with being insane when you're opposition, right?
So, you know, everything is relative and a lot of the ideas that are going to get thrown out when you're in opposition are not going to see the light of day if and when you ever become governor.
That's just the reality.
So that's one thing to consider.
With regards to Nahid Nenshi, it's an interesting one because, you know, everyone's saying, oh, I've never seen him as, you know, a partisan person or an orange NDP or something like that.
It really all depends, right?
Like, if you look at the policies and the way that the Calgary Council was run under his tenure, if anything, you could argue he was far more left-wing than the NDP because he was mayor while the NDP were in government.
And it was often Nahid Nenshi pushing the NDP to change the rules to allow him to do more left-wing ideas at city council.
You know, he wanted to be able to run deficits.
He wanted to be able to introduce more city-specific taxes.
And he really pushed the provincial government to introduce changes to the Municipal Government Act and city charters that would give him and the city council more powers to implement more of those ideas.
And in some of those areas, he was successful in convincing them to do so.
And in some, he wasn't.
Another example would be the Calgary Olympics 2026.
He was all gung-ho on spending five, six, seven, whatever billion dollars the end in cost would have been.
And in the end, it was Rachel Notley who stepped in and was like, no, you guys are crazy.
This is an insane amount of money.
And we won't give you provincial money towards this Olympics campaign unless you hold a referendum and show that Calgarians actually want this.
And guess what?
We had a referendum and Nenshi lost that vote and he didn't get his way.
And the Olympics idea got killed because people are like, we can't afford this.
So again, I don't want to sound completely crazy here, but actually it was Rachel Notley that stepped in and saved Calgary taxpayers five, six, seven billion dollars by requiring that referendum.
So Nenshi has always claimed to be purple.
He's always claimed that, you know, that's some kind of centrist moderation of blue and red and that he's really a non-partisan person.
But if you judge on policies, I don't see him having any issue fitting in with the NDP.
And a lot of people are saying, oh, you know, it's kind of an NDP takeover.
His moderate centrist people are going to come in and take over the NDP.
But in reality, we just have this quirk where, you know, there hasn't been a Liberal Party in Alberta for a long time.
The Alberta Party was never really a thing.
I'm sure he would prefer, from a branding perspective, if the Alberta Party or the Liberal Party was more of a force in Alberta and he could lead the Alberta or the Liberal Party and continue claiming to be a centrist moderate.
You know, that fits with his branding style.
But the reality is that the UCP and the NDP are now the only two games in town.
And, you know, I don't see any issue with him fitting into an NDP party promoting tax increases and spending increases and all sorts of, you know, more attacks on the private sector.
Yeah, 60% tax increase in Calgary while he was in charge.
That's an NDP policy, if there ever was one.
Go ahead.
Well, yeah, 60% plus for individuals, for homeowners, over the time that he was in power.
But if you were a business owner, some of the businesses were looking at way, way more than that.
There's examples that you can find of businesses paying 5%, 6, 700% more, just absolutely massive increases.
And this is really interesting because I think this will be the one challenge that it'll have, which is that there's a quirk of how municipal governments work in Alberta and other places, which is that they're not allowed to run deficits.
Right.
So side note, I've seen some of Ninci's supporters claiming that he's a fiscal conservative because he never ran a deficit.
No, he never ran a deficit because he legally was not allowed to run a deficit.
He absolutely would have run deficits had he been allowed to.
But because municipalities legally aren't allowed to run deficits, the way that they work is that they first calculate how much they want to spend and then they change their tax rate to make sure that they generate enough money to cover how much they want to spend.
And so, you know, that's why in provincial government, we have tax rates.
And depending on how strong the economy is, that determines how much money the government generates.
And it's a big deal in provincial politics if you want to go in and you want to raise taxes, right?
The NDP proposed a 2% increase in the corporate tax rate and basically no personal income tax increases.
And that really hurt them in the election campaign because people really didn't want even just a small tax increase at the provincial level.
Yet Ninshi is used to being able to do six, eight, 10 massive 10% tax increases year over year over year over year because he's used to picking how much he wants to spend first and then figuring out what the tax rate should be to collect that amount of money later.
Guess what?
You can't do that at the provincial level.
He's not going to be able to lead an NDP that comes in and says, well, we want to spend X amount and we're just going to raise taxes to whatever they need to be to be able to collect enough money to spend that because it just doesn't work that way provincially.
So that's the first challenge he's going to have if he becomes NDP leader is like, actually running a budget, you're going to have to actually prioritize spending.
Whereas at council, he was used to just throwing money at every single problem and then just collecting extra tax to pay for it.
