Slugs for Nenshi, hugs for rivals at NDP leadership's Calgary debate

When there are reports of physical contact among participants at a political debate, it's typically because something ugly has happened.

Unless, that is, it's an NDP leadership debate.

At the Alberta party's candidate forum on Saturday, rivals Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse and Gil McGowan weren't sure which one was supposed to speak first, nervously giggling about it. Once the confusion was resolved, they hugged, before profusely agreeing with each other about raising Alberta's minimum wage and the importance of unions.

These are, as Calahoo Stonehouse explained afterwards, all members of the same party, who broadly share the same progressive values.

They all oppose most of what the Danielle Smith-led UCP does, and after a successor to longtime NDP Leader Rachel Notley is chosen, they'll all remain prominent senior members of the same team — barring the sort of major party fracture that pundits often speculate about in the wake of a new leader's selection, but seldom materializes.

The niceties and touchy-touchy good vibes can go away when there's disagreement over who really belongs in the party or is well-suited to lead it. Take, for example, one testy exchange between former health minister Sarah Hoffman and Naheed Nenshi about the ex-mayor's past.

Hoffman reached back more than six years to hit Nenshi over the closure of the city-owned Midfield Mobile Home Park last decade, to make way for a larger residential community.  

"What I need to know from you Naheed: why you closed that park, why you evicted those folks," Hoffman said. She added that she'd spoken to some former residents, and they're still dealing with mortgages and one former mobile home-owner had to move in with his in-laws.

It was a departure from the question about expanding the party while remaining true to its values. Or was it?

Nenshi replied by calling them "so-called affordable homes," and said the residents were prioritized for Calgary Housing Company affordable rentals. He said Hoffman was "fear mongering."

"As the minister of health, Sarah, you should know that sometimes the easy answers are not the easy answers," he said.

The sense Nenshi is the front-runner gets amplified when nobody is dredging up controversial decisions from Hoffman's past, or former justice minister Kathleen Ganley's, or McGowan's as a labour leader. (Calahoo Stonehouse is a first-term MLA.)

McGowan used one of his debate segments to bring up the 2019 letter Nenshi sent the UCP government about altering the city union's collective agreement, which several candidates used to attack the ex-mayor as anti-union earlier in the week. Nenshi bid to be more genial in this defence, saying that he was only bringing forth the position of what he called a "super-right-wing council" five years ago, and that he's a strong supporter of organized labour.

A question bubbling underneath this leadership race: how passionate about organized labour is the NDP base in 2024, newly enlarged by the race itself?