Canada: Alberta Unreformed

So it goes without saying that there's certainly a good reason why, in discussing the Conservative Party of Canada, they call Alberta 'Fortress Alberta'. It's tough to imagine a place so fond of a single political party. In the six elections they've contended under the names Reform, Canadian Alliance or the Conservatives, they've never taken fewer than 22 seats in a province that has a total of either 26 or 28 seats (depending on the year). In fact, there is a seventh: the Reform party comtended the 1988 election, but as a relatively minor party that took no seats. I don't include the 1988 election, because it ruins the narrative: one of the PC imploding spectacularly and two parties being born as a result, one of which is called Reform. Canadian electoral history is divided into pre-1993 and post-1993. So 1988 is 'old-school'. Irrelevant.

Anyway, I've been noticing with surprise that the Liberals seem to be doing rather well in Alberta - 'well' doesn't mean much, of course, as it's inconceivable that they could actually threaten the CPC. But the fact is that they are currently presenting themselves as the only real alternative in Alberta to Harper's party. I was a bit surprised to see this; I know the NDP have tended to do horribly in Alberta, but at least they're a Western party with at least a historical taste for a bit of populism. The Liberals are supposed to be everything Albertans hate about Ottawa, aren't they? Elitist, centralist, resource-stealing, Ontario and Québec controlling the country. Right?

Well, I decided to look at those six elections with the following premise: what would happen if the Reform / CA / CPC party just disappeared? If this party just didn't exist, where would the Albertan vote go?

Now, obviously my techniques here are hardly scientific. What I did was look at each seat that this party won and considered which party came in second. So if, say, the Reform Party took 65% and the Liberals took 15% (with the remaining 20% going to the NDP, the PCs and various other parties and candidates), I say that in the non-Reform world, this seat goes to the Liberals. Now, that's not entirely realistic. The Reform/CA/CPC gets in some ridings enormously high margins of victory, and with such a huge voter base left to redistribute, the numbers are really quite up in the air: and one imagines a fair amount would go to the PCs, despite the animosity those two parties had for each other in the early days.

Still, the results are intriguing. Here they are:

• In 1993, Reform took 22 of Alberta's 26 seats, and the Liberals took the other 4. In a non-Reform Alberta, the Liberals would dominate, taking 19 while the remaining 7 would go to the PCs.
• In 1997, Reform increased their seat count in Alberta, getting 24 and leaving only two to the Liberals. but a non-Reform Alberta would look exactly the same as it did in 1993: 19 Liberal seats, 7 PC seats.
• And how weird is this: in 2000, the renamed Canadian Alliance got 23 seats, while the Liberals took 2 and the PCs took 1. But without the CA? Well, we're starting to see a trand here, but 19 Liberal seats and 7 PC seats. Any hope for long-term trends dies here though, along with the PC party.
• In 2004, the newly-minted Conservative Party of Canada took 26 seats to the Liberals' 2 (a seat redistribution gave Alberta an added two seats). Amazingly, if there were no CPC, all 28 seats would have gone Liberal. So the Liberals being the main opposition to the Conservatives is evidently nothing new.
• In 2006, the Conservatives made a clean sweep of Alberta: all 28 seats. A non-CPC landscape (so this, the second-place finishers across the province) are a bit more interesting, though: the Liberals would have 18 seats, the NDP 8, the Greens 1 and one seat would go to an independent.
• The most recent election a near sweep for the Conservatives: 27 seats and just one for the NDP. There's a sea change below the water level, though. An Alberta sans Harper would give 16 seats to the NDP, 8 to the Liberals, 3 to the Greens and 1 to an independent. Intriguing stuff.

If we do have an election this year, Alberta's not going to be the most interesting story. It'll still be CPC all the way, with perhaps a few seats here or there (likely in Edmonton) being competitive. But if current trends hold, the NDP won't be what they were in 2008, when they made significant inroads as the main alternative to the Conservatives in Alberta. Odd that no-one even noticed that.

Canada: When to Leave

Beleaguered Alberta premier Ed Stelmach is stepping down.

It's interesting news: we've had three premiers retire or resign in the past few months. Danny Williams of Newfoundland retired with levels of support the likes of which we rarely see in Canada . The question there is how much the PC's sky-high levels of support depend on the personage of Williams himself - in other words, how much of those astronomic poll numbers are now available for the Liberals and (snort) the NDP to cherry-pick.

Gordon Campbell and Ed Stelmach wish that was their parties' main concern at the moment. You get the sense that Campbell understood that the BC Liberals were in a real free-fall, and that they had yet to bottom out. You sense that Campbell 'took one for the team', stepping down for the good of the party in order to take the blame personally for BC's current problems and let the party carry on without him. Amazingly, due also to similar stories in the NDP opposition, it may actually have worked. Time will tell, but on the day of Campbell's resignation he was looing at polls so terrible that an NDP victory at the next election seems like a done deal.

Alberta's somewhere in the middle, and this is where it intrigues so much. Its history is one of single-party dominance, where one party dominates politics for a generation and then in a single election is crushed into insignificance by another party, who holds the reins for a generation. Since 1935, these have been parties on the right: Social Credit until 1967, when they were challenged by the reemergent Progressive Conservatives, who have held the reins ever since.

By March of 2010, Stelmach's PCs were in a freefall, and the Wildrose Alliance had overtaken them in the polls. Projections based on the polls at the time showed that the WRA would have decimated the PCs, overtaking them as the party of government and as the main party of the right. And if we can understand anything from Alberta's history, that change might have been permanent.

Were Stelmach Cambell, that is the point at which he would have resigned. But he's not, and interestingly in the past 10 months or so, polls suggest the PCs have come around: surpassing the WRA or at least drawing even with them. "The inevitable" suddenly seemed a good deal less so.

I'm genuinely curious and unable to guess what this means for the 'battle for the right' in Alberta. The captain abandoning a sinking ship might be the single event that pushes Danielle Smith's Wildrose Alliance to electoral success (for thirty-some years, perhaps). Or does Stelmach see in Campbell's departure an example to imitate? Will Albertains forgive the party now that Stelmach is gone? One thing I can say for sure is that it's a huge gamble, one that I never saw coming.

Another thing I can say for sure is that while Dalton McGuinty is probably nonchalantly pretending not to care, Jean Charest is almost certainly in the curious position of wonder if there is anything - anything at all - that Québec can learn from Alberta.