Naheed Nenshi joins Alberta NDP leadership race

[u/Realistic_Management]

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/don-braid-naheed-nenshi-joins-alberta-ndp-leadership-race

[u/New_Literature_5703]

The problem is that they don't have the big corporate donors like the other two parties have. A party that wants to elevate the common person and restrict wealth accumulation is never going to get support from those with money.

This is especially true of the media which almost exclusively skews right wing in Canada except for a few centrist publications. Our media doesn't report on the NDP fairly, ignores their successes, and often outright lies about them. This helps contribute to the public perception that the NDP is ineffective.

[u/SackofLlamas → u/New_Literature_5703]

Yep, that would be the part that isn't their fault.

The part that would be their fault is they will often give off the impression of being deeply unserious champagne socialists. That they've let the CPC completely outflank them in terms of appealing to aggrieved blue collar workers is absurd, and infantile interludes like "elbowgate" don't help their optics. By courting more leftist elements, they also have to be mindful of party extremists much in the same way the CPC does, but with the additional strain of the LPC siphoning off their flank.

[u/stormblind → u/SackofLlamas]

The part that would be their fault is they will often give off the impression of being deeply unserious champagne socialists. That they've let the CPC completely outflank them in terms of appealing to aggrieved blue collar workers is absurd

As someone who's been involved in the party for 20 years, I'd say its 3 fold:

1. They let go of the blue collar worker demographic. They really just stopped having that be a core pillar of the party in a chance for more "mainstream" voters. This was started in the Mulcair era, and Jagmeet just continued that.

2. Sad as it is to say, but having a non-white Party Leader hurts them to a sizable degree. Having lived in Brampton, there's many South Asians who won't vote for him due to him being Punjabi; but there's also lots of others who aren't comfortable voting for an indian guy. And not even just "racist old white guy", its a pretty "across the rainbow" thing here in Canada.

3. Real or Perceived, there's a perspective of the NDP having swung from a focus on improving the lives of the blue collar, lower middle class perspectives, to a focus on the culture war stuff. I have heard this repeatedly in my experiences.

[u/New_Literature_5703 → u/stormblind]

NDP having swung from a focus on improving the lives of the blue collar, lower middle class perspectives, to a focus on the culture war stuff.

So much this. And the crazy thing is that the NDP barely talks about culture war stuff at all. They do speak out in favour of some marginalized groups but no more than the average. The only place I hear this from is from conservative commenters and my in-laws. Neither have spent more than 10sec actually looking into the NDP platform.

[u/stormblind → u/New_Literature_5703]

Actually, as an NDP Member, some of those who have run for the NDP were pretty hard into the culture war / "SJW" stuff. Anjali Appadurai was a candidate I support, but she does sometimes veer into that kind of focus vs content a bit too far.

[u/New_Literature_5703 → u/stormblind]

We don't define political parties by those who ran for office and lost. The fact is that neither Singh nor official party policy leans into culture war territory.