Alberta: Polls, Byelections, And The Sovereignty Act

Alberta Roundup

Since I went into my self-induced Canada news blackout so I could survive the US midterms, two major things have happened in Alberta politics – Danielle Smith has been elected to the Alberta Legislature in the Medicine Hat byelection, and Janet Brown has released a poll showing the NDP in a very prime position. If I updated my Alberta model with just her numbers – and Brown is the best pollster in Alberta, the Ann Selzer of the Rockies - I’d have the NDP in majority government.

The reason I haven’t updated the model and gotten a shitton of clicks from Canadian resisters is that I still don’t believe it, and after my willingness to post any good news when it came to the prospects of Doug Ford losing earlier this year, I’m trying to be more responsible with what I share.

And here’s the thing – looking at the Medicine Hat results, I think everyone on the left is getting a little bit too excited.

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If you believe the polls in Alberta right now, they’re saying there’s something like a 30% swing from 2019 to 2023 with voters outside of the two main metro areas. It’s a little vague because of how you handle the weird semi-suburban, semi-rural Edmonton suburban seats, but there’s a huge swing there that is a little bit the NDP vote going up but is much more the UCP vote going down, mostly to undecideds.

In the case of Medicine Hat, the UCP vote fell, but only by 6%, and the swing was a much more reasonable 15%. Apply that swing to the non-city seats, and the NDP are only gaining 2 seats – Banff, and the other Lethbridge. That would take away a not-insubstantial part of the NDP’s current path to 44 seats, as Lesser Slave Lake, Leduc, and Fort Sask leave the board of potential seats they could win.

Plainly, I don’t believe these polls that show the UCP only up in non-main cities by single or low double digits, because one of the only reliable polling misses in this country is that the right is almost always underestimated in Alberta polling. It doesn’t end up mattering in the end, because in 2019 Jason Kenney was expected to win and he did, and that’s the same federally so nobody checks the details, but the polls in Alberta tend to underestimate the right.

On average, the polls in Alberta last time had the UCP up 12%. They ended up winning by 22%, but again, because the polls had the right winner, nobody cared. Here, it looks like the same pattern, where the UCP is outperforming their polls in rural Alberta, which forces the NDP into a much more specific lane for winning a second (non-consecutive) term.

Right now, the NDP have 24 seats. There are 8 seats that should be guaranteed wins for the party – the one Edmonton they lost in 2019, Lethbridge East, Banff, and 5 Calgaries – Currie, Falconridge, Klein, Varsity, and North East. If they win all 8, as they should, they need 12 more seats to win a majority. At most there are 15 more plausible seats unless the UCP just completely collapses – a theory I have a lot of doubts in, let’s just say – and unfortunately, three of them are seats that the Medicine Hat byelection suggest are functionally off the table. So it’s down to 12 seats.

Sherwood Park is the only non-Calgary on the list, and while I think it should go orange, that’s little comfort or concern here. What’s left is the NDP have to run the table of competitive Calgary seats to form Government – and that’s an extremely hard road to go down. Yes I understand that the Global Fucking Realignment I talk about a lot here will help the NDP, as socially liberal Calgarians who have a lot of money run leftwards, but there is still a huge mountain to climb if the NDP want to win this election and I’m not sure anyone has properly understood this fact.

The problem that many on the left of Alberta politics have is that there’s a lot of optimism and energy around the idea that Danielle Smith is beatable – and she is beatable, to be clear – but there’s more interest in riding that energy than actually seeing how beatable she really is, and what it will take to beat her. The NDP either have to radically show more rural strength than they have in either byelection during this Legislature or than their current polling adjusted for historical misses would point to them doing, or they have to make deeper, more incisive inroads into Calgary than basically ever in the history of the province for a left wing party. For a party with a fundamentally Edmontonian understanding of the world, it's a hard task to trust them to pull off.

One of the concepts that I’ve taken with me in recent months is the idea of defining success on your own terms. My newfound F1 fandom has driven it into me, because of how defined the tiers are in that sport, and how getting a Williams into 9th place can be worth more than a Red Bull coming third. That concept keeps rattling in my head when I think about Alberta, because I don’t know if the NDP actually views winning power as the only success.

It's long been a critique of mine of their federal cousins that the NDP nationally view Jagmeet Singh’s leadership as a success, and here I’m worried that a version of that same malaise will set in. If the NDP win 35 seats – a gain of 11, and the strongest left wing opposition in both raw numbers and share of the Legislature in the post-SoCred era – would the party view it as a success? In some ways it would undeniably be so, but it would also mean they’re still powerless.

My great fear, as someone who finds Danielle Smith’s politics abhorrent and the prospect of her winning a full term terrifying, is not that the NDP will have a disappointing night, it’s that they’ll lose and talk themselves into it being a good night. The NDP have a real chance – potentially one of their best ever – to make a real change in Alberta politics and win in a fair fight against the right for the first time since before World War II.

If the NDP are going to do it, they need a sharper argument. Stop arguing about the constitutional principles of the Sovereignty Act and find an oil and gas CEO who says they’ll move operations to Texas if they pass the thing. There are many people in Alberta who are winnable NDP voters who think that getting to override the Feds and those elitists on the Supreme Court when they rule dumb things is perfectly fine. What voters will respond to is not a lecture that the separation of powers decided on 150 years ago is good, but that legal uncertainty means jobs will go elsewhere and schools and hospitals will lose out because of it.

The NDP’s messaging is currently incoherent on a good day and downright contradictory on a bad one, with the party unable to decide on a coherent, overarching message to respond to Smith. She’s a danger for playing politics with the Constitution sometimes but at others she’s focused on irrelevances while ignoring the issues real Albertans care about. It’s hard to make people care about an issue that is both a fundamental outrage and a distraction from the true crises.

The NDP have time to get themselves into an actual winning position, but they need to find a discipline and a seriousness immediately, or they’ll look back at that Janet Brown poll in 6 months and wonder where the hell the majority that was there to be won ended up. And unfortunately, Alberta needs the NDP too badly to see them blow this.