Do we like Rachel Notley?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record on people, workers and LGBTQ+ kids, marked down for buying a pipeline and one old stoush with a backbencher.
Politics was the family business. Born in Edmonton in 1964, Notley was the eldest of three kids of Grant Notley, who led the Alberta NDP from 1968 to 1984, and Sandra, a social activist from Massachusetts. The family moved to north-west Alberta when her dad became an MLA, so she grew up in the smallest, loneliest corner of Alberta's left.
The long game paid off in 2015. Notley led the NDP to a majority government, ending 44 years of Progressive Conservative rule in a province nobody thought would ever go orange. She had been an MLA for Edmonton-Strathcona since 2008, took over the party in 2014, and became the 17th premier as oil prices were sliding.
Her government lifted the minimum wage to $15 an hour, created the Alberta Child Benefit, cut school fees and banned corporate and union donations to parties. It also began phasing out coal-fired power and brought in a carbon levy. Not everything was rosy: the economic squeeze led to cuts to daycare subsidies and a school lunch program.
Here's the one that splits the room. She saw the carbon levy as the way to win social licence for pipelines, and in 2018 her government bought the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion. Where you land depends on whether you read that as hard-nosed pragmatism or as a climate-minded premier backing more oil. Beyond that, no harmful words or dodgy company turned up in what we read, and her government protected gay-straight alliances in schools.
She turned up to Calgary Pride in 2018 in a Love Wins shirt with an I support Trans Mountain pin, which sums her up nicely. She called Pride “one of the best celebrations that we can do anywhere in the province.” For an LGBTQ+ reader, that and the school protections are the real stuff, not just a photo op.
It wasn't all smooth. In 2018 former NDP backbencher Robyn Luff alleged that MLAs were told it was best not to go public about opposition members accused of inappropriate behaviour, and that senior officials kept a tight grip on backbenchers. Notley said no one reporting to her gave such a directive and called politics “a bit of a team sport”; her office said two NDP MLAs had been accused of inappropriate behaviour since 2015 and the matters were handled by independent investigations. In 2016 the ethics commissioner cleared her over an Ontario NDP fundraiser, though even her own side admitted the optics were iffy.