Alberta’s Likely Early Election: Is Danielle Smith Vulnerable?

Setting The Table On Alberta’s Plausible Snap Election

There are a lot of reasons to be sceptical in general of early election rumours. The rise of fixed election date laws - whose actual purpose was merely to curtail the constitutionally acceptable but politically toxic 5th year of a Parliament - has made it easier to play out the string, and harder to justify the kinds of politically advantageous election timings that were commonplace. A couple of high profile failures - Theresa May’s 2017 snap election in the UK, as well as Jim Prentice’s disastrous 2015 call in Alberta - have also raised the question of what’s the point. But there still can be a persuasive argument for an early election, in the right specific circumstances.

Doug Ford’s 2025 snap election was a brilliant decision, for two reasons - external circumstances were going to be less favourable in the future than when he went to the polls, and the variance that waiting created was only going to help the Opposition get their shit together. Whether another 16 months would have gotten Crombie’s and Stiles’ shit together is debatable, though highly unlikely, but Ford could have either gone against an Opposition that was certain to be unready, or hope that they were still unready in a year.

In the same way, the issue profile and the external circumstances were good. Ford was Captain Canada and the issue was Standing Up For Canada, not the Greenbelt or corruption or health care or education or any number of issues that were worse for Ford. He needed to go when the issue set was right for him, because waiting could have created the circumstances for failure. If he had waited, he’d be in a pre-election period with damaging stories about corruption and political influence screwing over taxpayers floating around, instead of those stories dropping into the first year of a mandate where the Opposition are incompetent.

There’s also a lesson from Britain that suggests going early can be right, namely in the election Gordon Brown didn’t call in 2007. Brown didn’t go in the summer of 2007 immediately upon taking over the Prime Ministership, and within 6 months the British banking system was roughly as solid as Justin Trudeau’s 2024 polling. The banking crisis and subsequent mass recession ended Brown’s chance of actually winning an election, because waiting was only going to give the possibility of events getting in the way.

Why is any of this relevant, you might ask? Well, because Danielle Smith seems pretty clearly to be considering an early election. Duane Bratt, the esteemed political scientist, referred to a 2026 provincial election as “increasingly likely” in a December Substack, while the Dean of the Alberta political obsessives and friend of the site Dave Cournoyer has publicly raised the chance of an early election in the comments of my 2025 Year In Review. Clearly, it’s on the table.

Wednesday’s news that Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz is retiring also fits with the evidence of a spring election. Her decision to stay in the legislature through May, despite resigning as Environment Minister effective today, reads very much as “I’m staying through the election, but I can’t say there’s going to be an election yet.” There’s precedence for such a showing of the cards - Lisa MacLoed announced her final day in public life would be February 28th, 2025. Ford’s election? The 27th.

So, if there is going to be an election, is Danielle Smith vulnerable? Yes, but also not at all.

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Danielle Smith should be vulnerable to a challenge, in the sense that there are a lot of reasons that Albertans could or should want change. The upheaval and alleged corruption at AHS procurement and the promised health reforms, the fact you had Ministers and staff taking Oilers playoff tickets from people with interests, the handling of the Teacher’s strike, the general obsession with culture wars - be it laws about trans people, the obsessions with pretending to reopen the Constitution, or independence - over practical issues … There’s a very clear case to be made against Smith’s government.

An October Leger poll, at the peak of the Teacher’s Strike, had the NDP 5% down with 9% for the Alberta Liberals, a result that would suggest a progressive majority once the Alberta Liberals once again fail to run more than a handful of candidates and/or the NDP runs an effective squeeze campaign. Angus Reid’s (admittedly tiny sample) poll from December shows a 3% UCP lead, down from an 11% lead in a similarly small sample three months earlier. We have no usable polling post-MOU, but the tepid (to be kind) reception Smith got at the post-MOU UCP convention does suggest there’s both potential gains and irritations for Smith from that. (That said, potential gains with moderates and swing voters in Calgary at the cost of only winning Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House with 75% of the vote and not 82% like last time is a trade that helps Smith.)

The problem with the case I just laid out is that polls are a snapshot of a time and place, not a prediction. If that Angus Reid data was true and the election was today, it’s probably a genuine coin toss for who would win the election. But we don’t know that, and it’s not - there’s a campaign to be run and won or lost. And there’s nothing that Naheed Nenshi’s time as leader of the NDP has done to make me in any way confident that he can run a winning campaign.

Readers of my 2023 coverage will be able to do this by repetition at this point, but there have always been three political traditions in Alberta that have been forced to be described as two by first past the post. There are genuine progressives, the 30%-35% of people who vote for the LPC, NDP, and Greens at Federal elections and who would change their votes between the Alberta Liberals and NDP depending on who was best suited to attack the PCs. There are social conservatives in rural Alberta, who want to protect their way of life and believe what they believe, and utterly despise Eastern Canadian elites who want to meddle with their prosperity and impose their values.

And then there are urban moderates, corporate conservatives who work white collar jobs and who benefit from the oil industry either directly or indirectly. These are accountants and lawyers whose clients are the oil patch, doctors whose hospitals were built with the profits of the oil boom, bankers whose commissions were earned riding the oil industry boom, and engineers who supply the specs and the know-how to get the oil out of the ground. They’re socially liberal, aren’t always comfortable with the beliefs of their more rural brethren, but they also understand that the oil industry is responsible for a lot of families’ paycheques and a lot of projects that have done a lot of good.

For a province with a reputation for being dogmatic and stupid in their love of the oil patch, the truth is that the median Alberta neither loves it nor hates it. They want an economy that can sustain the levels of growth and the standard of living that they’ve come accustomed to after peak oil, but they also don’t think the oil industry should be denigrated as a source of evil. These are people pulled by multiple instincts, both on oil and in general. They nearly elected Rachel Notley because of their deep disillusionment with Jason Kenney and Danielle Smith’s pandering to the rural base, their prioritization of right wing culture wars, but they didn’t because Notley didn’t offer a clear enough rationale for her economic manifesto or a clear vision of how she would ensure she managed the economy well.

It’s often true that socially liberal, fiscally conservative voters aren’t the key swing vote nationally, and that’s true. There are plenty of places where Poilievre’s message rang truer than O’Toole’s, winning seats like Skeena and one of the Sudburys. But the thing is, in Alberta the swing voters are socially liberal Calgarians who enjoy a gay wedding but also enjoy their six figure a year salary funded by the profits of the oil patch. And Nenshi hasn’t done anything to make the people who thought about Notley in 2023 and couldn’t do it change their minds.

Where is Nenshi’s economic reform agenda, designed to strengthen Alberta’s economy when oil is trading low and create the jobs of the 2030s? Where’s Nenshi’s commitment to common sense anti-corruption legislation that will end the cycle of insider advantage at the taxpayer’s expense? Where’s the barnstorming tour of places often promised new hospitals or upgraded health services that never get them? Where’s the fucking initiative?

Nenshi’s NDP have been nowhere, and they’re suffering for it. There’s no clear thinking, no direction of travel, nothing to convince people who voted Notley in 2023, Kenney in 2019, and either PC or Alberta Party in 2015 that they can be trusted. There’s a void in politics, with Smith having to pander to her right flank, and the NDP are fucking nowhere. Smith is absolutely vulnerable to a competent, capable, intelligent opposition.

She’s very lucky she doesn’t have to face one.

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