Alberta Election Reset: Premier Notley Or Premier Smith?

Everything You Need To Know

As someone whose sense of humour broke sometime during Ed Stelmach’s tenure as Premier of Alberta, I just have to laugh. The most chaotic period of governance in Alberta’s recent history has come to a close with the dissolution of the Legislature and the beginning of the 2023 election campaign, and it will be replaced by an election that is likely to be one of the boringest to cover in recent memory, not just in Alberta but across the globe.

It’s overly boring and makes for bad content that the battle in this election comes down to Calgary, but it comes down to Calgary and there’s really nothing that can be done about it. The NDP won 19 of the 20 seats in Edmonton at the last election, while the UCP won 39 of the 41 seats out of the cities of Edmonton and Calgary. Of those combined 61 seats, 7 are legitimate targets and another 3 are stretch goals for the NDP. Even under the most optimistic of assumptions – which I plainly do not believe! – the NDP still needs 8 gains in Calgary.

Are they getting 10 seats? No, and 4 is likelier than 7, even. The NDP will win Banff, and they will win Lethbridge East. Sherwood Park and Edmonton South West should flip, so that’s 4. Fort Sask-Vegreville, Morinville-St. Albert, and Strathcona-Sherwood Park are lifts that seem unlikely at this point, and then there’s another tier of genuinely more exurban and regional seats, like Leduc Beaumont, Lesser Slave Lake, and Spruce Grove Stony Plain. On current polls those three look competitive, but that’s because the UCP is doing implausibly badly outside of the urban centres, and plainly those polls should not be believed. The UCP beating their polls in regional Alberta should be expected, given that’s what happened in 2019, the right as a whole beat their polls in 2015, and the CPC federally have beat their Alberta polled performance in both 2019 and 2021.

The NDP won 3 seats in Calgary in 2019, and it’s safe to say they’ll retain those three. Combine those three with the 20 Edmonton seats they project to win, the two Lethbridges, Sherwood Park, St. Albert, and Banff, the NDP have 28 seats before any gains in Calgary proper, meaning they likely need 16 gains in Calgary.

Can they do it? Sure, on paper, there’s no reason to think 16 gains in Calgary is an impossible feat. They would need to win Calgary proper by 6% to be projected for those 16 gains, but that’s not impossible. It’s also not likely, and this is the NDP’s problem.

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Since the election of the PC dynasty in 1971, there’s been a wide array of different oppositions to the PCs – be it the NDP of Grant Notley (Rachel’s father) to the Liberals for much of the 90s and 2000s, until we got to the Wildrose split, the NDP surge, the creation of the UCP, and now the seemingly stable two party arrangement we have now – but there’s always been three political traditions.

There has always been a left wing voice - usually split between the Liberals and the NDP, those two parties combined for north of 30% at every election from 1986 to 2008, including twice breaking 50% combined – and then two very different conservative traditions. There was an urban, mostly Calgarian, pro-business, fiscally conservative wing of the PCs that predominantly led the party, and then there was a much more culturally conservative, religious tendency in the regions of Alberta. Under Lougheed and Klein, those two tendencies mostly worked together well, but under Getty’s tenure the Liberals got a lot of those centrist votes uncomfortable with the economic state of Alberta, which is why the left got majorities of the popular vote in both 1989 and 1993.

Once Klein put Alberta’s fiscal house in order, the Liberals collapsed back, the different wings of the party came back together, and things were mostly fine, until Ed Stelmach. After winning in 2008, Stelmach’s PCs lost a byelection to Wildrose, Danielle Smith was elected leader of the Wildrose Party, and the disaffection of many in Alberta found a home. To win the 2012 election, the PCs ran an explicit squeeze campaign on the 26% of Albertans who voted Liberal in 2008, and that won Alison Redford a term.

The 2015 election isn’t really representative of the true levels of support for each of the three traditions, but thinking of Alberta politics as a two horse race isn’t the right way to do it. There are three traditions, and this election is a battle where there is no voice from what was for a while the dominant tradition. And that fact shows itself every time we look at this election.

If you just look blindly at an Alberta election, the default position should be the UCP wins unless we have reason to think otherwise. After the way Jason Kenney and Danielle Smith have governed this province, we have it. Kenney ran Alberta as a pale imitation of what he thought the Wildrose wing of the party wanted, with enough fiscal conservatism early to placate Calgarian money that got him elected. Once the pandemic hit, he was stuck between doing what he wanted to do to help mitigate the virus and what political considerations would let him do.

