Nenshi's NDP leadership rivals say he's vague on policy, as front-runner tries to blend in with orange crowd

It was a random draw, organizers say, that gave Naheed Nenshi the centre lectern in the five-candidate NDP leadership debate Thursday.

Nothing to do with his widely perceived front-runner status, his race-leading name recognition or his reported prowess recruiting new members to the party.

If any of his rivals wanted to use this first debate to tear a strip out of him or knock him down a peg, the placement of him in the middle on stage in Lethbridge meant all of them were in relative jabbing distance.

That didn't happen, aside from a few pokes about Nenshi's reluctance to take firm policy stances.

Let's contrast that with how UCP leadership hopefuls two years ago used debates to try piercing the armour of that contest's front-runner. Brian Jean, Rajan Sawhney and the others assailed Danielle Smith for the harm they believed her Sovereignty Act would wreak on the province's stability, and for unorthodox remarks she'd made that cancer was often "controllable."

The UCP candidates steadily rained rhetorical blows on Smith. It ultimately didn't prove successful against the now-premier, but it did convey that candidates were willing to combat the rival they saw as a threat, either to their party or their own leadership ambitions.

Scrapping on stage is not the NDP way, traditionally.

In Alberta and elsewhere, leadership debates tend to strain the meaning of debate. They're routinely cordial affairs among candidates who largely agree on issues, and would much rather make barbed contrasts with rival parties than against each other.

At Thursday's forum, the candidates applauded each others' closing statements. They declared their agreement routinely — on renewable power, on recruiting workers to the public health system, on fighting climate change while growing the economy, on fighting to gain ground in  rural Alberta where the UCP utterly dominates.

"We've been doing this for the last number of weeks," Nenshi remarked at one point about how often they've been at party functions together. "We're beginning to sound like each other."

It would serve Nenshi's best interests if all five sounded roughly the same, if he as the outsider who'd just bought his own party membership was beginning to blend in with the rest of the New Democrat pack.

Doing so would likely help more members feel comfortable with the prospect of him leading the party, and tamp down the clamour for an anybody-but-Nenshi movement.

There were wisps of such pushback at the Lethbridge forum. They didn't centre on painting the former Calgary mayor as an outsider to the party, but as a candidate who's being deliberately vague on where he stands.

"We're hearing many sentences, but we're not hearing a lot of policy," former health minister Sarah Hoffman said, as she pressed Nenshi on whether he'd repeal Smith's restrictions on wind and solar power. (He said he would, but bristled at her calling it a "ban" on renewables.)