Rachel Notley

Based on Wikipedia: Rachel Notley

In the early hours of an October morning in 1984, a twenty-year-old university student named Rachel Notley received a phone call that would shape the rest of her life. She had been at a party. It was four in the morning. On the other end of the line, her father's executive assistant told her there had been a plane crash.

Her father, Grant Notley, was the leader of Alberta's New Democratic Party. He spent much of his time crisscrossing one of Canada's largest provinces by small aircraft, visiting remote communities that larger parties often ignored. This wasn't his first crash. He'd already survived several plane accidents and even a collision with an elk. But this time was different.

When another party member called to confirm what Rachel already suspected, she had to be the one to tell her mother. Thirty years later, on the day after she was elected to lead the same political party her father once led, Rachel Notley would oversee a memorial service marking the anniversary of his death.

The Making of a Political Fighter

Rachel Anne Notley was born on April 17, 1964, in Edmonton, Alberta, though she grew up in the small northern town of Fairview. She would later become the first premier of Alberta actually born in the provincial capital, a quirky historical footnote in a province where most leaders had come from elsewhere.

Her family was steeped in progressive politics. Her father Grant led the Alberta New Democratic Party, known as the NDP, a left-leaning party that champions workers' rights and social programs. Her mother Sandy, a devout Anglican originally from Concord, Massachusetts, introduced Rachel to activism early. Before Rachel had reached her tenth birthday, her mother had already taken her to an anti-war demonstration.

Even as a college student, Rachel showed a willingness to challenge authority that would define her political career. At one Alberta NDP public meeting focused on poverty and student debt, she stood up and directed a pointed question at one of the panelists: What advice would he give to a "poor student whose parents made too much money for her to get a loan while at the same time being too cheap to give her enough money to buy food?"

The panelist was her father.

This combination of political conviction and personal fearlessness came from both parents. But Rachel also credits her high school social studies teacher, Jim Clevette, with sparking her interest in how governments actually work. Later, she would claim the charismatic federal NDP leader Jack Layton as a personal hero.

A Career Built on Workers' Rights

After earning her bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Alberta, Notley headed east to attend Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, one of Canada's most prestigious legal institutions. While there, she threw herself into federal party politics, backing Dave Barrett, a former premier of British Columbia, in the 1989 NDP leadership race. Barrett came in second.

Notley's legal career focused on something most people never think about until disaster strikes: workers' compensation. When someone gets injured on the job, they enter a labyrinthine system of claims, assessments, and appeals. Notley became an advocate for workers navigating this system, first in Edmonton and later in Vancouver.

In British Columbia, she worked as an occupational health and safety officer for the Health Sciences Association, a union representing healthcare workers. She also served briefly as a ministerial assistant to the provincial attorney general, Ujjal Dosanjh, who would later become premier. During this time, Notley was part of a team that expanded British Columbia's family law to include same-sex couples, several years before the Canadian federal government took similar steps.

Her work in Vancouver also included advocacy for special needs children through an organization called "Moms on the Move" and a seat on the board of Vancouver Community College. When she returned to Edmonton in 2002, she continued working with unions, including a stint with the United Nurses of Alberta.

In 1997, she married Lou Arab, a communications representative for the Canadian Union of Public Employees and a political strategist. Their wedding ceremony on Indian Arm, a scenic inlet near Vancouver, was officiated by Tim Stevenson, who would later become one of Canada's first openly gay elected officials. The couple settled in Old Strathcona, a historic neighborhood in south Edmonton, where they raised two children.

Entering the Arena

Notley remained uncertain about running for office herself until she was in her thirties. But politics has a way of pulling in those raised in its orbit.

In 1991, she led the election-planning subcommittee for the Alberta NDP. Two years later, the party was wiped out entirely in the provincial election, losing every single seat in the legislature. It was a devastating blow. In Alberta, conservative parties have dominated for generations. The NDP operated more as a voice of conscience than a realistic contender for power.

When party leader Pam Barrett resigned in 2000, Notley traveled back to Edmonton to help Brian Mason hold onto Barrett's seat. The party was fighting for survival.

Six years later, Notley was nominated to run in Edmonton-Strathcona, her home district. The nomination event was attended by none other than Jack Layton, by then the federal NDP leader. In 2008, she won the seat, succeeding former party leader Raj Pannu.

For the next six years, Notley served as a backbench member of a legislature thoroughly dominated by the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta. The Conservatives had held power since 1971, winning election after election in a province whose oil wealth made it the economic engine of Canada. Alberta was conservative country. Always had been.

