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As Alberta’s Referendum Looms, Where Is Naheed Nenshi?

The NDP leader hasn’t quite seized the moment, despite Danielle Smith’s fumbles

Where is Naheed Nenshi?

The question started in 2024, when Nenshi won the Alberta New Democratic Party leadership but gave the party zero bump in the polls. It continued to circulate after he won a 2025 by-election and entered the legislature after a year on the sidelines, only to remain “practically invisible.” It grew to a yell this spring, when a poll showed he was not more popular than his predecessor, former premier Rachel Notley, who exited following consecutive election losses in 2019 and 2023. Most damning, the poll also showed Nenshi’s popularity had fallen—from 27 percent of Albertans “very impressed” with his leadership in 2025 to just 20 percent in 2026.

At the time, former NDP environment minister Shannon Phillips, who left politics in 2024, argued in a feature for Forward Weekly that Nenshi’s NDP had made “foundational” errors. Nenshi and the NDP chose not to participate in the Forever Canadian petition in 2025, a pre-emptive strike against the push for separatism. Rather than pounce and mobilize non-NDP petition signatories to consider new options, Phillips wrote, Nenshi and his party were “stuck tiptoeing” around—a “classic case of overthinking.”

But there was new hope for Nenshi this May. Following a contentious citizen initiative to push for a legally dubious separation referendum, Premier Danielle Smith announced Alberta would include a tenth question on its upcoming October referendum—whether the province should hold a referendum to determine if it will separate from Canada.

Albertans find Smith unconvincing on separatism. Hard-right separatists have said she isn’t one of them. Others, meanwhile, have expressed that her pro-Canada stance is a cover-up for her real efforts to appease the separatist wing of the United Conservative Party. And the majority don’t seem impressed. An Ipsos poll in June suggested that 58 percent of Albertans disapproved of her and her government’s handling of separation (44 percent “strongly” disapproved), fully 21 percent of them said they’re unsure if she wants Alberta to separate or not, and just over half think her biggest motive is that she wants to keep her job.

Such polls should be where Nenshi enters this narrative. He arrived in 2024 as a star candidate to battle Smith, having won international recognition for becoming the first Muslim mayor of a major Canadian city in Calgary. He replaced Notley, who, despite her 2019 election loss to Smith, maintained her popularity until 2023. There were hopes his 2010s magic—the person who talked with voters for hours and built radically new coalitions—would........

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