EDMONTON—Naomi Rankin stands outside a grocery store in Old Strathcona with a stack of papers asking shoppers if they live in the area.

If they say yes, she will launch into an introduction that catches many off guard: She represents the provincial Communist Party, and would like to talk to them about the Alberta election.

“There’s a lot of different reactions. A large number of people, they’re a little bit surprised, but they’re pleased,” Rankin says.

On this Thursday afternoon outing, Rankin is equipped with a newspaper published by the Communist Party of Canada, a 13-point platform stapled together on three sheets of paper, and a black-and-white leaflet targeted at oil and gas workers proposing a “full sustainable economy with full employment.”

Nobody seems interested.

Shoppers politely wave Rankin off without engaging, and after about 15 minutes, we move to a nearby coffee shop, where she clarifies she does not expect to win her seat.

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As the longest-serving political leader in Alberta, Rankin is used to campaigning from the fringes at election time.

The 66-year-old retired computer programmer has led the Communist Party of Alberta since 1992, taking the reins after the collapse of the Soviet Union plunged the party into an existential crisis. She has run in every provincial and federal election since, despite often only garnering votes in the double-digits.

The only Alberta leader who comes close to matching her longevity is former premier Ernest Manning, who led the Social Credit Party of Alberta for 25 years from 1943 to 1968.

Rankin is playing the long game, striving for “qualitative change” by bringing the party’s message to progressive groups at protests and other events, and encouraging like-minded people to unite under the Communist banner.

She cites a recent gay-straight alliance rally, organized to protest a United Conservative Party platform point that would scrap Bill 24 and let teachers “out” kids to their parents, as one of many examples of Albertans mobilizing for inclusive social change.

“I don’t see the situation that people are static, or passive, or asleep, at all,” Rankin says, speaking thoughtfully and with a kind demeanour. “I see just the opposite.”

The Communist Party of Canada, which is closely integrated with its provincial counterparts, was formed secretly in 1921 by labour organizers and anti-war activists, and is now the country’s second-oldest active party behind the Liberals.

The party had members elected to the Ontario and Manitoba legislatures in the 1940s and 1950s, but has never held a seat in Alberta. Communists made their strongest Alberta election showing in 1935, running nine candidates and winning close to 6,000 votes, or just under 2 per cent of the popular vote.

Since the 1970s, the party has mustered less than 0.1 per cent each election.

But other fringe parties owe their existence, at least in part, to Canada’s Communists. In 1993, Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government raised candidate deposit costs and ruled that parties would be automatically deregistered and stripped of their net assets if they ran fewer than 50 candidates in a general election, taking the Communist Party out of the game. Then-party leader Miguel Figueroa, from Montreal, took the government to court on behalf of the Communist Party in a battle he won 10 years later in the Supreme Court.

In the decade before it was resolved, Rankin led a party that was, in her words, “semi-illegal.”

Rankin joined the party in 1981 after learning Marxist ideals at the dinner table from her parents, who were also members. Her belief that capitalism fosters inequality and suffering as the rich get richer off the backs of workers, and her desire for a united, militant working class to smash that paradigm, have never wavered.

Rankin says the party is the strongest it has ever been during her nearly four-decade tenure, though she won’t disclose its membership numbers — “We’re not going to tell our enemies how many of us there are.”

Rankin is running in Edmonton-Strathcona against 10 challengers, including NDP Leader Rachel Notley.

She is joined by candidate Alex Boykowich in Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood, Andrew Janewski in Edmonton-Mill Woods, and Jonathan Troutman in Calgary-East, for a total of four Communist candidates running in the April 16 provincial election, which is two more than the party had in 2015.

Janewski, who is 20 years old, left the NDP to join the Communist Party.

He says his friends and family were initially “confused and dumbfounded” when he started calling himself a Communist, but he feels Rankin’s party is the only one with adequate strategies to fight poverty and climate change.

Communism is a dirty word to many Albertans. This past week, conservative pundits have called NDP Calgary-Varsity candidate Anne McGrath unfit for office because she ran for the Communist Party of Canada in 1984.

When Janewski goes door-knocking, he says most people don’t want to hear the party’s message — one campaign worker was told to “Go back to Russia” as a door was slammed in their face — but about 20 per cent of voters find common ground.

He is not running to win, but to make people understand that communism “is not something to be feared.”

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“Our goal is to build the movement and create more Communists, basically,” Janewski says.

As a Young Communist League leader, Janewski works to build bridges with the Edmonton Coalition Against War and Racism and various anarchist and anti-fascist organizations. He plans to expand that reach to organized labour groups.

Janewski hopes to see the Communist Party win 800 votes this year, which would quadruple its 2015 showing.

He believes the party could realistically govern Alberta as soon as 15 years from now.

“People are going to become radicalized when the way that they are living their lives is being threatened by climate change, and so they’ll start listening to more radical alternatives when that happens,” he says.

The election comes at a time when resource-rich Alberta is in an economic crisis. Oil prices are floundering and the province has limited ways to export it to international markets (like China), which has many voters and opposition parties like the UCP raging about the lack of a new pipeline.

The Communist Party leaflets specifically target oil and gas workers, sympathizing with concerns over losing their jobs and exclaiming that they don’t have to “wear a yellow vest” and rail against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“The answer to unemployment is ... full employment!” the leaflet reads. “It can be done! There is life after pipelines!”

The party promises to put oil sector workers to use building renewable energy and transportation systems, retrofitting buildings, and cleaning up environmental degradation like abandoned oilwells and tailings ponds left behind by oil companies.

“It drives me crazy. The NDP and the UCP both walked into this in a petty squabble about which of them would be best at building a pipeline. Well, the whole pipeline is just a white elephant. It’s not unreasonable to expect that by the time it’s built, or within a few years of it being built, that we just simply can’t sell that junk (fossil fuels) anymore,” Rankin says.

“We should be starting today building things in our economy that can last, that can provide ongoing employment, not just a little blip of employment during a construction period.”

The word “pipeline” was uttered 52 times during Thursday’s televised leaders’ debate between members of Alberta’s four major parties.

Rankin is aware an anti-pipeline message is a hard sell in a province built on black gold, but argues the mainstream parties live in a “fantasy world” where oil and gas can be sold in unlimited quantities into the future.

Meanwhile, as oil and gas companies struggle to make enough money to keep going amid falling oil prices, they continue to be propped up by government subsidies, which Rankin says is a waste of money on a non-renewable energy source.

The Communist Party’s 2019 platform also includes free post-secondary education, rent controls and more affordable social housing, expanded public health care and child care, a minimum-wage increase and a 32-hour work week.

The party would also double the corporate tax rate, and eliminate taxes entirely on incomes under $35,000 a year.

Rankin laments the anger and intense partisanship being stoked this election cycle, particularly the way some have turned that anger against immigrants and the LGBTQ community rather than the mostly foreign-owned corporations controlling our resources.

She feels it’s only a matter of time before Albertans reach their boiling point and explore more radical alternatives to the status quo.

“I think this is a symptom of end-stage capitalism. The whole capitalist system just doesn’t have many options for people. Everyone’s feeling that their possibilities are narrowing. They’re insecure,” Rankin says.

“Once people break out of the straitjacket of thinking that capitalism is eternal and capitalism is the only possible system, suddenly whole vistas of possibilities open up. They don’t have to feel that fear. They don’t have to feel that life is just getting smaller and meaner.”

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