Alberta Votes 2015: The Winners, the Losers, and the Orange Wave!
Visual approximation of the only vote
that mattered in the Knesset election.
It is just shy of eleven months since I intrigued Invicta with my first (and until now, last) election roundup. That one was for the provincial elections in Ontario, Canada's largest province, and while there have been elections since around the world, none have really held my attention enough to warrant a roundup post. The sole exception, perhaps, was the election in the Near East, and sadly, as much as I like their cute little ballot papers, summarizing the Zionist election the morning after is a fool's errand if ever there was one.
However, now things have changed. My own province, Alberta, held elections yesterday, and though it is not as big a player population-wise as Ontario, its elections were being watched even more closely across the country. At first, this was simply because we're a major oil and gas producer, and as such are seen as a driving force behind Canada's increasingly fossil-dependent economy. Yet as the campaign progressed, it became more and more obvious that strange things were afoot, and Alberta was not the ideological fortress it is often perceived as.
This early election came about as a result of Alberta's economic hardships as of late. With stagnant or plummeting resource prices, the oil and gas royalties Alberta's government had come to rely on for revenue in the past years have dropped off, sending the province's accountants into red ink-fueled hysterics. In late March, Progressive Conservative Premier Jim Prentice tabled a budget to fix Alberta's woes: a budget which raised personal income taxes across the board and reintroduced a healthcare levy—long-abandoned elsewhere in Canada and scrapped in Alberta in 2009—while leaving corporate taxes (which were already at par with personal income tax) and resource royalties untouched.
The budget provoked a furor from all sections of Alberta's population, who in opinion polls have consistently shown support for hikes to corporate taxes and royalties. Prentice, meanwhile, did his budget no favors when he opined that Albertans should 'look in the mirror' to see who is at fault for Alberta's budgetary troubles: perhaps he meant the fault lay with those who had voted his party into power for the past 44 years? Though the PCs held 70 of the Legislative Assembly's 87 seats, it was clear to all involved such a reactionary budget would need a new mandate, and the writ for the election was dropped 7 April—yes, though last June I mocked the length of American campaigns, now I can mock the length of Ontario's campaign! Six weeks‽ We can do it in four!
Vote breakdown by riding.
Inset from top: Edmonton, Red Deer, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat.
Now, in case you missed the figure in the last paragraph, let me reiterate: Alberta's Progressive Conservatives have governed the province for 44 years, having been elected uninterrupted in every election since 1971. That gives us a longer period of single-party rule than Laos, Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and a great many of the Warsaw Pact countries. For many years under the premiership of Ralph Klein, this culture of conservatism was so ingrained in the public psyche that it was simply not politic to say you would vote against him and his PC government, and doing so in many regions of the province was a sure way to find yourself on the wrong end of a public shaming. It's not unsurprising, therefore, that Alberta is known for its conservatism, both at home and abroad: which stands testament to how terribly the PCs have squandered their trust and goodwill in recent years, as their poll numbers dropped drastically throughout the campaign.
This is not to say Prentice's election was going to be a shoe-in. Alberta's 2012 election saw the rise of an opposition, the Wildrose Party, who for many weeks of that election's campaign looked set to win, only to have the rug pulled out from under them at the last moment when Albertans grew suspicious of their radical, right-wing ideology, which at the time placed their party somewhere to the conservative right of the American Tea Party movement. Though they underperformed in that election, and since had their legislative numbers slashed by defections to the ruling PC, they entered this election campaign as a viable alternative to the incumbent PCs, having softened their image somewhat since 2012 and with public sentiment towards Prentice soured by his proposed tax hikes. Wildrose leader Brian Jean positioned himself as 'the only leader who won't raise your taxes.'
In fact, that appeared to be his only position. During the 23 April Leader's Debate, Jean showed himself to be cold and impersonal, and seemed vaguely obsessed with taxes, twisting every question posed to him into a way to make it clear: he wouldn't raise taxes. Although Jean certainly came out poorly in the debate, Premier Prentice fared not much better, appearing a patronizing bully when, in an attempt to claim opponent Rachel Notley proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 20%, he said to her, 'I know that math is difficult.' When it became clear it was in fact Prentice's math that was wrong—and as his party was dogged by allegations a miscalculation during our last royalty review cost the province $13.5 billion in revenue—the Twitter hashtag #MathIsHard was spawned.
The rise—and fall—of titans:
the NDP proves itself the mouse that roared.
