Naheed Nenshi

Early Life and Education

Naheed Nenshi is one of two children of Kurbanali Hussein Nenshi, a small businessman, and Noorjah Nenshi. The couple immigrated to Canada from Tanzania in 1971, a year before Naheed was born. He grew up in Calgary’s Marlborough neighbourhood and attended Queen Elizabeth High School, where he participated in debating and acting.

“I grew up in a house where we read the newspaper every day, and we talked about politics over the dinner table,” he said. “I always did student government… and I was always very, very involved in policy issues, but I never really thought that I would be a politician. I thought maybe a journalist, or maybe a professor.”

A childhood hero while growing up was former Calgary mayor and Alberta lieutenant-governor Grant MacEwan — whom Nenshi met during his ninth-grade graduation. Nenshi studied commerce at the University of Calgary, where he became president of the students’ union. He graduated in 1993 and went on to earn a Master of Public Policy degree from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1998.

Consultant and Professor

After university, Nenshi worked for McKinsey & Company, a global consulting firm, as an engagement manager. He advised large telecommunications companies, banks, retail businesses and oil and gas companies with corporate strategies. In 2001, he founded his own consulting firm, the Ascend Group. Its clients came to include the United Nations, the Alberta government and various clothing retailers.

As a member of Canada25 — a now-defunct, non-profit organization that helped engage young adults on public policy issues — Nenshi authored the 2002 policy paper, “Building Up: Making Canada’s Cities Magnets for Talent and Engines of Development.”

In 2004, Nenshi became an associate professor at Mount Royal University’s Bisset School of Business, where he specialized in non-profit management and marketing.

Municipal Politics

In 2004, Naheed Nenshi made a failed bid for a seat on Calgary City Council. He spent the next six years as an academic. He urged his fellow citizens from all walks of life to enter municipal politics as a way of making change and building a stronger community in Calgary. “One of the things I have learned,” he said, “is that it is very easy to get people involved in their community — you just have to ask them. But it is very hard to get people involved in politics.”

In 2010, at age 38, Nenshi entered the race for mayor. He made the decision to show young people that voters “can elect good people into government…. I wanted to prove a point,” he said. “Could a relatively unknown academic with good ideas and no money actually do well in an election? That was our [campaign’s] goal, to figure that out.”

Nenshi’s rivals were alderman Ric McIver and former CTV Calgary news anchor Barb Higgins. Rather than run a traditional campaign, Nenshi relied heavily on social media and other then-unorthodox means to engage voters. His campaign was dubbed “the purple revolution,” as it reached out to voters across the political spectrum and not just to liberals (red) or conservatives (blue). The campaign’s hallmarks included the 40 or so coffee parties Nenshi held in the homes of his supporters, where he spoke to his hosts’ friends and families about his campaign platform.

A September 2010 Calgary Herald-CTV poll showed Nenshi with only eight per cent support — well behind McIver (43 per cent) and Higgins (28 per cent). A month later, however, another Herald-CTV poll showed Nenshi in a virtual tie with McIver and Higgins. On 18 October, he was elected Calgary’s 36th mayor with 40 per cent of the vote and almost 28,000 more votes than McIver.

Nenshi was re-elected in 2013, receiving almost 74 per cent of the vote. He was re-elected for a third term in 2017 with 51.4 per cent of the vote.

Mayor

As with his campaigns, Naheed Nenshi relied on social media as mayor to engage citizens. During the floods of June 2013 — at the time, the costliest natural disaster in Canadian history — he tirelessly offered comfort to besieged residents and urged people to help their neighbours rather than wait for emergency officials. His Twitter account gained 28,261 followers within 10 days after the floods, according to a report from Marketwired.

Nenshi remained a prolific tweeter throughout his mayoralty, using the medium as a way of directly answering Calgarians’ concerns and questions on everything from transit policy to parking tickets. A 2016 New York Times headline called him “A Mayor Fluent in Twitter.”

After taking office, Nenshi was a staunch supporter of the Alberta oil industry, which makes its corporate headquarters in Calgary. He was also a vocal proponent of new and expanded pipelines to carry Alberta oil to foreign markets — a controversial stance among other big-city Canadian mayors outside Alberta.

