NDP leader discusses wide-ranging issues at Whoop Up Days

Posted on September 5, 2024 by Vauxhall Advance

By Al Beeber
Southern Alberta Newspapers

NDP leader Naheed Nenshi greeted Lethbridge residents who packed Lethbridge streets for the annual Whoop-Up Days parade last month.

His appearance in the parade – to what he called “an incredible reception” – came the morning after a fundraiser for the NDP at which Nenshi introduced the party’s two candidates to represent it in a byelection for Lethbridge West. The seat was vacated on July 1 by long-time NDP MLA Shannon Phillips.

In a wide-ranging interview the former Calgary mayor who earned 86 per cent of votes on the first ballot of the vote to replace Rachel Notley as party leader, addressed numerous topics of concern including social issues and a reliable electrical grid.

In the leadership race, Nenshi earned 72,746 votes to beat out three sitting MLAs for the party leadership.

His visit to Lethbridge was his third since announcing his candidacy. He was also here for a candidates forum and to speak with supporters.

A fundraiser was organized in less than a week which attracted more than 300 people.

“There was big, big energy in the room and I got the chance to introduce our two candidates” for Lethbridge West.

Nenshi called Rob Miyashiro and Bridget Mearns, who are seeking to take Phillips’s old seat in the Alberta legislature, “two amazing candidates with a deep, deep history of public service in Lethbridge. But also they’re sort of battle tested politicians and I think this is going to be a really, really great opportunity for one of them to join our caucus.”

Nenshi said the party is hoping to get its fourth straight NDP victory in Lethbridge West with Phillips winning the three previous ones.

He added Phillips is missed in the caucus, saying the former MLA built a great group of volunteers who worked on her campaigns and between elections and “they are jazzed and excited about going out there and knocking on doors and getting an NDP MLA elected for a fourth straight time.”

Between the two local constituencies, the NDP has almost tripled its membership which Nenshi called exciting.

“We came very close to taking both ridings in the last election. I anticipate if current trends continue, Lethbridge will be a very positive space for us and it’s not surprising because you’ve got a big city here with big city concerns and frankly, a city that has largely been forgotten by Conservative government,” he said citing the lack of a cardiac catheterization lab which has been promised by the UCP.

“The Conservatives are going to pull out every stop to win this byelection. They’re going to promise the cath lab again, they’re going to promise all sorts of things for Lethbridge but they’ve never been able to follow through on any of these things. So the people of Lethbridge see that. They see the public education system is on the brink of collapse on a good day, that the healthcare system is problematic but also the Conservatives have not delivered on what Conservatives are supposed to be good at – strong economy, good jobs and giving people a future and hope,” he said.

And in Lethbridge, residents are seeing problems with mental health and addiction that are impacting other communities in Alberta, he said.

He said while the UCP has built a recovery centre here and is building one on the Kainai Nation it has largely ignored the serious concerns Lethbridge has in terms of these issues.

“The people of Lethbridge have every right to feel forgotten by this government.”

He said social disorder is a huge problem in every city in North America, existing before the pandemic but it was exacerbated by the pandemic.

Across North America, people are starting to avoid public transit because it doesn’t feel safe, they’re avoiding downtowns because they don’t feel safe and perception becomes a reality, said Nenshi.

“So if there are fewer people going downtown or fewer people riding the bus, it not only feels more dangerous, it can become dangerous so while we have to have a very thoughtful and comprehensive program on addiction and mental health, as we have in Calgary, we also have to recognize peoples’ very real concerns that are rooted in their real compassion for the folks who are suffering from addiction and mental health issues,” he said.

The centrepiece of his third term as mayor in Calgary was the creation of the first community-based mental health and addiction strategy in Canada.

“To me, the UCP’s single-minded focus on abstinence-based recovery is not working. The so-called Alberta model has already failed. We’re losing more people to addiction and drug poisoning than we were before the UCP came in.”

One of four Canadians will suffer a mental health episode in their lives, said Nenshi, so while having more treatment space available is a good thing because it will help a lot of people it won’t help everyone, he said.

“While the UCP focuses only on that, the issues of social disorder and human misery grow and grow and grow,” Nenshi said.

The Calgary roadmap takes a broad view of the issues and has three parts, he said. They include being well – ensuring people are doing OK before they fall into addictions or mental health problems, focusing on mental health at work, in school, on sports teams, in faith communities and elsewhere.

The second piece includes getting help where, when and how people need it, ensuring the help is there when a person is in crisis. This includes a holistic view of treatment and harm reduction, he said, noting people can’t be helped when they’re dead.

The third piece is that everyone deserves to be safe, whether it’s people suffering from mental illness or addiction or the vulnerable on the street. This means rethinking how policing is done and ensuring enforcement is done where it’s appropriate and ensuring people are getting funneled into the help they need at the time and place that’s right for them, he said. And ensuring there is a focus on overall community safety “so that people feel safe and happy about getting on the bus or coming downtown or whatever,” he said.

Community-based policing has been important for decades and work is still being done to make it better, said Nenshi, calling police “very expensive social workers but sometimes they’re the ones that we need.”

A fourth option – mental health – is now asked when people call 911 in Calgary where a team of mental health first responders go out to diffuse situations and most times police aren’t involved, he said. To establish that team, Calgary hired fewer than 30 people which allowed the city to make systemic change, he said.

Nenshi knows of the controversy involving the supervised consumption site in Lethbridge and he said it was an error in Calgary to establish one centralized site when there was a plan to build a series of smaller ones throughout the city which Nenshi said no to.

He said the site Calgary created ended up centralizing the addictions problem in one location and led “to a den of social disorder and quite frankly to a lot of people preying on the people suffering from addiction.”

Since then Calgary and the province have been working to create a more effective system. In Lethbridge, he said rather than looking for a replacement site first, the province shut down the SCS and created a mobile site that can fit fewer people in without coming up with a community-based solution that works for everyone and implementing it.

“That’s not a way to solve the problem,” Nenshi said.

“The province I think thought if they just close the site then the problem will solve itself and anyone who lives in Lethbridge can tell you the problem is not solved,” said Nenshi.

He said the SCS caused a lot of social disorder here and there is a lot to be said for people’s concerns which need to be addressed but in a way that keeps people alive.

“Getting that balance right is tricky” and that’s why Alberta needs a “pragmatic thoughtful government that’s solutions oriented instead of an ideological one,” said Nenshi.

One problem that prompted Nenshi to get back into politics was the electricity grid issue last winter when usage skyrocketed due to a brutal stretch of cold weather.

“For better or worse I know a lot about electrical utilities since I found myself representing the owners in one for 11 years, Enmax, and when I watched how the government managed that issue in the winter, basically blaming everything on the federal government, instead of telling people ‘hey, you’ve got to shed load, you’ve got to turn off your appliances.’ We came within a handful of megawatts of total grid collapse at a time where when up in northern Alberta it can be -45. People could have died and that is really how I realized that this government, which is just focused on picking fights all the time and not on actually being a government, was actually putting peoples lives at risk.

“And that’s one of the reasons I jumped back into politics. We have a government that just hates renewable energy,” said Nenshi, noting the moratorium on development caused between $30 billion and $300 billion of investment “to flee Alberta, never to come back” and cost thousands of jobs, particularly in rural Alberta. And that moratorium led to a less reliable electricity grid, said Nenshi.