And that's how he was balancing the budget at City Hall.
So that's, I think, going to be the first challenge he has to face.
Now, I'm going to ask you to speculate.
What are his chances of winning?
Because I think if he does win, it's a game changer.
I think in Calgary, I think also in Edmonton.
And I hate to even think of it, but what do you think his chances are?
Given that he's coming from the outside, Sarah Hoffman, as much as I disagree with her on literally everything, has been grinding it out for her spot to take over from Rachel Notley since she was elected back in 2015.
You know, what are his chances of being accepted by the party membership?
Well, there's two parts to this.
First, can he win the leadership race?
And then can he win an election?
So let's talk about the leadership race first.
Honestly, I think the leadership race is over.
Leadership Race Advantage00:03:57
I think the name recognition and the campaign organization of all the other candidates running is nothing compared to what Nahid Ninci is.
You know, putting aside the policy of what he pursued at City Hall, he's a very smart guy, very competent, has a really good campaign, professional campaign team behind him that have won multiple elections, both for him and for the NDP.
This is another reason why I think he's a perfectly fine fit for the NDP, by the way.
Pretty much all of his campaign team from his mayoral runs were the campaign team for the NDP.
It's the same people.
It's the same consultants.
It's the same businesses and contractors.
So the idea that he's some kind of outsider to the NDP.
We know, for example, well, we don't know, but we pretty much know, for example, that a lot of Ninji's people were heavily involved in the process for writing the leadership rules for the NDP because they're high-level senior NDP people who were involved in that process.
And that's a big part of why the rules are written in a way that is quite open to outsiders.
You know, the NDP, the NDP have a clause in their constitution that allows the unions to have up to 25% of the delegate votes in a leadership race.
And yet for this leadership race, the unions get zero.
And the NDP could have written much stricter rules on the ability to sign up members, which would make it easier for insiders to run and more difficult for outsiders like Nenshi to run.
And yet they didn't.
They wrote the rules in a way that actually it's quite easy for an outsider to sign up a lot of members.
So we know that Nenshi has been considering this for a while.
We know that a lot of his senior supporters and campaign team were involved in the process for writing the rules and made sure that they got a rule set that would work for Nenshi coming in from the outside.
And the other thing is from his time as mayor and from his time involved in politics, he doesn't just have a lot of name recognition.
He also has a massive database of supporters.
One of the benefits of being a mayor is that you're an independent and you control all of your own data.
All of his email lists, all of his supporters, all of his volunteers, they're all his.
They're not party data.
So the other candidates are trying to appeal to existing volunteers and donors and supporters of the NDP.
They don't have a significant problem.
Now Nenshi has his own massive list of supporters that he's been building for years and years and years.
So I think he's going to come in.
I think he's going to sign up a ton of people as members of the NDP from the outside.
I also think he's probably going to do quite well with the existing membership of the NDP.
I think if the NDP had set rules that had much more restrictive regulations for signing up new members, it would have been more difficult for him.
But I would not be surprised if he ends up getting a majority of the existing NDP support as well.
So that's the first thing.
That's the leadership race.
I think it's over.
Just look at Twitter.
His first campaign event, hundreds of volunteers showed up to help out, pretty much spur of the moment because they're excited by his campaign.
I don't know how the other campaigns team's volunteers events are going and things like that, but I haven't seen a lot of photos of a lot of events on social media, which suggests to me that it's not going too well.
Because if they were going really well and they were having huge audiences, they'd be posting those photos.
So yeah, I think the leadership race is over.
Okay.
Now, can he win a provincial election?
So this is a much more complicated question.
And the shorter answer is, yes, he can, but that doesn't mean he will.
And the thing to consider here is that there's two main kind of inputs into election results.
You know, very simplified.
Leadership Popularity Decline00:05:54
And that's the public's image and the public's perspective on the party brands and the public's image and the public's perspective on the leaders.
And sometimes the leaders are more popular than the parties.
And sometimes the parties are more popular than the leaders.
And, you know, you see this all the time.
When the party isn't polling very well, when the party isn't particularly popular, there'll be much more of an emphasis on the leader.
The leaders in all the photos, the leaders on all the billboards.
When the leader is not so popular and the party is more popular than the leader, then all the colored billboards come out without the photos.
You see that with Justin Trudeau, for example.
First couple of elections, he's on all the billboards.
Last election, he's on basically none of them, and it's the local candid or it's just the liberal brand and things like that.
And, you know, that happens across all parties.
All parties do that.
You play to your strengths and you promote the thing that's popular and, you know, that's perfectly natural.
