How the Alberta NDP Competes In One of Canada's Most Conservative Provinces

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. Unfortunately, my co-host, Tracy Alloway, is out today, so it'll just be me solo. But it's gonna build on some conversations that Tracy and I have been having lately on the show. So as everyone knows, it's a theme that we've really been talking about for maybe two years now, or at least a year and a half. And this idea of like, okay, supply-side expansion, everybody likes the idea in theory of like, okay, expanding productive capacity in the economy. And that's very hot right now. You have all kinds of people talk about it. We had Ezra Klein, for example, on the show talk about it recently.

We also see it in DC. There's real action and the Inflation Reduction Act is specifically about building out capacity and investing in new energy and so forth.

We saw it with the CHIPS Act that was also passed about building up US domestic semiconductor capacity, et cetera.

However, that being said, I still believe that there is this core tension, particularly among left or liberal parties, and you definitely see them in Democrats. Clearly one aspect of building out supply side capacity is energy and oil, gas, and so forth. And obviously there's interest in renewables, but in the meantime, this is a real constraint. Inflation, high gas prices, high electricity prices, et cetera. And on one hand, there's an impulse to expand supply side capacity. There are also climate goals. And so I believe that there is this real tension among sort of left liberal parties in the West, at least specifically, between, yes, this idea of expanding supply side capacity versus meeting climate goals and not giving a boost, is how to put it to the fossil fuel industry. And I don't think that parties have really resolved this tension.

That being said, there is a party that has been thinking about this tension and finding a way to resolve it, both in terms of policy and politics for a long time. And that is the Alberta NDP. Alberta is historically been a very sort of energy, energy is a huge part of the economy. And it's also seen as a conservative province. And yet the Alberta NDP has had a surprising, a shocking amount of electoral success in the province, having been in power from the years 2015 through 2019 as sort of this meteoric like shocker.

And it reminds me personally of the fact that, Joe Manchin can win in West Virginia in some respect, because there's such a, in the US, such a red area maybe would be characterized. I don't know what the color schemes are in Canada, but similar idea. And so I wanna learn more about the Alberta NDP, how they do it politically, and how they think about these potentially competing policy goals. So I'm very thrilled to welcome to the podcast today. I am going to be speaking with Rachel Notley. She is the leader of Alberta's official opposition, the leader of the Alberta NDP. And she was the provincial chief from the years 2015 through 2019, and election season is gearing up in Alberta once again. It could be this spring, it could be sooner, maybe later because of how parliamentary systems work. So we're going to talk about what's going to come up in this election season. So Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Rachel Notley (3:41)

Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Joe. And that sounds like you've been having some very interesting conversations as we go through a lot of economic growth and evolution.

Joe Weisenthal (3:53)

I really do think this is like a really difficult challenge in the US., for example, for the Democratic Party. And I suspect for the national NDP in Canada as well, though you'll tell me more about that.

But it seems like you've kind of cracked the code, like to some extent, at least electorally, but from a policy standpoint, like just let's start big picture. Like how do you think about balancing the importance of the natural resource sector, the importance of energy, both from a sort of employment standpoint and abundant energy perspective, with also thinking about climate goals?

Rachel Notley (4:31)

Well, you know, I think probably from the very start, one of the things we've tried to do is avoid using terms like balance, because it implies the notion that they run against each other. And the reality is that one of the things we have to remember is that, you know, there are a lot of things that impact economic activity at any given time. One of the things that's impacting it now is the collective need to grapple with climate change. And so what you therefore need to do to continue to grow the economy and provide good paying jobs is to also address one of the pressures impacting your economic activity, in this case, climate change. And so addressing climate change is part of good economic policy. It is not a countervailing force to good economic policy.