Former Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi speaks during a city council meeting in Calgary on Oct. 31, 2018.Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press
In an atmospheric river of nasty, insincere, gotcha politics, Naheed Nenshi stood up last weekend and spoke from the heart about Danielle Smith’s new, sweeping policies affecting transgender youth – and many others. The Alberta Premier had announced them in a seven-and-a-half-minute video that began with her telling trans people how deeply she cares about them.
Mr. Nenshi, the former mayor of Calgary, was having none of it.
“I hate that what we heard for seven minutes was cruelty… lies,” he told a crowd outside Calgary City Hall. He called Ms. Smith’s stance “inhumane,” “un-Albertan,” and dangerous.
“Premier Smith, I want you to understand that votes aren’t worth a few dead kids.”
He ended his speech with a chant: “We will fight! We will win!”
Mr. Nenshi is said to be considering a run for the Alberta NDP leadership, with Rachel Notley departing. The race officially kicked off this week. A cynic might point to the timing of Mr. Nenshi’s passionate weekend speech and the NDP leadership opportunity, but Mr. Nenshi has long demonstrated that he operates by a different playbook.
Mr. Nenshi has never aligned himself with a particular political party (he has voted for at least four different ones, he said in endorsing Ms. Notley in last year’s Alberta election). He is not a slave to any ideology, refusing to toe whatever line has been deemed acceptable or parrot whatever his base wants to hear.
Instead of regurgitating political talking points, he makes actual points when he talks.
Is he possibly running a trial balloon for his future candidacy? Probably. But I’ll take a trial balloon over a political football any day. With those being punted left and right, a politician who speaks their mind and stands up for what they truly believe is right – not what they are expected to say along party lines – would be so welcome.
Mr. Nenshi was a political outsider when he first ran in the 2010 Calgary mayoral election. He was not expected to win, but he did, with nearly 40 per cent of the vote. A key campaign theme was “Politics in full sentences.”
“In Calgary,” Mr. Nenshi told The Globe and Mail in 2010, “nobody cares who your daddy was and nobody cares what your last name is. They care what you bring to the table.”
Born in Toronto to recent immigrants from Tanzania, he was raised in Calgary, attended a gifted high school program, was student union president at the University of Calgary, and studied public policy at Harvard on a scholarship.
He “has the energy and gregariousness of a born politician,” wrote then-journalist (and now Deputy Prime Minister) Chrystia Freeland in The Globe in 2011, months after his election.
During the devastating floods of 2013, Mr. Nenshi rose to the occasion, working tirelessly with little sleep, pitching in with manual help on the ground, while offering comfort to Calgarians in desperate need of inspiration and a morale boost.
Now we are mired in a different kind of storm, flooded with the sludge of the culture wars, and Mr. Nenshi feels like the kind of person who could help the province – maybe even the country – wade through the mire.
He has famously eschewed party politics, refusing to pick a side and stay there. This has been part of his draw, and – or but? – this was long before the polarizing zeitgeist we are currently living in.
After three terms as mayor, Mr. Nenshi left the job in 2021. The sheen was long gone; his approval ratings had fallen along with the price of oil. And the country was at a crossroads.
“It all feels sometimes like too much. Is our country ungovernable? Are the voices of anger and hatred and division simply too loud?” he wrote at the time in The Globe.
“Have they won? … I don’t believe that. I never have. I can’t. I won’t.”
In the midst of the pandemic and so many other crises, he called this a “wet clay moment,” urging that “We must mould the future now, before it sets.”
I fear things are setting, and fast. Mr. Nenshi seems capable of hurrying to reshape the intractable monument to polarization that has resulted. He doesn’t play it safe. He plays it real. How refreshing would that sincerity be, even with the odd misstep, over the boilerplate we are perpetually being sold?
Perhaps this sounds hokey.
But Mr. Nenshi has the brains, the integrity – and the backbone, to boot. And that’s a lot more than I can say about many other politicians. Including the one I hope he runs against in the next Alberta election.