And from Prentice's and Jean's disastrous showings in that debate emerged a specter, a specter that has haunted Albertans for lo these many years: the specter of socialism. Notley proved herself both competent and popular in the debate, and her left-wing New Democratic Party, long-seen as the ideological antithesis of the once-unstoppable PCs, suddenly surged into poll lead. The idea that what Albertans wanted was a left-wing replacement for Prentice's government was a strange idea for pollsters and politicians alike. Though he was now taking fire from both the left and the right—and his party had dropped into third-place—Prentice was dismissive of the NDP's sudden surge. 'This is not an NDP province,' he quipped, in staunch defiance of the polls. While he could be forgiven for dismissing what was still seen as potentially little-more than a post-debate blip, his public pronouncements to the effect appeared arrogant to voters, and NDP numbers continued to rise.
Skepticism was rife, however. The Wildrose led the PCs by three points a week before the 2012 election, yet finished a dismal second while the PCs maintained a majority government. If Albertans could be frightened by the prospect of a government far to the right of the PCs, surely they may equally end up frightened by one far to the left. The NDP's poll numbers also seemed concentrated in Edmonton, and the nature of first-past-the-post meant that they'd need more widespread appeal in both the conservative stronghold of Calgary and in rural areas to have a shot at government, no matter how high their numbers shot in the capital. Five days out from the election, however, their numbers began to appear more competitive as they polled high in northern Alberta and even made Calgary look like a three-way race.
The NDP's rising numbers appeared to cause a snowball effect amongst the electorate, and only continued to climb. Among the province's political elite, however, this was not good news. The conservative news media rushed to endorse the incumbent PCs, with the CEO of Postmedia, who owns all four of the province's major newspapers, ordering his editors to make the endorsement against their will. Wildrose leader Brian Jean warned Albertans not to 'accidentally' elect the NDP to punish Prentice. Just as when Prentice opened his mouth, however, this only seemed to bolster the NDP further—Albertans, it turns out, don't like being told what to do or who to vote for. And in a final push to boost the left's chance at government, minor party candidates dropped out of several key ridings and endorsed Notley's New Democrats, cementing their lead in Edmonton, and turning Calgary from a battleground into a certain NDP victory.
Come election day, political analyst Éric Grenier—who has been called Canada's Nate Silver—called the vote for the party who a month earlier was widely expected to finish a distant third- or even fourth-place: the New Democratic Party would form a majority government, and do it by a landslide.
The New Democrats, as expected, were swept into power on an orange wave which saw them win 53 of the Legislative Assembly's 87 seats, with 41% of the popular vote—an amazing 31pp swing from their 2012 showing, and a win in every urban seat outside of Calgary. The right-wing Wildrose Party won 21 seats, positioning them as the official opposition, while the 44-year Progressive Conservative dynasty ended in a third-place showing, dropping 59 seats from before the election to a dismal 11 MLAs. Jim Prentice resigned as both party leader and MLA in spite of his victory, which will lead to a by-election in his seat of Calgary–Foothills. The minor Alberta Party also won a seat: Calgary–Elbow, where its leader Greg Clark narrowly passed the PC incumbent, as did the Liberal Party, whose interim leader, Dr David Swann, retained his seat of Calgary–Mountain View.
Although voter turnout has not been confirmed, it is estimated from advanced polls to be approximately 70%, a substantial increase from the 2012 election and part of a continued rise since 2008's record low of 40.6%.
The election's results obviously signal a big change for Alberta. Since its formation as a province in 1905, parties have been elected continuously for long stretches of time, and once replaced have never returned to govern. The Liberal governments which ruled Alberta until 1921 gave way to the United Farmers of Alberta, who led until the shocking Social Credit victory in 1935—and the SoCreds in turn governed Alberta until their upset by the PCs in 1971. Does the victory of the New Democrats position them as Alberta's new natural party of government? Or will this experiment with socialism be a fleeting footnote before the NDP themselves are replaced? And perhaps the bigger question: if they are to be replaced, by whom? Will the PCs manage to break form with their predecessors and return to govern Alberta once more? Only time will tell.
And while Alberta's election results are momentous for the province, there remains the question of what they'll mean to Canada's federal stage. Federal elections are expected to take place this October, and while the incumbent Conservative Party has a tenuous lead over the second-place Liberals, the prospect of the NDP once again rising to prominence federally as they did in 2011 is not something to be ignored. The Conservatives won all but one seat in Alberta in that election—can the wave which propelled Notley's provincial New Democrats to power yesterday carry through to help their federal counterpart five months from now?
All these questions are yet to be answered. These are exciting, yet harrowing, times for Canadian politics.