Alberta Reset: UCP Leadership And Post Kenney Futures
On The Polls And 2023
“In the forest of whispering speakers/Let's swear that we will/Get with the times/In a current health to stay.”
If any song were best to sum up the approach the UCP has taken to their enduring leadership crisis, both while they had a leader and now that they very much don’t, it’s probably hard to find a better one than The Hip’s It’s A Good Life If You Don’t Weaken. From the title summing up the argument of the anti-restrictions zealots to the way the quoted stanza describes why the UCP decided to bring this crisis on now, as opposed to risking sticking with Jason Kenney to the fact that (noted Albertan) Feist’s version with The Hip at the 2021 Junos is better than the original, it’s a good soundtrack for today’s task, which is simple, and yet oh so hard: Who is going to win the 2023 Alberta Election?
….
The real answer (sorry for spoiling it!) is we don’t know yet, but it’s definitely worth working through the recent past, and the likely path of the future, to get to that conclusion.
For the last two years, Jason Kenney’s UCP has been down in the polls, and has been down consistently on the basis that his government has been a bit of a disaster in, well, most every way. From budget cuts to promising to repeal the Alberta NDP’s carbon tax and then losing his challenge to the Federal carbon tax, from saying Alberta was open for business with a juicy corporate tax cut that was supposed to, and didn’t, pay for itself, to promising no further restrictions in the spring of 2021 to having to impose vaccine passports the Tuesday before the federal election because hospitals were about to be overwhelmed (and arguably already were), Kenney’s government was a mess at the best of times and a disaster at the worst of them.
Rachel Notley’s NDP mostly coasted by on that, because the Kenney cavalcade of noise was good enough for the Opposition Leader to find a story of the day that she could whack Kenney with, and keep him in the 30s in terms of vote shares and down 10-20% compared to her. It was basically free runway for Notley because Kenney’s failures weren’t differences of economic theory, especially in the last year and a half, it was competence stuff. From his members continuously undercutting his authority through his staff going to the UK in the winter of 2020 against COVID advice to the Best Summer Ever disaster being followed by Kenney not being seen in public for weeks, Kenney had continual crises of leadership, not of economic policy.
Even the balanced budget this year – announced right before the UCP leadership balloting started – didn’t help, because none of the crises and none of the anger was actually about economics or traditional politics. Plenty of the anger was about COVID policy, but there Kenney was in a no win spot – his zealots were mad the unvaxxed couldn’t eat at their diners and the urban professional class – the bankers, lawyers, accountants, and doctors of the world – didn’t like that Kenney had lifted all restrictions in the summer. And, it’s always worth noting, plenty of those urban professionals voted for Kenney last time.
The UCP (and going back to 2008 and before, the old PCs) had the advantage of being two distinct movements in one party – the urban professional class of Calgary (and before the Notley NDP, some of Edmonton too) and then rural conservatives. The rich Calgarians would vote for the PCs on the basis of low taxes, low (or no) debt, and economic management, and the rural conservatives would vote PC on the basis of cultural conservatism and contempt for city lefties who wanted to impose their values on Red Deer or Cardston. It was a marriage where everyone got most of what they wanted – the cities didn’t always love some of the cultural conservatism, the regions didn’t love that Klein, Getty, and Lougheed were city boys whose instincts weren’t theirs – but the economy was strong and the flood of money paved over a lot of the cracks.
Now, Kenney’s UCP is in theory that same marriage again, but the problem now is that COVID raised the salience of the dividing lines between upper class Calgarians who wanted to go to a restaurant safely and of anti-restrictions rural voters who thought vaccine passports was an unconscionable attack on their liberty, and Kenney can’t walk that divide anymore. And with him gone, the UCP’s internal civil war – bubbling over for two years now – is in full swing.
On Saturday, we got a Leger poll which asked three different versions of their vote intention question – UCP vs. NDP with no leaders named, Brian Jean’s UCP vs. Rachel Notley’s NDP, and Danielle Smith’s UCP vs. Rachel Notley’s NDP. In the first question, the UCP took a slight province wide lead, but in the questions with named leaders, the NDP took a big lead.
Taken on their face, this is good news for the NDP, right? Yes, the hypothetical no leaders question was bad for them, but once Notley faces an actual, named choice, she dominates. The problem is, take even a gander at the data, and you see the problem, summarized neatly in these two tables.
Notley beats Jean and Smith, yes – but she does so almost entirely because the UCP vote collapses to undecided when there’s no forced choice, as their was with the party question. Like, if you think a Brian Jean-led UCP is only going to get 34% outside the Edmonton and Calgary CMAs – where the UCP got 65% of the vote last time – then I have oceanfront property in Medicine Hat to sell you.
There might be some evidence, if you squint, that the NDP vote in Calgary goes up against Jean or Smith, and that would be good for the NDP – but you can’t just take those polls with 25% undecided at face value when those voters look pretty clearly to me like UCP voters on the generic party ballot test. So, on that basis, the UCP are fine, right, when they pick whoever they pick, the undecideds will come home, and the NDP will spend another four years licking their wounds? Not so fast, and this is why it’s still a race, in my eyes.
