After weeks of speculation, Naheed Nenshi has today officially entered the race to be the next Alberta NDP leader, even as he insists this isn’t the road he thought he would take just a few months ago. As Calgary’s high-profile mayor for 11 years, he avoided any entanglement with party politics.

But he says he cannot abide by a Danielle Smith government that’s “a dangerous mix of incompetent and immoral.”

If Mr. Nenshi manages to clinch the leadership of the province’s main opposition party and go head-to-head with Ms. Smith in an election scheduled for 2027, it will make for one of the country’s most riveting clashes of political ideologies and personas, ever.

Three decades ago, Ms. Smith and Mr. Nenshi were on friendly terms as part of a high-octane group of political nerds who attended the University of Calgary together. Since then, both have been counted out by their critics, a couple of times, but have managed to come from behind to win.

Now they will be the fiercest of rivals, competing with an estranged-sibling-like intuition of how to push each other’s buttons.

“That is not the woman I knew 30 years........

© The Globe and Mail