The breadcrumbs were there early. Before anyone knew he was about to take over the Alberta NDP’s campaign, Michael Burton — a Liberal operative who served as National Field Director for Mark Carney’s Liberal leadership campaign — was already publicly celebrating Naheed Nenshi’s flu-shot photo-op on LinkedIn.

At the time it looked like routine, cross-partisan progressive cheerleading. In hindsight, it was the soft launch of a new job.

Because now it’s official: Nenshi has imported a top Carney lieutenant to run his provincial campaign.

Burton isn’t just any Ottawa staffer. His CV is a greatest-hits reel of the failures of the never-ending federal Liberal era: chief of staff across the very ministries that spent the last decade stumbling from scandal to failure — Immigration, Indigenous Affairs, Natural Resources, Infrastructure.

When the federal government was dropping the ball on these key files, Burton was in the room passing it to them, over and over again.

And now he’s running Nenshi’s war room in Alberta into the 2027 election against UCP Premier Danielle Smith, who leads the NDP by 5% in the latest Leger polling from October.

For years, the Alberta NDP insisted they weren’t the provincial arm of the Liberal Party, but a distinct alternative on the Left. Nenshi’s latest hire blows that fiction to pieces.

Bringing in Carney’s national field director — a lifelong Liberal operative cut directly from the inner circle — makes the relationship undeniable. The NDP are just the socialist caucus of the Carney cult, one that is wildly unpopular in Alberta, polling at 25%.

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