Alberta 2023 Reset: Head Vs. Heart

The Battle For Alberta

If you ask me right now who is favoured to win the next Alberta election, I have no answer.

It’s not that I have no opinions on the topic – far from it, I have thousands of opinions on the topic – but I have no idea what is going to matter when the ballots are cast. I know a few things, and they all end up living in this contradictory space in my head.

The first thing I know is that betting against the right in Alberta is dumb, pure and simply. It is a right wing province and a right wing populace, and regardless of whether you like or hate that fact, it’s true. We’re also at a point where people not just in Canada but internationally as well are more polarized now than ever before, which should (in theory) reduce the numbers of 2021 CPC-2023 NDP voters out there. But, the other thing I’m thinking about is that Danielle Smith is running the most chaotic and incompetent government in Canada, which isn’t a good title to hold months before an election.

I don’t pretend to like Danielle Smith, and I think it’s clear from what I wrote about the Sovereignty Act that I view her with a lot of contempt. But I also know that I am substantially to the left of the average Albertan, and that fact is crucial to not making a mistake and assuming there is a wider band of left wing opinion out there just because the view of Alberta that is apparent on Twitter is fairly left wing.

The problem is, I slightly lied when I said I have no answer to who is favoured – I have two answers, I just don’t know which one is correct. If you ask my head who’s gonna win next year’s election, it’s Rachel Notley and the NDP. But in my gut? Smith wins again.

And I have no idea which one is right.

…

The path to Rachel Notley winning is very plausible.

Plausible doesn’t mean likely, and nothing in this column should be construed to be a prediction, but the path to the NDP winning runs through places and people that make a lot of sense. In the US last month, the Democrats won the Senate and held their losses in the House through holding their own with a specific type of voter – educated social liberals with a lot of money. The upper class social liberal, who values fiscal prudence, stability, and is perfectly fine with the social liberalism of the last two decades, are increasingly voting for the left.

In Calgary, there are a ton of them – they mostly work in private sector gigs, they make a ton of money in law or finance or accounting, although plenty of doctors also fit this description – and they are all deeply uncomfortable with the way that many conservatives talk about gay rights. They are the voters Danielle Smith’s Wildrose lost in 2012 during that campaign, as the “Lake of Fire” controversy saw voters who agreed with Wildrose’s fiscal conservatism and the idea that the PCs were corrupt thought that Wildrose was too extreme on social issues, and voted PC accordingly.

These are the voters who re-elected Jim Prentice in his Calgary seat in 2015 and delivered the PCs a higher vote share than Wildrose, even as Wildrose won in seats. They mostly voted UCP in 2019 on the idea that Notley had failed to recover a bad economy, but now, at a time when the UCP are as crazy as ever, they’re reconsidering the legacy of Notley and the NDP.

Are there enough of them to put the NDP into office? Yes – there are polls showing the NDP winning Calgary by as much as 11%, a margin just big enough to see them into office. Does that mean they will? No, because there will be many voters who say they’re voting Notley now and who won’t on the day, and there are some for whom their breaking point with Smith may come in the new year, but not yet. The reason it’s so uncertain is not because the NDP doesn’t have a path, but because they have one that makes a lot of sense in theory, but we have no idea if, when push comes to shove, they can execute.

The geography of Alberta means that the UCP locks down nearly everything they need to win in the “rest” of Alberta, the NDP locks down most, if not all, of Edmonton and their inner ring suburbs, and then the swing is Calgary. The reason Alberta elections are so rarely close is that the conservatives, in whatever form, usually sweep Calgary, which they can’t exactly take for granted anymore.

The NDP’s fundamental problem is that there are a lot of people theoretically willing to support the NDP, but they believe that at their core they are insufficiently trustworthy to hold office. It’s a refrain you get a lot from centrists with fiscally conservative views – “I like [insert left wing leader], but I don’t trust him.” We saw it with Layton, we saw it with Notley, we even saw it with Trudeau in 2015, although the country got there in the end on Justin mostly because Harper’s Conservatives were so obviously out of ideas.

Here, the problem facing the variegated right isn’t a lack of ideas, but too many ideas that are antithetical to the part of the UCP’s coalition that lives, bluntly, in the seats that matter. The reason a Travis Toews leadership would have been more electorally successful is simple – it doesn’t really matter if the Wildrose Independence Party gets 2% or 12%, because those votes will be concentrated amongst the voters and in the places where the only question is whether the UCP wins by 20% or 40%. Now, with a leader who keeps the margins up in the places where First Past The Post makes them irrelevant, the NDP have an opening.

That opening relies on the NDP convincing a large number of people who didn’t vote for Notley in 2015 or 2019 that actually they can be trusted again. The voters who matter are the 2015 PCAA, 2019 UCP voters who don’t love the fact they’re in a party with people like that, in whatever way the (mostly urban) former PCers mean when they say that.

Could the UCP’s bad marriage last? Of course it could – it’s Alberta, and they have Conservative in the name. That really could be enough to deliver another term of government after all of this. But it’s not a guarantee, which is why any of this matters. Do I know what’s going to happen, whenever the election is? No, but I know the incumbent Premier will have a mixed economy of budget surpluses and persistent inflation, and have a problem that she increasingly comes off like an unhinged nutter to many in her province.

Live through Danielle Smith’s tenure, and you see a reliable pattern of claim and correction, over exaggeration and then apology. Be it comparing the treatment of the unvaxxed to how Canada treated the Indigenous to claiming her anti-democratic Sovereignty Act didn’t mean to give her the sweeping powers the original version did, she is leading an incompetent and objectively in over its head government.

It also might not matter, because she in the province where the biggest thing that matters is out of her control. She will go into the next election promising to spend like a sailor, presumably, because of the state of her surplus, all from an oil price she can’t control. The reason Calgarians who, in any other city in any other province, would already be voting for the left aren’t is oil, and the facts that the oil boom has kept “Professional” Calgary in business the last decade, decade and a half. If you work in law, accounting, or finance, the oil companies have paid your bills. If you’re a doctor or a nurse, the oil industry build the hospital wing and paid for the equipment you’re using. And that’s why people don’t trust the left.

If Smith governs quietly for the next 5 months, she will win the election. If she is her usual brand of chaotic bullshit that keeps bringing back COVID restrictions and culture war fights that separate her rural base from the city voters she needs, the NDP will keep their chance.

At the end of the day, I don’t think Danielle Smith has the discipline to do that, which is why my head says the NDP wins. But I also can’t get over the gut feeling that the right will win because it’s Alberta.

What a time to be alive.