Alberta’s Understandable Liberal Surge

On The Biggest Trend In Polling

If you were going to look for a place with a lot of moderate conservatives who are willing to vote for a pragmatic centrist, you’d probably think about Alberta. It’s the clearest area where there is a proven, persuadable group of voters who have stubbornly refused to vote Liberal in recent years, and yet it’s a culture shock because people have a perception about Alberta that doesn’t match the reality.

For all the talk of Alberta as a monolithically Conservative province, it is actually a province of three distinct political tendencies in roughly equal proportion - rural social conservatives who are often motivated by their faith and their sense of community, urban centrists who are social liberals and fiscal conservatives who support gay rights and a woman’s right to choose while also being employed directly or indirectly from the profits of the oil boom, and the left. Obviously at any given election at either the provincial or Federal level those proportions can shift a bit, but broadly speaking Alberta is three political traditions. Conservatives have stuck together at the Federal level since the CPC was formed, and the fact that they’ve combined the two “conservative” tendencies is why they get 60% of the vote all the time. But that’s not what the UCP got last time.

At the last Alberta Election, that middle broke for the UCP, on route to an 8% popular vote win, but by no means did they sweep the urban centrists like they historically did. The NDP got from the 35% they got in 2019 to the 44% they got in 2023 by winning significant numbers of white collar professionals in Calgary - bankers and lawyers and accountants whose firms pay their bills off of the oil companies, or doctors and nurses who work in hospitals built with oil revenues. Those voters backed Notley in 2023 despite voting for O’Toole in 2021, because they thought Notley was sufficiently moderate - and the UCP sufficiently crazy - that they could trust the Alberta NDP despite wanting a Federal Conservative government.

It’s clear that Carney’s gains in 2025 were almost all from eating the NDP vote - the NDP vote fell 12.8% and the Liberal vote went up 12.4%. The rise in the CPC vote basically matched the PPC’s fall, which all points to 2025 being about consolidation, not about genuine crossover between Conservatives and Liberals. But the polls are now pointing to movement.

Mainstreet tossed a federal vote intention question onto their latest Alberta poll, showing a 3% lead for the Conservatives. Liaison’s now got a 11% gap only, which is notable given the CPC won Alberta in April 2025 by a whopping 36%. The voters who switched from Kenney in 2019 to Notley in 2023 are similarly showing some willingness to consider Carney.

Will that last at an election? No, probably not, but right now my model has the Liberals winning 10 seats in Alberta. Right now, there’s not a Conservative projected ahead in the city of Edmonton. Do I think that holds? Of course not, and they’ll probably win 4-6 and not the 10 I’m staring at right now. But that would still represent a seismic shift in Alberta, and the most durable shift in decades. And it would represent the codification of something federally that Alberta’s been living with provincially for years - there is a willingness to listen to moderate voices.

Politics isn’t about policy, or at least not all about policy. Trudeau got no credit for buying a pipeline because he was seen, for good or ill, as hostile to Alberta, hostile to business, and hostile to their way of life. Their objection to Trudeau wasn’t rational, it was visceral - which is why no amount of “he thought you a pipeline” was ever going to make Albertans waver on their belief that Trudeau was not concerned with a strong Alberta.

Carney, on the other hand, gets the benefit of the doubt that JT never earned. Carney is viewed as wrong about various things, but not hostile to the very idea of Alberta being successful. Carney is managing to hold good will from both Quebec and Alberta, because both places think that he is at least willing to listen to criticism and engage with contrary arguments. That good will is not some idea that they’ll always like what Carney does, but that they know he’ll listen to their arguments and consider their interests.

When Reform tossed around that The West Wants In, they didn’t think it meant this, but this is actually what wanting in means in this context. Alberta now has a government where their interests get the consideration they deserve. Does that mean they’ll win every fight? Fuck no, but Quebec’s environmentalist streak didn’t stop the MOU and Ontario’s car manufacturers didn’t stop the China deal. That is a huge symbol that their interests will be taken seriously, and that they are actually partners in confederation, not merely subjects to the Laurentian Elite’s will.

I often complain about the dismissive and stupid way Quebecers are written about in the English press, but it’s also true that Alberta is written off as a backwater hell hole by many on the liberal left. It’s as untrue as it is counterproductive, a tautology that persists because people don’t understand how deep the financial impacts of the oil industry are in Alberta, far beyond those directly employed by the oil industry. Albertans are making a rational choice when they vote for parties that care about the oil patch, because the livelihoods of Calgary and Edmonton (though to a lesser extent) are deeply rooted in the success of the oil industry. When properly understood, Albertans in the two city cores aren’t idiots who don’t believe in science or care about their futures, they’re reasonable people who worried that Trudeau was sacrificing their communities on the altar of good intentions and no long term vision. It’s hardly a shock they’re more receptive to Carney.

Obviously these voters exist in other parts of Canada, but Alberta has the biggest concentration of voters who you look at and say are gettable. Yes Ontario matters, and there’s a ton of new, more rural marginals to go and get in Eastern and Southwestern Ontario, but Alberta is a hugely symbolically important place to gain seats. Carney has a chance to re-write the entire political map of Canada, and to show that Alberta isn’t the backwoods land of nonsense and idiocy people out here wrongly call it. And the reason Albertans are listening make complete sense - they want in, and Carney’s given them that.

Now it’s on him to continue to deliver.

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