NDP still waiting for Nenshi wave: poll shows party farther behind UCP with new leader

EDITOR’S NOTE: CBC News commissioned this public opinion research to be conducted immediately following the federal election and leading into the second anniversary of the United Conservative Party’s provincial election win in May 2023. 

As with all polls, this one provides a snapshot in time. 

This analysis is one in a series of articles from this research. More stories will follow.

Naheed Nenshi, the Alberta NDP leader and prolific public speaker, spent 55 minutes delivering a speech to his party’s convention in early May about the state of Alberta politics and where he wants to take his movement and province.

Well, at least most of it was present- and future-focused.

He spent 11 minutes near the top of his address looking back at the Calgary flood — the defining moment of his mayoralty. A dozen years ago.

At one point in that reminiscence, he became self-aware he was dwelling on the past.

“So I know this feels like an old story,” Nenshi said. “Why is he going back to the greatest hits?”

He then tried to bridge his storytelling about Calgary’s flood-time resilience into a metaphor about the UCP government. 

“It’s a flood of economic uncertainty. It’s a flood of attacks on our public services. It’s a flood of policies that divide rather than unite. And today, my friends, we’re going to start stopping that flood.”

But it seems like the hero of 2013 Calgary isn’t stirring hearts in 2025 Alberta, according to new polling from Janet Brown Opinion Research.

Ex-mayor behind in cities

The massive enthusiasm that surrounded his big win last year as the Opposition party’s leader appears to have failed to resonate beyond his base.

He was a star recruit from outside the NDP ranks, selected to deliver victory after former premier Rachel Notley had failed in her second and third bids to return the party to that electoral Jerusalem.

However, NDP fortunes have fallen sharply in Calgary under its first Calgarian leader. They’d narrowly won the popular vote and won the most seats in the province’s largest city in 2023, but now trail the UCP there by 13 percentage points, the poll shows — nearly as far back as they are provincewide.

And in Edmonton, the city they swept (again) and won by 29 points in 2023, it’s nearly a tie.

Nenshi is running in a by-election in Notley’s former riding of Edmonton–Strathcona, and is even mingling among the city’s hockey fans in a newish team sweater. 

But he has a lot of ground to make up in his newly adoptive political home base to even bring the NDP back to its 2023 levels of success, let alone faring better than that next election. 

“Our life’s work is not to be the biggest Opposition Alberta has ever seen,” Nenshi told his party convention. “Our life’s work is to be the best government Alberta’s ever had.”

While the NDP brand often struggled, Notley in her latter years tended to enjoy higher personal support than her UCP rivals Jason Kenney and Danielle Smith.

The progressive party’s current leader holds no such edge, compared to the current premier.

In both Edmonton and Calgary, more poll respondents are likely to say they have a negative impression of Nenshi than a positive one.

Brown said he may have Smith to blame for his fortunes, as impressions of the premier have edged upward over her time in office.

“It’s always difficult to look at a leader in isolation because how well a leader is doing is always related to how well the person on the other end of the teeter-totter is doing,” the pollster told CBC News.

“So Danielle Smith probably owes something to Nenshi for how well she’s doing, and Nenshi probably has to acknowledge that Smith is one of the reasons that he’s not performing as well.”

Brown cites Smith’s “dynamic” communicating skills — say, wasn’t that Nenshi’s reputation too? — but also her ability to dominate the agenda as premier. 

“She just takes up so much of the energy, it’s hard for Nenshi to get into the debate,” Brown said.

Over his nearly one year as leader, Nenshi hasn’t been able to get onto the legislature floor for any formal debate; but with a by-election win on June 23, he’ll have that opportunity when the assembly resumes sitting in October.

But getting in four weeks of question period jousts this fall won’t likely matter much — not with so many other modern ways to make his political message heard, said Keith McLaughlin, a former NDP senior aide and strategist.

To him, Nenshi should change the content and approach of his message, rather than expect the venue to improve things for him.

“Voters want fighters, not feelers,” McLaughlin said in an interview. “They don’t want to go for a bleeding heart.”

While Nenshi’s recollections of the Calgary spirit during the flood were well received by convention-goers, McLaughlin said, the partisans were far more energized by their leader’s more spirited rhetoric about labour strife among education staff and about their rivals’ flirtation with provincial separatism.

