Rachel Notley resigned as Alberta s premier on Monday, leaving the Alberta NDP to become the next leader of the federal party, the Green Party of Canada. In this episode, I discuss why Rachel Notley's departure is a good thing for the party and what it needs to do to replace her.
00:00:00.440Former Alberta Premier Rachel Notley resigned after 10 years of leading the Alberta NDP.
00:00:05.960And despite the fact that I'm a conservative, I'm at least interested in looking at how this is going to affect the Alberta NDP.
00:00:12.240And I think that by talking this through, you'll gain a little bit of a better understanding about how the NDP works, both provincially and federally, and what their general appeal is.
00:00:21.260The reason why, and I didn't like her at all, she is still a stalwart NDPer, so I didn't agree with any of her policies, but there was something very good about Rachel Notley's leadership in terms of the NDP's electoral success.
00:00:35.620The problem for the NDP is it's fundamentally a marriage between two groups, hyper-social progressives, usually in universities, and then you have the union, usually public union, labor base.
00:00:47.040These two sides don't really care about each other in a lot of ways. The progressives will pretend that they're big union people at the same time.
00:00:54.080They do not like the values of a lot of blue-collar working union men.
00:00:58.680So these two sides usually need a leader who can bridge the gap between the two of them, tone down the rhetoric on the progressive stuff,
00:01:06.160and not let the union people muscle out the sort of flaky progressives too much in terms of inside the party at AGMs and whatnot.
00:01:13.620Rachel Notley did this very well, and that's why a lot of voters saw her as a moderate, because she kept the sort of two sides of her base under control.
00:01:22.360She kept the union people under control who hate private business and they would love for the government to effectively nationalize things, raise union wages, and bowl over any private business.
00:01:31.980And then she also kept in check a lot of the progressives who would have probably wanted her to be far more, you know, strong on the LGBTQ activist type rhetoric,
00:01:41.100on the sort of like any racial politics rhetoric, the people who, you know, think that, you know, you know, ether-rich type progressives.
00:01:49.500She makes sure that these people stay hidden in the party.
00:01:52.260The thing about the Albert MVP is once you scratch below the surface, the surface being Rachel Notley, you find nutcases underneath the surface.
00:02:00.700People who are open communists, people who are openly pro-Hamas, people who are openly pro-the Houthi-like terrorists in Yemen.
00:02:08.320These people are not average kind of politicians that most people, you know, want to elect.
00:02:13.420These are very much activist politicians, not the sort of sort of very mayoral type politician that Rachel Notley projects herself as.
00:02:22.220Rachel Notley very much was not running to be premier ever.
00:02:27.260And when I say that, I mean in the sense that she would run as like a managerial type.
00:02:32.120I'm here just to manage our services better than Daniel Smith or Jason Canney or Jim Prentice.
00:02:37.520I'm here because, you know, our health care system is underfunded and we need more money, even though we have the most overly funded health care system in Canada.
00:02:46.080And that has nothing to do with the inefficiencies.
00:02:48.780But she very much ran as the services premier, despite the fact that when she was premier, she incorporated, she introduced her own carbon tax.
00:02:56.120She tried to nationalize all the DMVs.
00:02:58.340She tried to nationalize other aspects of Alberta administrative life.
00:03:02.800She's not, she's not actually a moderate, but she could talk like a moderate.
00:03:06.740She talked like someone who was running for mayor.
00:03:09.180This is why one of the people that everyone has sort of has pegged as someone who might try and replace Rachel Notley is former Calgary mayor, Nahid Nenshi.
00:03:17.660Because he very much has that kind of moderate, soft, progressive, like city manager style that a lot of like middle class people in the province will vote for.
00:03:28.200The great thing about Rachel Notley leaving is I actually don't think Nenshi will end up being the Alberta NDP leader.
00:03:45.960So the person that I think is probably going to become the next Alberta NDP leader is not going to be a man that that's too predictable for the NDP or that's too common for the NDP.
00:03:57.240They're probably going to pick a candidate like Racky Pacchioli, who is the current MLA for Edmonton White Mudd.
00:04:04.840Someone who's a young progressive, comes from kind of a specific ethnic community that might give the NDP a big up in certain ridings where they have a big presence.