Nenshi was sometimes criticized for being better at talking than getting things done in his city. However, he presided over upgrades and rider incentives in the city's mass transit system, CTrain, and the building of a new airport access tunnel. His council introduced a new city hall auditing structure. He also worked, with mixed success, to contain the city's urban sprawl, while also championing projects to revitalize neglected or tired neighbourhoods. Nenshi’s lifelong passion has been making communities work better. On his 3ThingsforCalgary.ca website, he challenged every resident to do three things for the city — whether selling pies at a bake sale for a charity or donating toys to a community toy bank.

Nenshi was a vocal supporter of ethnic and gender diversity among the city’s senior staff. He was also the first Calgary mayor to serve as a grand marshal for the city’s gay pride parade. He served as a powerful, personal symbol of Calgary's growing ethnic and political diversity in the 21st century. He also presided over a period of growth in the city, which included such projects as the construction of the National Music Centre (Studio Bell), the new $245 million Central Library and the revitalization of the East Village, as well as the construction of a $295 million airport tunnel.

In April 2021, the 49-year-old Nenshi announced that he would not seek re-election for a fourth term as Calgary’s mayor.

Career After Politics

After choosing not to seek a fourth term, Naheed Nenshi publicly expressed some ambivalence over his decision. On the eve of the election that saw Jyoti Gondek elected as his successor, he told CTV News, “I’ll never have a job like this again and I'm a bit melancholy about it, but I'm not bittersweet about it…. Is it awful to abandon the city at this pivotal moment? Those are really the things that are in my head.”

After leaving office, Nenshi returned to his consultancy firm, the Ascend Group, and became a highly sought public speaker.

Beginning in February 2024, he participated in the 2024 edition of Canada Reads, championing the graphic novel Denison Avenue (2023) by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes.

Alberta NDP Leadership Campaign

On 11 March 2024 — after weeks of intense media speculation and five days before the deadline to do so — Naheed Nenshi announced that he would run to replace Rachel Notley as leader of the Alberta NDP. He joined five main candidates in the race: Alberta MLAs Kathleen Ganley, Rakhi Pancholi, Sarah Hoffman and Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse, and labour leader Gil McGowan. Nenshi stated his concern that the United Conservative Party government of Danielle Smith was “not only incompetent, but they're actually immoral and they're dangerous…. Ideally, we need to build an Alberta that is a beacon of hope for everyone around the world.”

Having repeatedly campaigned for mayor on a famously nonpartisan platform, Nenshi was seen as having his work cut out for him to win over the NDP faithful. As University of Calgary political science professor Lisa Young told CTV News, “If the party were to choose Nenshi as its leader, I think that its brand would certainly change. I think that certainly, he would need to find areas of compromise.” Nenshi also said that he would update the Alberta NDP’s constitution and improve its relationship with the federal NDP. The Alberta NDP leadership convention was scheduled to take place on 22 June.

At the Alberta NDP leadership convention on 22 June 2024, Nenshi secured a landslide victory with 86 per cent of the vote on the first ballot. He was credited with attracting new voters to the Alberta NDP, as the party’s membership increased by a factor of five to more than 85,000. The turnout for the vote was a remarkably high 85.6 per cent.

Because he did not have a seat in the legislature, Nenshi’s first order of business was to appoint house speaker Christina Gray as the leader of the Opposition. He also named Rakhi Pancholi as deputy leader. Nenshi then turned his attention to winning a seat in the legislature. It was rumoured that he might run for the seat of NDP MLA Shannon Phillips in Lethbridge-West, which was set to become vacant in July. Nenshi did not close the door on that option but expressed his desire to run for a seat in Calgary. Alberta’s next provincial election was scheduled to take place on or before 18 October 2027.

Honours

Naheed Nenshi received a Young Leader Award from the World Economic Forum in 2011, and the President’s Award from the Canadian Institute of Planners in 2012. In 2014, he was awarded the World Mayor Prize by the British-based City Mayors Foundation, a research and public affairs group. It called him "an urban visionary who doesn’t neglect the nitty-gritty of local government." Nenshi was the first Canadian mayor to win the award. He also received the Honorary Peace Patron Award from the Mosaic Institute in 2017.

See also Politics in Alberta.