Smith, since coming in in 2022, has been a product of a different set of constraints – not internal ones, like Kenney routinely faced, but outside pressure. When Kenney was hugely down deep in the dark days of COVID and having to institute vaccine passports, there was time to right the ship. It was easy to believe then that time would solve the ills. When Kenney “won” the leadership review by an unsustainable margin, the idea that a new leader might make everything better was in the air. But when Smith’s first round of polls came through as Premier and didn’t suddenly return Alberta to the status quo of huge UCP leads, they panicked.

Smith’s tenure in office has been marked by two consistent defining features – her saying incredibly incendiary things, and her spending money that Danielle Smith circa 2012 would be screaming bloody murder about. This arena deal in Calgary is another example of her being willing to throw principle overboard for the prospect of a few votes, because she really, really, really needs those few votes.

On the other hand, Rachel Notley is trying to win this election without this election being about Rachel Notley or the NDP. Notley, who I’m on the record as a big fan of, is trying to win this election as the leader of some amorphous political party that is full of other people like herself, also known as people who aren’t scary socialisty left wingers.

The problem is, Notley’s not really done anything to reassure the centrist, socially liberal, well off voters she needs that she can actually be trusted. The irony of this election is that if Notley wins, she will do so on the votes of people whose taxes she raised in 2015. The brunt of the votes she is liable to gain are amongst well off voters who think oil is a necessary evil, who got vaccinated right away, and who would not flinch at seeing gay couples acting as a couple in public.

On social issues, Smith is abhorrent to these people – her statements saying the unvaccinated were the “most discriminated against” group are anathema to these voters, her video whitewashing how (white) settlers treated Indigenous peoples, attempting to mess with prosecutions of people charged with COVID and/or Convoy related offenses – but they don’t trust the NDP on economics. And the problem is, it’s Alberta, where tie goes to the UCP.

Alberta is often understood in Central Canada (or, what Albertans call Eastern Canada) as in love with oil, and for many that’s true, I’m sure, but it’s not reflective of reality. The relationship many have to oil in Alberta is different, and much more complex, then the stereotype. Does the average doctor or lawyer or banker or accountant in Alberta have a “I Love Oil Sands” bumper sticker on their car? No, but the hospital they work in was probably built on oil revenues, and the law firm they work for probably pays their bonus with billables from one of the oil giants, and so they necessarily look warily at any proposal or any political party that doesn’t have a credible plan for how to get from where we are to where we will go without their professions losing out.

What’s it all mean? Part of me wants to say who the fuck knows, but I’m pretty sure I do know – and it’s not good. Unless the NDP have something waiting for the campaign itself, there will not be a strong enough plan from the NDP to persuade the voters they need to actually pull the trigger and vote for Notley. The NDP feels Edmontonian because it is, and there proper left wing values are properly popular. In Calgary, the road runs through managerial technocratic politics. And that’s a hard gap for one party to bridge. That said, they have to, or they will lose.

The NDP has a chance here to revolutionize Alberta politics, to prove that 2015 wasn’t a fluke, and show a path for progressive politics in Canada’s bastion of conservatism. The problem is, their timidity is showing, and they’ve got 4 weeks to win over a group of voters who need to be actively won. They need to make a big, bold offer to Calgary that shows not just ideas about what policies they think are good but shows a fundamental understanding of the city they need if they are going to govern.

The burden of this campaign is for the NDP to show they understand Calgary, not just as an extension of Edmonton but as a specific ecosystem for which there is no comparison, in Alberta or in Canada. Calgarians have shown a willingness to elect moderate, progressive leaders before, but those leaders always understood the city they sought to lead. Notley’s NDP seems to misunderstand it, either out of a misplaced hope that it is like Edmonton if only we hope it hard enough, or because they’re too Edmontonian.

At the end of the day, the campaign will no doubts be chaotic, but in a very sort of fundamentally unimportant way. Danielle Smith will say a lot of stupid things, and UCP candidates will have their stupid tweets and Facebook posts resurfaced in an attempt to Lake Of Fire Smith for a second time, but none of it will matter. What will matter is the NDP’s ability to get people who do not like Danielle Smith to actually vote NDP - in many cases after having spent their lives fighting against the idea they’d ever do it.

I think they’ll get close and they’ll lose, because I do not think Rachel Notley understands Calgary enough to win the city, or more accurately to win it by enough. I might be wrong – Lord knows I’m praying I am – but I really, really don’t think so.