00:04:15.080She is probably going to be the person they pick.
00:04:17.780They could also pick someone like a Sarah Hoffman or Janice Irwin.
00:04:21.920The problem with all of these choices, even though they kind of represent slightly different sides of the progressive or labor base, they're too on the nose.
00:04:30.020As soon as you, especially Janice Irwin, I'd love for the NDP to elect Janice Irwin.
00:04:35.440Janice Irwin was always effectively the party leader anyways.
00:04:38.860Rachel Notley would have been able, would have been much more hard pressed to put together a, like a protest pressure campaign than Janice Irwin would be.
00:04:47.860Whenever you look at the NDPs, AGMs, when Janice Irwin has been around, she basically dominates the entire thing.
00:04:53.860Because she is the organizer of progressive activists who take over party EDAs and who pass votes on the parties, like for the parties platform.
00:05:02.620When you actually look at NDP AGMs, the labor base has actually been mostly sidelined.
00:05:07.760If the NDP was smart, they would pick a very moderate, soft orange candidate like Court Ellington from Calgary Foothills, just newly elected.
00:05:16.240They'd pick someone like Joe Sisi. Joe Sisi's still a little bit probably too progressive for most people, but he's at least the kind of traditional labor NDP-er that can make a lot of middle class people feel more comfortable.
00:05:30.040Because progressives tend to have an issue with needing to get involved in your life, where at least the labor people, they'll try and rip off taxpayers by increasing labor wages for jobs that in the private sector don't get nearly paid as well.
00:05:43.440Don't have nearly as many vacations, don't come with nearly as cushy a pension.
00:05:47.380But for the most part, Joe Sisi could fly under the radar in terms of his radicalism.
00:05:51.960Janice Irwin can't, but she's obviously the id of the Alberta NDP.
00:05:56.460If they elected Janice Irwin, the party would be honest about who they are.
00:06:00.520They are radicals who don't care about Hamas killing Jews.
00:06:03.620They are crazy people who think that private business is inherently bad, that education, the curriculum should be inherently left-wing and progressive, and that if you disagree with her, you're a racist, transphobic, homophobic bigot.
00:06:19.940That is who Janice Irwin is, and that is who the party is fundamentally behind the scenes in terms of if you were to ratio out what the party was, it would probably be probably around 66% hyper-progressive activists in terms of the very active members of the party.
00:06:34.380The thing with the NDP is that the appeal always, again, is that they appeal in college towns and they appeal in areas where there's a high amount of government employees.
00:06:44.580In Alberta, the benefit of the NDP has been that the Liberals don't exist.
00:06:49.740So while Liberals tend to be more corporate, middle-class, pensioner-type voters, they'll vote for the NDP even though traditionally, federally, they would vote Liberal because the NDP poses a risk to someone's pension.
00:07:04.380This is why the Liberals actually tend to rely on a lot of 60-plus voters because the Liberals promise sort of increased pension benefits, a lot of social service benefits, but they don't try and mess around too much with the system.
00:07:18.620The Alberta NDP and the NDP in general, and when I say that, I'm not saying that Justin Trudeau is moderate.
00:07:23.340He's just less ambitious than Jagmeet Singh or Rachel Notley or Rob Canoe, Bob Canoe, I forget what the guy's name in Manitoba is now.
00:07:31.200But the NDP tends to want to overthrow a lot of our institutions in such a way as that, actually, is that like making government programs more bloated, giving more benefits away, you know, increase rent controls, all these sorts of things.
00:07:44.500It's a lot more government control of the economy, which scares away center-left voters who want some more government, like, tinkering to benefit themselves, but they don't want to do it so much so that the whole system might collapse.
00:07:55.900The NDP doesn't care about the system collapsing, they just do it.
00:07:59.140So that's where the NDP in Alberta has benefited greatly from the Liberals being a defunct entity, from the Alberta Party being a defunct entity.
00:08:09.040So all these people who, if they actually thought about it, would notice that the NDP are going to put their own financial situation at risk, are voting for them because someone like Notley, one, there's no Liberals in the Alberta Party to vote for.
00:08:20.680And then there's also at least a moderate face on the party with Rachel Notley, who promises she's not going to destroy your pension-like funds.