The Impossible Victory

On October 18, 2014, Notley won the leadership of the Alberta NDP with seventy percent of the vote on the first ballot. It wasn't even close. She defeated two other candidates, fellow legislator David Eggen and union leader Rod Loyola, to become the ninth leader in the party's history.

Nobody expected what came next.

When Progressive Conservative Premier Jim Prentice called a provincial election for May 5, 2015, conventional wisdom said his party would cruise to a thirteenth consecutive majority government. Yes, they had just released an unpopular budget that cut social spending while keeping corporate taxes low. Yes, they had raised various fees that hit ordinary families. But the main opposition party, the Wildrose, had been decimated by defections. Many of its members had crossed the floor to join the very Conservatives they had been elected to oppose.

Alberta observers figured the NDP might pick up a few seats in Edmonton. Maybe they'd become the official opposition. That would be a good night.

Instead, the campaign turned into a three-way race. Notley hammered the Conservatives on their budget choices, promising to raise corporate taxes instead of cutting services. She proved to be a formidable debater. In the sole televised leaders' debate, she was widely seen as the winner.

Then came the moment that crystallized the campaign.

During a discussion about the NDP's proposed budget, which contained an embarrassing arithmetic error, Premier Prentice turned to Notley and said, "I know math is difficult."

The remark was instantly seen as sexist and condescending. In trying to score a point on a genuine mistake, Prentice had revealed something about how he viewed his female opponent. The comment went viral. Donations flooded into NDP coffers.

By the final week, pollsters were predicting an NDP majority. Notley later told reporters she had been sitting in a hotel room in either Calgary or Lethbridge when she saw a credible poll showing her party was about to go from four seats, the bare minimum for official party status, to an outright majority government. She immediately scrapped her plans for a grueling final push. She needed to rest. She needed to prepare for a transition nobody had thought possible.

On election night, the NDP won fifty-four seats. They swept every riding in Edmonton with huge margins. In Calgary, vote-splitting among conservative parties allowed them to win fifteen seats. The Progressive Conservatives were crushed.

It was the end of forty-four years of unbroken Conservative rule, the longest continuous run of any party at the provincial level in Canadian history.

Governing Against the Tide

Rachel Notley was sworn in as the seventeenth premier of Alberta on May 24, 2015. The ceremony was held on the steps of the provincial legislature, open to the public. A folk band played the national anthem. Food trucks distributed free popsicles. It was a deliberate statement about the kind of government she intended to run.

Her twelve-member cabinet was the smallest in Canada, representing only fourteen percent of her caucus. She retained the previous head of the provincial civil service, Richard Dicerni, while bringing in NDP strategist Brian Topp as her chief of staff.

The challenges started immediately. One of her newly elected members, Deborah Drever from Calgary-Bow, was discovered to have posted controversial content on social media, including an image widely seen as homophobic. Notley suspended Drever from caucus and apologized publicly on behalf of the party. It was a reminder that governing meant owning problems you didn't create.

The NDP moved quickly on its core promises. Their first throne speech announced bills to ban corporate and union donations to political parties, ending a practice that had made Alberta politics dependent on big-money interests. They raised taxes on large corporations and high earners, ending the flat tax rate that had been in place since the premiership of Ralph Klein in the 1990s.

Notley also reached across the aisle. She created a seventeen-member committee to improve government accountability, initiating it through a joint motion with Wildrose Party leader Brian Jean. She asked Liberal leader David Swann to help review provincial mental health policy. These gestures were unusual in the combative world of partisan politics.

Reconciliation and Apology

One month after taking office, Notley delivered an apology that had been decades in coming.

On June 22, 2015, she apologized to the Indigenous peoples of Alberta for generations of neglect by previous governments. She specifically addressed the decades of abuse that had occurred at government- and church-operated residential schools, institutions where Indigenous children had been forcibly separated from their families and subjected to systematic attempts to erase their cultures and languages.

This was not merely symbolic. The residential school system is one of the darkest chapters in Canadian history, and its impacts continue to reverberate through Indigenous communities today in the form of intergenerational trauma, poverty, and broken families. Notley pledged that her government would work to improve living conditions for Alberta's Indigenous communities.

She followed through in concrete ways. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, Notley immediately tweeted her support. She endorsed the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Her 2017 budget included one hundred million dollars to upgrade water treatment facilities serving First Nations communities, addressing the shameful reality that many Indigenous Canadians lack access to clean drinking water.

In 2018, her government sold 150 hectares of Crown land to the Fort McKay Métis community for 1.6 million dollars, a precedent-setting transaction for Métis people, who occupy a unique position in Canadian Indigenous relations, being of mixed European and First Nations ancestry with their own distinct culture and legal status.

