Kenney, Jean, Notley, And Fort Mac Reflections

Thoughts On Alberta

I’ve got to admit, something has always felt wrong, and last night just confirmed it.

I’ve known what all these Alberta polls have said, but this whole time, I’ve never really bought the idea that the NDP were cruising to a victory, and now, after that, two events have given that fear a lot of credence, despite what a lot of my (overwhelmingly left-wing) followers want to think.

The first was the Fort Mac-And-Other-Shit byelection, where the NDP vote managed to fall by 6% despite supposedly being up 10% province wide, and the other was a Janet Brown poll of the province out this morning showing a UCP lead, which, albeit narrower than the 2019 result, would still see the UCP returned to office, and made much more sense compared to the Fort Mac results. And all of this is happening just weeks before the UCP Leadership review, where Kenney will face the winner of the Fort Mac contest, Brian Jean, in an unofficial leadership battle.

Here, the unknowns outweigh the knowns – will Kenney win the leadership? Will Jean’s people accept a theoretical Kenney victory? Would Kenney call a snap election if he loses to attempt to win another term and stop the battle? Will I survive that weekend sober? – but we can focus on one thing, which is simple, which is why did the NDP do so fucking badly on Tuesday, and what does it mean?

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If I’m going to be honest, I don’t think the chances of Jason Kenney making it through the leadership review unscathed are that high, because the act of having a leadership review imposed on you is a sign you’re probably going to lose it. This logic is why Kathleen Wynne got rid of the 2016 leadership review at the Ottawa AGM after she got destroyed in the Scarborough-Rouge River byelection, because she knew as well as I did then and everyone with a brain did as well that she would lose it – so she took it off the schedule.

Usually, and this was true with Stelmach and Redford and federally with Mulcair, if people want a leadership review, your leadership is dead. This is also true in Australia, where no recent leader who faced a leadership spill ended up surviving, regardless of how the first spill went. The act of Hawke, Rudd, Abbott, and Turnbull facing spills ended up killing them, because once there’s pressure to get rid of you, they will eventually get rid of you. That said, whether it’s Jean or Kenney is a sideshow, because the Alberta NDP are in real trouble.

The last time I wrote about Alberta, I wrote about the fear I had that the Alberta NDP were winning, in a sense, by default, and that the picture was much gloomier than the polls were showing, but in the months since, I’ve been sort of shaken from that view, because the UCP kept polling so bad, and they kept getting caught in dumb scandals and the NDP kept leading in the polls. But now, with some evidence they’re not actually ahead, I’m back to wondering when the Alberta NDP will get their heads out of their asses and stop acting like the UCP without the ethical concerns.

I greatly want Rachel Notley to be the next Premier of Alberta, but I have, and I think many others have as well, bit my tongue about the lifeless and weirdly sterile opposition she has provided in recent months, where she has relied on the obvious uselessness of the UCP’s pandemic response to boost her poll numbers – which worked, when COVID was the dominant issue. But now, with COVID receding from the headlines, her strategy makes even less sense than it ever did. It was understandable when the polls were riding high, but now that we have actual evidence from Fort Mac that the NDP’s message was about as popular as the notion of drinking one’s own urine, things need to change.

I have no idea how things will work out on the conservative side of politics – nor does literally anyone who claims they do – but I do know that unless the Alberta right is stupid enough to reconstitute the split which let Notley in the first time, the NDP will need to find an actually persurasive message to enter government, and they clearly don’t have one right now, based on the results on Tuesday and the poll on Wednesday – which, for the record, came from the same pollster who was deemed “too high” on the UCP by my biased ass in 2019, and who ended up being bang on the money when the chips came down.

Look, if you asked me right now to make predictions, my calls would be simple – Brian Jean will do enough damage to Jason Kenney that Kenney doesn’t make it to the 2023 election, and that the 2023 election will be won by the UCP. I like these predictions in exactly zero ways, but that’s where my head is now after Fort Mac. If people wish to change their minds, the way to do so is to sharpen the NDP’s message against Kenney, but unless they do, they’ll continue to blow this fertile environment, and re-elect one of Canada’s worst governments.