The 'Redmonton' party no more: Alberta NDP's base has shifted to Calgary

You don't have to go far back — 2012, or four elections ago — to find a time when the Alberta NDP hardly registered in Calgary.

Sure, they ran candidates, but none of them seriously door-knocked or campaigned. They averaged less than five per cent of the votes in Alberta's largest city in 2012.

It had been an Edmonton-centric party for decades, because that's where its leaders resided,  and that was the only place in Alberta where it actually won seats.

Times have changed. Calgary has changed. New Democrats certainly have changed, especially as they look beyond Rachel Notley for a new leader.

The Alberta NDP is now a Calgary-dominated party.

Nearly half of the party's membership ahead of the June leadership vote is Calgarian, according to a riding-by-riding breakdown of the party's 85,144 members. That compares with only one-quarter of members from Edmonton, while the rest hail outside the two major cities.

There was buzz among party insiders that the party's centre of gravity would shift, particularly with the star candidacy of former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, who joined the opposition party this spring to seek the leadership.

But this is a galactic rebalancing. Calgarian NDPers outnumber Edmontonians by nearly two-to-one, 39,240 members to 21,253.

This regional lopsidedness of the NDP membership likely bodes well for the hopes of Nenshi, the widely perceived front-runner, and Kathleen Ganley, a Calgary MLA and former cabinet minister. Meanwhile, it means there are fewer Edmontonians to support the leadership bids of local MLAs Sarah Hoffman and Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse, making success a greater uphill climb for them.

New Democrats might also be encouraged by the new size of their base in the city that was the key battleground in the last election. There are more NDP members in Calgary now than there were UCP members there in 2022 for its leadership vote — despite Danielle Smith's party having more members province-wide.

"It says that a lot of people are really excited in Calgary," said Ganley. Her own riding, Calgary-Mountain View, has 3,501 NDP members, the most in Alberta — and more than the UCP had in its strongest rural riding in 2022.

In fact, the six ridings with the most NDP members are all in Calgary, followed by Notley's own Edmonton-Strathcona in seventh.

Ganley's leadership campaign used geocoding with the addresses in an updated NDP active member database to provide the geographic data. This breakdown was provided to CBC News.

The party's membership has grown more than fivefold since January, when Notley announced she would step down once a new leader was chosen. Party insiders have said that before leadership campaigns began enlisting new members, the membership base was more evenly split between Edmonton, Calgary and the rest of Alberta.