The NDP is massively less popular than Rachel Notley.
And that's why Rachel Notley was the front figure at the last election.
Now, having said that, that's not to say that Rachel Notley was massively popular.
There was this big misconception at the last election that somehow Rachel Notley had much higher approval ratings than Danielle Smith.
Well, Rachel Notley had slightly higher approval ratings than Daniel Smith when Daniel Smith first became premier.
But over the course of the year or so after Danielle Smith was leading the leadership race and became premier and then we got into the election, Rachel Notley's approval ratings came down a lot and Daniel Smith's approval ratings actually improved in the run-up to the election to the point where by election time the approval ratings for the two were about the same.
But even though Rachel Notley's approval ratings had come down, they were still higher than it was for the NDP party.
So the way that the NDP can win an election under Nahid Nenshi is, I think, either a general improvement on people's perceptions of the NDP and or a decrease on people's approval and perceptions of the UCP rather than necessarily Nahid Nenshi being highly popular.
And again, Nahid Nenshi is making a big fuss about how popular he was in Calgary.
And he claimed on Ryan Jesperson's show yesterday that even after 11 years as mayor when he left, he was more popular than Daniel Smith had ever been.
It's factually untrue.
Nahid Nenshi was reasonably popular when he became mayor, but let's not forget he only became mayor thanks to a vote split in the first election.
And then after the floods in Calgary, he became incredibly popular.
And that led him to a runaway victory in his second election.
But by his third election, his popularity was still decent.
It was about 60%.
But he only won 51% of the vote, which interestingly, the NDP won 49% of the vote in the 2023 election.
So the NDP in 2023 won pretty much the same share of the vote as Nahid Nenshi did in 2017.
But Nahid Nenshi has not run for anything in seven years.
Since that 2017 election, when he had a 61% popularity and got 51% of the vote, by the time he left and decided not to run again, his popularity was down to 35%.
And maybe since he left office, there's been some fading of memories and some nostalgia kicks in a little bit.
But no, the reality is by the time of the 2021 election, Nahid Nenshi's popularity rating was down to 35%, 32%, actually, I think, which is significantly lower than Rachel Notley's popularity was in Calgary.
And the simple fact is he would not have won that election had he run again.
So he is banking on either people forgetting about his time in office in Calgary or on the NDP brand actually being improved or different.
And there could be some discussions around changing the NDP brand there as well.
But no, this idea that Nahid Nenshi is massively popular in Calgary and that he will therefore carry the NDP to victory almost automatically by picking up Calgary seats, I don't think is there.
And the final point on that as well would be that it's not just Calgary overall either.
You have to look at the different parts of Calgary.
So Nahib Ninshi lost South Calgary even in 2017 when he was still quite popular.
And a lot of the seats that the NDP need to pick up in order to get a majority are in South Calgary, which he lost in his last, in his 2017 election.
So even if he just did as well as he did in 2017, the election result would be very, very tight.
Maybe a one or two seat NDP majority if Nahib Ninci were able to lead the NDP to the same result he got in 2017.
But that was seven years ago.
And he's got quite a history over the last little bit of not saying kind things about conservatives.
I think that'll come back to bite him.
The man I think is probably a walking attack ad of himself sometimes.
Peter, I want to thank you so much for your opinions and your take on the NDP leadership race.
It gives me some food for thought.
I wasn't quite sure what to think, but at least I have some things to digest and I think my viewers do too.
Rebel News Letter00:02:21
How do people support the Alberta Institute and find out what you guys are up to, what you're talking about each day?
Best way would just be to go to the website albertainstitute.ca and sign up to get our emails.
We send a weekly newsletter talking about everything going on in Alberta politics, which I think a lot of people find very useful just to get a very short summary of what's going on and keep on top of things.
I know people are very busy and they don't necessarily have the ability to track every story all the time.
And yeah, we'll keep people up to date through emails as well about different events that we're hosting or different campaigns that we're running and everything that's going on in Alberta politics, whether that be economic issues or municipal issues or leadership races and more.
Well, Peter, I appreciate that so much.
And I'm so sorry.
It's been so long since you've been on the show and we'll have you back on again, I'm sure, very soon.
Well, friends, we've come to the portion of the show wherein we invite your viewer feedback, unlike the mainstream media.
And I know, friends, I say this every single week, but I actually do care about what you think about the work that we do here at Rebel News.
It's the reason why I give you my email address, which comes right to me on this computer.
It's sheila at rebelnews.com.
Put gun show letters in the subject line so I know why you're emailing me.