David Climenhaga, a provincial NDP supporter and blogger, wrote after the Alberta convention that Nenshi’s been “weirdly passive” when he’s had the opportunity to take on Smith.

“There are lots of social media videos, but I don’t get the feeling Mr. Nenshi’s professorial lectures have homed in on the issues that matter the most to the working Albertans whose votes the provincial NDP requires to push it over the top,” Climenhaga wrote.

However, time and circumstances may have prevented Nenshi from capitalizing on two of the biggest fights his NDP have taken to the United Conservatives.

The opposition was girding for a big fight last fall, when Smith put forth her legislation making major policy changes on transgender youth health care and in schools in late October. But soon afterward, headlines were dominated by Donald Trump’s victory south of the border, and his subsequent threats on Canadian sovereignty.

Months later, controversy erupted over Alberta Health Services’ contracting practices and the ouster of CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos. Nenshi’s NDP swiftly branded it a scandal and demanded another ouster, that of Health Minister Adriana LaGrange.

The Trump bump (of all else off the agenda)

But other events dominated the headlines as those health-management stories broke, too. 

A newly inaugurated President Trump ramped up his tariff threats on Canada, and the rise of Liberal Leader Mark Carney and the federal election became the main story in Alberta and elsewhere, perhaps giving less spotlight to provincial politics, where Nenshi and his MLAs were busy fervently denouncing their rivals and trying to highlight the AHS saga.

Brown also said she believes the recent evaporation of federal NDP support is helping drag down the provincial party. Nenshi’s team has recently started referring to themselves as “Alberta’s New Democrats” instead of using the NDP acronym — a subtle attempt to distance themselves from their federal cousins.

That’s on top of a more formal separation of federal and provincial branches. 

At the same convention where Nenshi shared his flood reminiscences, members voted to end automatic membership in the federal NDP for all provincial card-holders.

They also showed unity behind their leader with an 89.5 per cent vote of support in his leadership review.

The party is leaning on him in these by-elections. Not only is Nenshi’s name on his own candidate lawn signs in Strathcona, but his cross-town colleague running in the vacant Edmonton-Ellerslie has a “Team Nenshi” logo in one corner that’s larger than the party’s logo in another corner.

Despite his subpar performance in polls to date, there’s far more patience than discontent among New Democrats with Nenshi, McLaughlin said. There’s also awareness that he has time to make up ground before the next Alberta election in fall 2027.

While his NDP remains united, there’s sharp division within Smith’s party on the separation question. And who knows what multiple investigations into the AHS matter will conclude?

At the end of Nenshi’s speech, he spent three more minutes on one last 2013 Calgary flood story — about one family wracked by the disaster, and the shepherd’s pie that strangers made for them. 

He spoke about the deep kindness and generosity of Albertans in the face of adversity, and then spoke of tapping into that spirit to overcome what Smith’s UCP have wrought.

It may have been a new anecdote to many of the non-Calgarians at this Alberta NDP event, but it’s one that by 2014 had already been well-worn in Nenshi’s rhetorical repertoire.

He may choose to refresh the content of his speeches as he continues in his bid to overtake the UCP and Smith.

Or, he could stick with his greatest hits, the pivotal moment of his past political career and for Calgary. 

But if the flood is still his favourite reference point come next election, he’ll be seized by something that happened 14 years ago, when voters will be concerned about the next four years.

The CBC News random survey of 1,200 Albertans was conducted using a hybrid method between May 7 to 21, 2025, by Edmonton-based Trend Research under the direction of Janet Brown Opinion Research. The sample is representative of regional, age and gender factors. The margin of error is +/- 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. For subsets, the margin of error is larger. The survey used a hybrid methodology that involved contacting survey respondents by telephone and giving them the option of completing the survey at that time, at another more convenient time, or receiving an email link and completing the survey online. Trend Research contacted people using a random list of numbers, consisting of 40 per cent landlines and 60 per cent cellphone numbers. Telephone numbers were dialed up to five times at five different times of day before another telephone number was added to the sample. The response rate among valid numbers (i.e. residential and personal) was 12.8 per cent.