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NDP to move campaign HQ to expected election battleground of Calgary

Recent opinion polling suggests a tight race in Calgary, where 26 legislature seats are up for grabs

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The Alberta NDP is moving its campaign headquarters to downtown Calgary ahead of the expected May 29 provincial vote — a move that reflects the city’s widely regarded status as this election’s decisive battleground.

Speaking to reporters in Calgary Sunday, NDP Leader Rachel Notley confirmed her party will bring its main campaign base to the city’s core.

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“It’s like my home away from home. We’re doing a lot of work here, connecting with folks across the city, so we look forward to be able to be responsive to what people across Alberta tell us, but certainly what people in Calgary tell us as well,” Notley said.

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“No question, there’s a lot of seats in Calgary.”

Recent opinion polling suggests a tight race in Calgary, where 26 legislature seats are up for grabs. A Leger poll conducted earlier this month found that while the NDP leads Danielle Smith’s UCP in vote intention 47 to 43 per cent provincewide, the opposition party trails the UCP 47 to 42 per cent in the vital Calgary metropolitan region.

NDP needs to win record number of seats in Calgary

In the 2019 election, the NDP managed to win only three ridings in Calgary; they secured 16 in 2015, when they stunned by surging to a majority government for the first time in the party’s history.

This time around, the NDP will likely need to win 18 to 20 seats in Calgary to sew up the election, an even higher watermark than they hit in their 2015 victory.

“Everyone knows that Calgary will decide the election,” Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt said. “Edmonton will go NDP, and even some of the satellites around Edmonton will go NDP. And the vast majority of rural Alberta with the exception of maybe Lethbridge or Banff is going UCP, so it’s going to come down to Calgary.

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“That’s why they’ve been spending so much time here, and so it does not surprise me they’re going to set up the campaign headquarters (in Calgary).”

Notley pledges ‘community-specific campaign’

Notley declined to weigh in on her party’s electoral strategy, saying only that she believes the NDP’s path to victory will come by winning over Albertans on their policy planks.

She wouldn’t say how often she intended to be on the ground in Calgary during the campaign — only that she’d spend “at least a third of my time” in the city.

“We’re going to see a very focused, community-specific campaign in a whole bunch of different areas around the province,” Notley said. In Calgary, that means an NDP campaign focus on health care, education and affordability, she said.

It’s expected there are about two months to go, give or take, before Smith drops the writ for the late-May vote. The Legislative Assembly will sit again before then, convening Tuesday for the tabling of the UCP’s 2023 budget.

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But it’s clear both parties have already been in campaign mode for several months, Bratt said, with heavy spending on election advertising and a slew of announcements and press conferences, particularly in ridings thought to be contested.

Bratt said he believes the NDP’s best shot at winning seats in Calgary will come from a campaign that sets its sights on Smith’s weaknesses.

“People in Calgary are doubting Smith’s competencies, and I think they’ve got to pound on it,” Bratt said.

jherring@postmedia.com

Twitter: @jasonfherring

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