The Alberta election: some random thoughts

1    How about that election, eh?
It was certainly one for the record books, like the Rae win in Ontario in 1990, but much more decisive: all the polls said NDP majority, Conservatives running as far back as 3rd, but almost nobody believed something that politically improbable could happen.
Until it did.
Now, of course, the result appears kind of obvious: this is the province that elected mayors Naheed Nenshi and Don Iveson, the one that elected the most “progressive” of Progressive Conservatives, Alison Redford, when the polls all said that scary Wildrose was sure to win the 2012 election.
So it turns out all that really happened was that Jim Prentice appeared to be both kind of uncharismatic and in the pocket of the oil industry. And Rachel Notley, who almost nobody knew before the campaign, appeared, by contrast, to be kind of charismatic, straight-talking, and progressive, but in a business-friendly way. Really, not scary-NDP at all.

Isn't it delightfully satisfying when political hubris is punished so completely?


2    Many pundits have identified Prentice's “look in the mirror” remark, assigning responsibility for Alberta's current economy to Alberta voters, as deeply offensive, and one of the reasons he and his party were crushed. Although it's hard for an outsider like me to see how he's wrong, he apparently didn't help himself when he added: “We all want to blame somebody for the circumstances that we are in. But the bottom line is we’ve had the highest cost and the best public services in the country, and we haven’t built, basically, a revenue model that sustains them.”
Prentice could hardly say, “We've been pandering to those of you who want first-class services but wanted to pretend they were free for the last 43 years”, but that's what the Alberta economy and political system look like to those of us in the neighbouring provinces.
I'm not convinced Notley's NDP will have an answer. In Canada we're all deeply committed to magical thinking where taxes are concerned. We don't want to pay them, but we insist on the services. The NDP is not better than other parties in this regard: we still believe that taxing the rich and corporations is the solution, when that is, at best, only a small part of it.
Previous Alberta governments could have done like Norway, but voters chose instead not to pay sales tax.
I doubt if Notley's NDP will take that on.


3    It is an article of faith in NDP circles that assembling a database of sympathetic electors and then organizing them to get to the polls is the path to success, and undoubtedly that groundwork is part of it. But in the Alberta election that territory belonged to the PC's, who also happened to have most of the money.
We can probably conclude from this, and the last federal election in Quebec, that sometimes the leader and the conventional wisdom of the day is all that really matters.
Further evidence: the last provincial election in BC, when Christy Clark, a charismatic, photogenic lightweight, beat  Adrian Dix, a serious, thoughtful pro, on style points and with a whisper campaign that impugned his morality. The fact that she promised to deliver the wonders of the Ali Baba cave didn't hurt, but I doubt if it tipped the balance.
We could easily have lost North Island, and would have, in spite of far superior organization and enough money, had it not been for Claire's popularity on the islands, where she, as the MLA, had been regularly and where the Liberal candidate hadn't bothered to visit.


4    What kind of premier will Rachel Notley be?
Above all, I suspect, she will be pragmatic. You don't overcome 43 years of PC government by challenging the electorate's fundamental assumptions, at least, not all in one go.
She'll have her work cut out just to deal with the well-funded campaign to undermine her government's legitimacy that is undoubtedly in the offing, and she should expect the federal Conservatives, the ones that offered their congratulations today, to do everything they can to sabotage her success.
I imagine she'll be guided by the examples of Roy Romanow, Alan Blakeney, Gary Doer and Greg Selinger, rather than those of Dave Barrett and Mike Harcourt...
She certainly won't be a socialist premier.

And finally, can we NDPers please abandon the canard that the NDP has to revert to it's “socialist roots” in order to win? That's so clearly not the case!