00:08:28.380I know pensions are federal, but I'm just talking about general finances.
00:08:31.620She's not going to put any of your benefits at risk.
00:08:33.600She's not going to put your health care at risk.
00:08:35.200She's not going to do any of this stuff.
00:08:36.400She actually does through all of her massive government interventions, but she has the right tone and attitude to convince some people that she's not as radical as she really is.
00:08:46.900Janice Irwin will just tell you exactly what she wants to do, that, you know, we need to get rid of more, we need to eliminate more private delivery of health care in Alberta.
00:08:56.620She would probably want it to be more fully nationalized.
00:08:59.940A Janice Irwin would want charter schools to be eliminated, for Catholic schools to be eliminated, for the Prost and Palliser school system to be eliminated.
00:09:08.640She will just tell you what she's going to do.
00:09:11.080And when Alberta is a two-party province, you're going to have a lot of people run away from the Alberta NDP and go back to the UCP,
00:09:19.860despite what the media propaganda around, like, a Daniel Smith or Jason Kenney would be.
00:09:25.760They are totally fine voting UCP if they know what the NDP is going to do, or if the NDP states what they're going to do.
00:09:32.980That's where, in this last provincial election, Rachel, Daniel Smith did not win.
00:09:37.600I know that ticks off a lot of people when I say that.
00:09:39.860Daniel Smith did not win the 2023 provincial election.
00:09:43.500And when I say that, I mean Rachel Notley just lost the provincial election.
00:09:47.680If she didn't announce her corporate tax hike, she wouldn't have lost.
00:09:51.380What she was basically doing was trying to announce the corporate tax hike, knowing that she assumed she was going to be the premier.
00:09:58.220So let's get it out of the way now, and then no one can say I'm a liar after I raise corporate taxes.
00:10:03.080That killed her, because once people peeked behind the curtain and realized that the NDP was a vehicle for taxation, higher union wages, inflation,
00:10:12.200massive bloated programs that are not going to be at all useful to anyone,
00:10:17.180and, like, very, very, like, you know, very, very, like, overt progressive takeovers of a lot of our institutions,
00:10:24.080people went over and enough people switched over at the very end of the election to the UCP or stayed home,
00:10:29.760and the NDP ended up losing very narrowly in Calgary, which was what their entire electoral strategy was based on,
00:10:36.600holding Edmonton and then just winning most of Calgary, and they barely didn't cross the finish line.
00:10:43.440But anyways, that's kind of it for me today.
00:10:45.600If you guys want me to talk more about the NDP in live streams or other videos, I absolutely will.
00:10:50.880I think this is going to be really interesting, and I kind of endorse the Take Back Alberta strategy that David Parker announced
00:10:58.280for people who maybe aren't already members of the UCP or members of the UCP to revoke their memberships and buy an NDP membership
00:11:05.240and vote for the most radical NDP candidate, because the NDP should have to embrace who they actually are
00:11:12.460and then fall in the polls just like the Alberta and become completely irrelevant just as the federal NDP are.
00:11:18.800But other than that, I have my usual donation link in the description of this video below.
00:11:25.120We're currently winning this case, but it's just being dragged out because Alberta does not have anti-slap,
00:11:29.460so even though they have no evidence against us, they're just hoping to make our lives miserable.
00:11:33.480I've had to pay over $25,000 into it, so if you want to donate, there's a link in the description below.
00:11:38.500And also I, Wyatt Claypool, I'm running for the Calgary Signal Hill Conservative Party nomination federally,
00:11:43.800so if you live in that riding, buy a federal party membership and vote for me number one on your ballot
00:11:48.480whenever that nomination date is set and, you know, whenever the voting date is declared.
00:11:54.560It probably won't be until after April that any date is announced because we're still waiting for the official boundaries of the riding to be announced
00:12:02.000because there's a lot of shifting around in Alberta considering we're getting a few more federal riding seats
00:12:06.680which are most likely going to go conservative, giving Alberta a little bit more power.
00:12:10.940But even then, we're probably still very, very underrepresented in this country.
00:12:16.320So anyways, that's it for me today, and I hope to see you guys in my next video.