Alberta Premier Jim Prentice of the Progressive Conservative Party
It wasn't supposed to be this way. It was supposed to be easy. Five months ago, Alberta's long-governing Progressive Conservative Party was at the peak of its power. After dispatching an aggressive challenge by the far-right Wildrose Party in 2012 by a 44-34 margin, the PCs held a dominant 61 seats in the province's 87-member legislative assembly, the equivalent of a state legislature. While their leader, Alison Redford, had grown extremely unpopular thanks to far-reaching allegations of arrogance and
abuses of power, the party itself seemed to put Redford's troubles behind it when it replaced her last year with Jim Prentice, a banking executive and former cabinet member in the federal government.
(There's truly nothing "progressive," by the way, about the "Progressive Conservatives," at least by Canadian standards. They're a right-wing party aligned with the Conservative Party that currently holds sway under Prime Minister Stephen Harper at the federal level and are better known as the Tories, just like their counterparts in the UK.)
Prentice soon solidified his grip on the legislature. After leading his party to a sweep of four critical by-elections (that's Canadian for "special elections") last October, he negotiated a stunning mass defection of 11 members of the 16-member Wildrose caucus to the PC ranks, including Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, shortly before Christmas.
With the Wildrose in disarray and the right wing seemingly consolidated once again under the PC tent, many Alberta election observers were expecting Prentice to call a snap election (Canadian political leaders have wide discretion when it comes to the timing of elections) and score a massive majority in the process. But a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation: The expected Tory cakewalk has turned into a legitimate three-way race, with a resurrected Wildrose and an unexpected threat from the left in Alberta's surging New Democratic Party squeezing the PCs from both sides.
How did we get to this point, you ask? Head below the fold for the complete backstory on this stunning turn of events.
It all began with the collapse of oil prices in late 2014, which resulted in a correspondingly large deficit forecast for the province's 2015 fiscal year. (Much like, say, Texas, Alberta is heavily dependent on the energy industry, thanks to the extraction of crude oil from the province's plentiful tar sands.) A long series of PC governments had relied on royalties exacted from the oil sector, rather than taxation, to keep the budget balanced, but those royalties were finally drying up.
Prentice therefore decided that transformative budgetary change would finally be necessary in Alberta. He begun crisscrossing the province, speaking of the need for both deep spending cuts and tax increases. His rhetoric became increasingly grim by the day, and culminated in a verbal gaffe in early March that became the first major turning point in popular opinion against the Tory machine:
Premier Jim Prentice is facing a social media backlash after telling Albertans to "look in the mirror" to find who is responsible for the province's current financial woes.
Speaking on CBC's Alberta@Noon Wednesday, Premier Jim Prentice told host Donna McElligott that "in terms of who is responsible, we need only look in the mirror. Basically, all of us have had the best of everything and have not had to pay for what it costs."
Prentice cried foul, claiming his words were taken out of context, but the damage had clearly been done. As Edmonton Journal columnist
Graham Thomson wrote in the immediate aftermath: "Politicians can never win when they blame voters. [...] Voters get to pass judgment on politicians at election time, not the other way around."
Prentice's situation only grew more precarious after he finally released his long-anticipated budget in March. Not only did it include cuts to health care and education, it also included 59 tax hikes and increased user fees, including a re-institution of an unpopular "health care levy." It was a "bad news" budget that Prentice presented as bitter, but necessary, medicine for Albertans to swallow.
Yet it was also a budget that had something for everyone—something for everyone to hate, that is. By putting forth a tax-and-cut budget, Prentice breathed new life into his opponents on the right and the left. At this point, the warning signs for the Tories had grown obvious, but Prentice nevertheless persisted in calling for a snap election on May 5, perhaps because the ossified PCs, in power for 44 consecutive years, had been so used to leading that they couldn't comprehend losing.
The leaderless Wildrose rallied behind former federal Conservative MP Brian Jean—himself a former colleague of Prentice in the Harper government—to carry their banner into the next election. By way of background, the Wildrose movement was created in large part by anger from Calgary's corporate boardrooms over former PC Premier Ed Stelmach's modest increases of oil royalty rates in 2007, and sustained largely by rural conservative populists ever since. Buoyed by the opportunity to campaign against the conservative apostasy of raising taxes during an economic downturn, the Wildrose re-emerged as a legitimate threat to the PCs in much of rural Alberta as well as in Calgary, the largest city in the province and a longtime Tory stronghold.
The Wildrose campaign is both anti-tax-increase and anti-deficit, themes that may call to mind "tea party" for American readers but will resonate with many conservative-minded Albertans. Jean, a largely unknown figure outside of his own district in the province's far north, is bravely campaigning as the face of the Wildrose despite the death of his son to leukemia just days before he was elected as leader of his party.
Meanwhile, Alberta's New Democratic Party is enjoying what looks like a stunning resurgence under the leadership of Rachel Notley, a member of the legislature from Edmonton. Notley, a charismatic and able communicator, has seen her party's support surge dramatically in the election's early public polling, especially in her home town of Edmonton, where one recent poll has put the NDP up by a gaping 51-14 margin on the PCs. The party's fundraising, too, has spiked, and the NDP has begun the biggest TV ad campaign in its history. For a party that has never held more than four seats at a time since 1997, the sudden turnaround is nothing short of breathtaking.
Two major factors are fuelling the NDP's surge. First, many observers credited Alison Redford's 2012 election win over the Wildrose to mass strategic voting by Alberta Liberal Party voters, whose share of the vote plummeted in that contest to 10 percent from 26 percent in 2008. But after her victory, instead of rewarding the voter coalition that saved her party, Redford instead made a series of assaults against her supporters, including cuts to university and college funding, attacks on public sector labor pensions, and support for anti-union legislation that sparked a backlash from organized labor.
In short, the PCs destroyed their credibility with soft-left voters, and Prentice's austerity budget only alienated this bloc further. By refusing to increase corporate taxes while increasing taxes on virtually everyone—and everything—else, Prentice appears to have made a major tactical mistake that has fuelled a populist backlash against him, with the NDP as the major beneficiary.
The second factor lies in the slow death of the Alberta Liberal Party. Once a viable centrist alternative to the PCs in the late '80s and the early '90s, their base has been dispirited and demoralized by a series of electoral defeats and weak leadership. Under interim leader David Swann, their challenge in this election is merely to survive as a political entity in the face of the surging NDP. The party suffered a major blow to their credibility by only fielding candidates in 56 of 87 districts, and it only has two incumbents running for re-election.
With polls showing the Liberal vote collapsing into low single digits, this election may actually spell the demise of the ALP. But, perversely, that's actually good news for the province's long-beleaguered left, since it means that the left-leaning vote is less apt to get split and allow the Tories or Wildrose to win plurality victories. In fact, the opposite may hold true: With the NDP emerging as the only viable party on the left, it could be the PCs and Wildrose who split the right-wing vote, allowing the New Democrats, who no longer have to worry about the Liberals siphoning off votes, to maximize their gains.
Still, all three parties—the PCs, the NDP, and the Wildrose—remain in the mix, leading political analysts to openly muse whether Alberta's elections, for the first time in history, might fail to give a single party an outright majority. That means we are truly navigating through uncharted waters. Prentice, feeling the heat, has already reversed himself on one particularly unpopular tax revision: his decision to slash the province's tax credit for charitable donations. His dramatic reversal is a sure sign that his campaign team is looking in the mirror and seeing their own mortality staring back at them.
Stay tuned to Daily Kos Elections for a final election preview and liveblog of the results on Tuesday, May 5.
