At the Calgary Stampede, the Alberta NDP leader took a photo with Israeli ambassador Iddo Moed. When confronted later, a flustered Nenshi refused to “tell [Moed] off at a public event” and stormed off. “That’s not the way it works,” he said.
The NDP bureaucracy has desperately pushed the party as a more responsible representative for Albertan capitalism than the UCP and Danielle Smith. For them, Nenshi is the perfect leader: a “respectable” politician who has never had a thought in his head that wasn’t engineered in a writer’s room to be palatable to the ruling class.
The party bureaucracy hopes that Nenshi can win over “moderate” voters fed up with the UCP. But to quote the man himself, “that’s not the way it works”. Despite Smith being widely hated for her incompetence and for her idiotic “referendum for a referendum”, NDP support lags behind the UCP. With the establishment widely despised, leaning into milquetoast liberalism has been catastrophic. Nenshi offers nothing to differentiate the NDP except old platitudes like “Keeping Money in Your Pocket.” He has the gall to promise this while also supporting public cash for Smith and Mark Carney’s new pipeline. Whose money is he talking about? Whose pockets?
In being an inoffensive stooge, Nenshi appeals to absolutely no one. Even when gifted an easy win like taking a symbolic pro-Palestine stance, Nenshi fumbles, terrified of looking uncivil in front of the Zionist genocide apologist.
The establishment is useless to Albertan workers. What we need is a real alternative. A leadership that won’t suck up to the oil barons but will take the fight to them and the capitalist system. That alternative will never be Naheed Nenshi.
– Mariano Solís-Jensen