This is my model just on the Leger poll’s UCP vs. NDP Ballot, and it shows a reduced UCP majority. It shows the NDP picking up the one UCP seat in Edmonton proper, making 3 gains in Calgary proper, and another 5 in the rest of the province. The NDP are about halfway to their goal on this poll, given that they need 20 gains for government and they’re at 9 right now.
As many have pointed out, not having a leader is an advantage, because everyone can project their preferred leader onto the UCP, and inevitably some people will be unhappy. Let’s say, as is rumoured, Michelle Rempel-Garner runs for the UCP leadership, and she somehow wins it. If she wins the leadership, her moderate social views – Rempel-Garner is a notable supporter of gay marriage and voted against the 2012 motion to reopen the abortion debate in this country – will be catnip for many of the urbanites in Calgary who just want a reasonable leader and to be able to skip the culture war fights, and will go over like boiled piss to those anti-restrictions social conservatives who think that the UCP is just the PCs all over again, who will bolt to Wildrose Independence.
If it’s Jean, then the right of the party wins and the centre has to decide whether or not they can vote for a party led by someone who doesn’t share their values. In a world where social values and not economics is determining more and more of voting intention – and, more explicitly, where last month a dozen “blue ribbon”, wealthy, inner city conservative seats fell to either Labor, the Greens, or independents whose animating cause was climate action in Australia – these centrists are more and more willing to vote for parties of the left if they think the right is too far.
Does Jean (who is my provisional, but by no means confident, current prediction for next leader) do worse than a simple Generic Party test would have him at? Yes. Does he do better than that Leger Jean vs. Notley test has him? Absolutely yes. Will the issues mix going into the next election be less COVID related? Sure, but we have no idea what will replace it.
Assuming Pierre Poilievre wins the Federal Conservative Leadership, how will his controversial stances around cryptocurrency and firing the Bank Of Canada Governor be playing, and will those stances force Jean or whoever else wins the job to have to take a stance and alienate either the core base that helped elect Poilievre or the moderates who are sceptical he has the chops for the job? If inflation comes down, does it come down enough – and enough in visible ways, also known as in gas prices and food costs – that the mood is better? Does potentially high inflation make voters blame Trudeau and leftwing parties for costing them, or blame the UCP because they’re in power? These are all questions which add to the uncertainty, but the main source of my doubt is about the NDP, because I pay a lot of attention to this and I have no idea what a Notley government is good for if we don’t get another global pandemic.
Competence as your calling card in government is fine in a crisis, but given where we currently stand in terms of the pandemic, vaccines, and immunity, “I’ll do a better job in a crisis literally nobody wants to have happen again” isn’t a great argument. The Ontario NDP just ran on vaguely left wing ideas and absolutely no bold vision, and they got walloped. Yes, they stayed in official opposition, but they lost seats to Doug Ford. Technocratic competence isn’t enough in a province where the default is a UCP win of 20 points.
If it’s Jean, the NDP can’t rely on vote splits to save the day, because Wildrose Independence will be a fringe force consigned to getting 7% of the vote in rural seats and 2% in the cities. The NDP have to find an answer that isn’t just “Jason Kenney Sucks”, and as much as I might want it to, they’ll need a better argument than their 2019 campaign, which amounted a lot to a bad re-run of 2012, with controversial comments of UCP candidates being spun desperately into a crisis on the level of Lake Of Fire.
The NDP need an actual compelling message, on the future of the oil industry on the road to net-zero, on housing, on investments, and on diversification especially. The first time I ever did a radio interview I was asked by an American host why Calgary votes so Conservative unlike every other Canadian city, and the answer I gave was mostly western alienation and the federal Liberals don’t try there. That’s mostly true, but the thing I missed in that answer is that Calgary runs, in a lot of ways, on the oil industry. Calgary law firms bill their business from the oil companies, Calgary accounting firms get their business from auditing the oil companies’ books, oil revenues have paid for most of the big infrastructure projects that fund the city. The Alberta Children’s Hospital, opened in 2006, was absolutely paid for by the proceeds of the oil boom, and has provided care for millions of kids since it opened.
Calgary as a city has benefited hugely from the oil boom, and much of the city still runs on the oil industry for its wealth, and if the NDP do not have a better answer this time than they did last time for what a post-oil Alberta looks like, then they’re gonna lose again. Finding that answer isn’t easy, but neither is governing, and the NDP are trying to get back into government without having the long conversation with itself about how best to actually transform this province.
At the end of the day, I keep coming back to Feist’s hauntingly beautiful performance with The Hip, because of one other line: “Gives way to shaky movements/Improvisational skills”. The NDP had a gameplan and a strategy to beat Kenney, and now they gotta boogie and find another one to beat whoever wins the UCP leadership.
Will they? I have no idea.