St. Albert MLA Marie Renaud says she will be supporting former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi in the NDP leadership race.
Her decision comes as Edmonton-Whitemud MLA Rakhi Pancholi, whose campaign Renaud was co-chairing, announced on Tuesday that she is withdrawing from the race and backing Nenshi.
Renaud said she is “still aligned” with Pancholi’s “vision.”
“I believe, like her, that [Nenshi] is the future for this party and the future for Alberta,” she said. “He's demonstrated very quickly that he can grow the membership, that he can attract people that were not inside of our tent before. His vision aligns with [Pancholi’s]. It is positive.”
The message is a shift from five weeks ago, when Renaud told a crowd of Rotary Club members that Nenshi was not her preferred candidate.
She said that backing Nenshi was “an incredibly hard decision” for her to make.
“I am so fond of my colleagues [Kathleen Ganley and Sarah Hoffman,]” she said. “These are incredible women. They’re friends, and I love working with them. And so this just wasn't easy. It was a very pragmatic decision.”
In a Tuesday press release, Pancholi said part of her choice to leave the race came down to NDP membership numbers.
“In the span of a week, Naheed has more than doubled the size of the Alberta NDP’s membership,” the release says. “It’s an incredible accomplishment and invites so many more people into our movement.”
But a flood of new NDP members does not necessarily translate to more support for the party.
A new Abacus Data survey of 1,000 Albertans found 45 per cent of respondents would support the UCP in an election if it were held today, whereas only 33 per cent would vote for an NDP candidate.
The poll also surveyed Albertans’ feelings about the various NDP candidates. Nenshi came in first place, with 31 per cent of respondents ranking him favourable, or “positive.” But he also came in first place for negative impressions, with 23 per cent of respondents giving him a negative evaluation. The reason for this odd conclusion is that more respondents were either “neutral” or “didn’t know enough to say” about the other candidates.
With Pancholi out of the race, five candidates remain: Nenshi; Calgary-Mountain View MLA Kathleen Ganley; Edmonton-Glenora MLA Sarah Hoffman; Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan; and Edmonton-Rutherford MLA Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse.