The Climate Challenge

Alberta presented Notley with a fundamental paradox. The province's wealth came from oil, specifically from the oil sands, also called tar sands, massive deposits of bitumen, a heavy form of petroleum mixed with sand and clay, located in the northern part of the province. Extracting this oil is energy-intensive and carbon-heavy. Environmental groups around the world had made Alberta's oil sands a symbol of climate destruction.

But that same industry employed tens of thousands of Albertans and funded the province's generous public services. You couldn't simply shut it down.

In November 2015, just before the international climate summit in Paris, Notley unveiled an ambitious climate plan. It included an economy-wide carbon price starting in 2017, a mechanism that puts a cost on greenhouse gas emissions to encourage businesses and individuals to reduce them. The plan capped emissions from the oil sands themselves. It committed to phasing out coal-fired electricity by 2030 and cutting methane emissions in half over ten years.

To make the coal transition work, her government paid 1.4 billion dollars to compensate three major power companies, ATCO, Capital Power, and TransAlta, for the early closure of six coal plants. The money came from carbon tax revenues and would be paid out over fourteen years.

She also tackled a problem unique to oil country: orphan wells. When oil and gas companies go bankrupt or simply walk away from depleted wells, someone has to clean up the mess. Thousands of these abandoned wells dot the Alberta landscape, leaking methane and contaminating groundwater. In 2017, Notley's government budgeted 235 million dollars for the Orphan Well Association to begin reclaiming and rehabilitating these sites.

Her government also created the Birch River Wildland Provincial Park, a protected area of 3,330 square kilometers of boreal forest, the largest protected boreal territory in the world. The park sits adjacent to Wood Buffalo National Park and was created through a partnership with the Tallcree First Nation and the conservation group Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Progressive Social Policy

On social issues, Notley moved Alberta decisively leftward. In 2018, her government introduced legislation creating fifty-meter buffer zones around abortion clinics, preventing anti-abortion protesters from harassing patients and staff. That same year, the province began publicly covering the cost of Mifegymiso, a medication used for early pregnancy termination.

Her government launched a pilot project to fund daycare at twenty-five dollars per day per child, a dramatic reduction from market rates that can run several times higher. Affordable childcare has long been a priority for progressive parties, who argue it enables parents, especially mothers, to participate in the workforce.

Defeat and Opposition

In the 2019 provincial election, Alberta's political pendulum swung back. The newly formed United Conservative Party, which had merged the old Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties, swept to power under Jason Kenney. Notley's NDP was defeated, though they retained enough seats to form the official opposition.

For the next four years, Notley served as Leader of the Opposition, holding the new government accountable. In the 2023 election, the NDP made significant gains but again fell short of forming government. Conservative Alberta remained conservative Alberta.

On January 16, 2024, Notley announced she would step down as party leader, though she would remain until her successor was chosen. On June 22, Naheed Nenshi, the former mayor of Calgary, was elected to replace her. Two days later, Christina Gray took over as Leader of the Opposition in the legislature.

In December 2024, Notley announced she would resign her seat entirely, effective December 30. She returned to practicing labour law, the profession that had shaped her political convictions decades earlier.

The Arc of a Political Life

Rachel Notley's story illuminates several truths about political leadership. She spent years in the wilderness, part of a party that seemed permanently locked out of power in a province that had voted conservative for as long as most voters could remember. She built expertise in a specific area, workers' rights, rather than pursuing power for its own sake. When opportunity finally came, she was ready.

Her breakthrough also reveals how quickly political fortunes can change. The same Alberta that had elected forty-four years of conservative governments chose, for four years, to try something different. They didn't choose differently because they had suddenly become progressive. They chose differently because they were angry at the incumbents and because Notley offered a credible alternative.

The condescending comment about math being difficult probably didn't change anyone's deep political convictions. But it crystallized something voters were already feeling about a government that had grown arrogant in power. Sometimes elections turn on such moments.

Notley cycled and jogged and skied. She was a reformed smoker. She raised two children in a historic neighborhood of Edmonton with a husband who shared her political commitments. Her brother Stephen became known for creating "Bob the Angry Flower," a cult-favorite comic strip.

And she began and ended her political career shaped by small aircraft over Alberta's vast landscape. Her father's death in a plane crash, when she was just twenty years old, didn't push her away from politics. If anything, it pulled her in. She spent decades carrying forward his legacy, fighting for workers and Indigenous communities and environmental protection in a province whose wealth came from the very industry environmentalists opposed.

Whether you see her tenure as a brief aberration in Alberta's conservative history or as proof that change is always possible depends on your perspective. What's certain is that for four years, the daughter of a man who died trying to represent remote communities led those communities' province. History sometimes bends toward the unexpected.