And who knows, you might just have your question, comment, story idea read on air and responded to by me, your favorite host here at Rebel News.
But if you are watching the free version of the show, be it on YouTube or on Rumble, thank you so much for sitting through those ads.
Every little bit helps us here at Rebel News.
But leave a comment there too.
I go looking for the gun show letters over there too sometimes.
So, you know, I like to mix it up and I think you guys appreciate that too.
Now, today's letter comes to me from the email inbox and it is from Michael, who wrote to me last week.
So I don't know if it's last week, the show that prompted this or what, because he doesn't really, you know, sort of give any sort of context, but I appreciated the letter and I'm going to respond to it.
Why We Avoid Political Speech Terminology00:05:45
So it says, firstly, thank you for all that you do.
You continue to be one of the few people keeping us from national socialism, a la Hitler.
I don't know if I'm doing that, but I think there are a lot of people who are, you know, advocating for smaller government, personal accountability, personal responsibility, and minding our own business, Which I think is the best way to live your life, that parents are the best first educators of their children and that they should have the final say on everything that happens to their children, and the decisions about the money your family earns are best made by your family.
And I also don't think taxes change the weather, because I think that is superstitious uh, cult-like nonsense.
That's a religion.
If you pay a tithe to a climate god and then he doesn't smite you with bad weather, they used to throw virgins into volcanoes because of that stuff that I think the Aztecs were sacrificing people um, by the thousands for the same sort of superstition anyway uh, let's keep going.
Secondly, the mainstream media has convinced my Alberta brother that Danielle Smith is a dictator.
You got to get your brother off a steady diet of the mainstream media, but it isn't good for him.
It just isn't because uh, they are hyper crazy people sometimes.
I was in a press conference today and I asked two questions to the premier and listening to the other journalists.
By and large, there are a few good ones there, for example, the folks at the Western Standard RICK BELL with the Calgary SUN, who ask normal questions.
But most of these questions are asked by people who are so bizarre that it makes you wonder if they've ever talked to a normal person in their life like they are asking their weird little hobby horse questions.
Instead of questions the people want answers to.
It's so strange, you know, just odd.
Michael asks me, is it possible to do a healthy segment to objectively explain what a dictator would look like?
I think we've got some historical examples and Danielle Smith ain't it and all of the ways that prove she is not one.
I suppose I could.
I suppose I could.
I just, you know if, if a dictator wants to, you know, give your family more autonomy over itself, to give you the final say in the things that happen to your children, to protect your religious freedom, to shrink the size and scope of government, are they dictators, you know?
Or do you want like a benevolent dictator?
Benevolent dictator who gives you everything but you don't get any choice in what you get at the end of the day?
Is that freedom?
I prefer messy, messy freedom.
I'd rather be one of those ugly seagulls just eating whatever I find and living free than a pretty bird in a gilded cage.
Let's keep going.
Uh, Michael suggests maybe the top 10 reasons that Danielle Smith is not a dictator.
You know, this is a fun video for when I have time.
You know, when the news stops and slows down, I might do this one.
If you do read this, and if you decide to walk non-rebels through this, could you please do it without the lingo?
Which lingo is that, I don't know.
I think i'm a pretty plain spoken person.
Um, I don't use the mainstream media catchphrases like carbon pollution.
I say carbon dioxide.
You know what I mean.
Anyway, please can keep it simply positive and, if possible, leave out the attacks and political speech terminology.
I try not to use political speech and terminology because no normal people talk like that.
The politicians and the left try to obscure what they're really talking about by using their little catchphrases like gender affirming, care for minors.
What they really mean is surgically and chemically sterilizing perfectly healthy children.
I avoid the use of the preferred language and pronouns of the left.
So don't you worry about me there.
Thanks, Michael.
Kindest regards.
Well, Michael, you know, that is a video I'd love to come back to.
No promises, but I do appreciate the fact that so many people are still in the throes of the mind control of the mainstream media these days.
And words that they used to know the meaning of, like dictator, they have no idea what it means anymore.
Like they'll call Donald Trump a dictator.
And, you know, somebody who appoints freedom-minded judges to the Supreme Court is hardly a dictator.
But you are right.
People might need a reminder.
And even if they don't accept my reminder, it'll at least prickle the feathers of the left by fact-checking them on their nonsense.
So again, no promises.
I might do it if I have time, but I don't always have a lot of time.
I'm filming this very late in the day that it needs to be published, if that's any indication about the small amount of time that I have to spare.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here or somewhere in the same time, in the same place next week.
And as always, remember, don't let the government tell you that you've had too much To think.