The Titan Arum Blooms: Alberta election, May 5

So election time has been called. The titan arum blooming in Muttart Conservatory may perhaps be a premonition.

So. . . the story. Progressive Conservatives have been in power since 1971. Lougheed-Getty-Klein-Stelmach-Redford-and now Prentice. The price of oil is down and we had been using oil and gas royalties as a means of expanding the budget. No money has been funneling into the Heritage Fund for decades and the Sustainability Fund has been tapped. Prentice has to balance the budget somehow. A provincial sales tax has touted to fill in the gap that the royalties would have filled. Instead, they bumped the consumption taxes and deviated slightly from the flat tax that they had been using. This means that the price of gas, alcohol, tobacco, and fees have all been bumped and the sort. The budget has a bit of a popularity crisis.

So Prentice has decided to call an election today. CBC provides a handy Vote Compass. I get an abnormally high alignment with the Alberta Party, a centrist party that is challenging the Alberta Liberals. The problem here is that they are very untested and suffer from organisational issues.

The Liberals are quite frankly a mess. Alison Redford bit into the Alberta Liberals when the Wildrose Party was the main opponent from the right. She reneged on the left who voted for her by being a sloppy politician but the Liberals saw themselves absolutely sapped. In reaction, the Liberals appointed Raj Sherman as their leader and he has been an absolute travesty of a leader. Very single-issue without providing any semblance of leadership. He resigned a while ago but the party is in pieces. The collapse of Laurie Blakeman was just a sad affair. She brought the GSA issue up in legislature last fall but when Prentice tried to renege her bill, she fell apart. Just absolutely fell apart. Weeping and blubbering on the media. Fast forward four or five months later, she does the inexplainable by announcing that she is running for all three parties while continuing to weep and blubber. Just weird.

Okay, the GSA issue, Rachel Notley of the NDP won on that issue. Quite handily. When Prentice sought to scupper Blakeman's bill, Notley surprisingly took a very prominent role in grilling the new premier on the issue, including why there were provisions to allow the school boards to decide whether or not they were going to allow the GSAs in their school (remember, Alberta has botha secular public school system and a publicly funded Catholic school system.) Prentice relented and rescinded the provisions that described letting the boards decide on GSA. Notley actually being there has impressed me with her leadership skills there, especially as the other opposition parties are in tatters.

Wildrose? They had a great disappearing act going on there but how that happened has angered a lot of people. I will be prepared to see a lot of people vote for them. I hope they do. Take a big chunk out of what the Tories have been able to take for granted for so long.

And that's the field. There is the Greens. Don't know much about them and they don't have the big names like the federal Green Party. Oh well.

So yeah, the horses are out. The wild rose has turned into a fetid titan arum. Life is wonderful.

Only in the American political dialect. Progressive has always been right of Liberal in Canada.

LJD said:

This is what I find so weird about Alberta politics. The same party is always in power...

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The biggest problem in Alberta is developing the counter-story. Western alienation is a very strong force in Alberta politics and it helped thrust the UFA into power in 1922 Whenever a party loses the plot, another party takes up a stronger tack on the western alienation allowing members from the crumbling party to jump ship to the new party. That was also the trick the Prentice government's early days when they allowed Wildrose party members (including their leader) to jump onto their ship. The biggest problem is that there is not enough people estranged from that Western Alienation or no one knows how to enunciate it for broad appeal.

An article about pollsters coming across the problem of "majority of error", which is when you no longer have a margin of error but knowledge that what you have is simply incorrect. Polls in this decade in the province (and increasingly in British Columbia) are showing signs that polling methods are returning erroneous results and one cannot make any decisions based upon them.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news...crutiny+after+2012+fiasco/10957659/story.html

As much as we can't trust polls in this election, there are a few conclusions that can be more assured to say:

1) the polls are suggesting that Albertans are much more tempted to change their votes/voting patterns.

2) the Alberta Liberals and the Alberta Party, two moderate parties, are collapsing.

There are a couple polls which are suggesting that the NDP may be leading in Calgary of all places. Will have to see.

Latest 308 article is reading that the PCs are heading into firmer third-place territory. What was once a battle for second place has now become a three-horse race.

http://www.threehundredeight.com/2015/04/momentum-with-notleys-ndp-in-alberta.html#comment-form

So Alberta's Justice Minister, Jonathan Denis was caught vandalising his own signs. Apparently he has done similar antics previously when running in University of Saskatchewan elections or something decades back.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/c...-campaign-signs-to-read-jonathan-penis-744294

The results of the debate tonight:

It wasn’t even close.

Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley won the debate.

Wildrose Party Leader Brian Jean won over voters.

And Progressive Conservative leader Jim Prentice won the ire of every female in the room when he turned to Notley and said: “I know that math is difficult.”

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http://news.nationalpost.com/news/c...-subtract-voters-for-alberta-pcs-jim-prentice

There is a bit of excitement in the air. There is a strong possibility that we may see the end of the Progressive Conservative dynasty in Alberta. We don't know if it will be a minority or who will take the minority but there is a sense of change in the air. Maybe. Election day is on Tuesday.

All projections are pointing to an NDP majority. If that is true, it would mean the fall of the PC dynasty. Will vote later today.

Cast my vote and now I play the waiting game for the results.

That is one angry flower!

A (humourous) review:

The 2015 election was supposed to be boring. Tedious, even. Jim Prentice decided to flout the province's fixed-date election law because all the astrological signs pointed to an easy, uncomplicated win. Sure, a tanking economy is generally not a good time for a governing party to head to the polls, but it's not like anyone appeared ready to keep the Progressive Conservatives from racking up another monster majority government.

The main opposition—the Wildrose Alliance Party, a rural, right-wing protest party—had been decapitated a few months earlier in the largest and most outrageous floor-crossing in Canadian political history, when opposition leader Danielle Smith and all her high-profile colleagues decided they'd rather be on the winning team. Its new leader, a man named Brian Jean who rocks a bargain-bin televangelist haircut, was a virtual nobody and was at the helm for less than a month. The Liberals hadn't been a serious contender in over 20 years, the Alberta Party pretty much only exists on Twitter, and it would be literally insane to seriously believe anyone was going to vote for the New Democrats outside of some disaffected Trotskyists in downtown Edmonton.

All in all, it seemed like a pretty good time to for Prentice to pull the trigger.

And then.... well, shit went off the rails. The rest is history.

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http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/albe...s=10153878684165616&fb_action_types=og.shares

Captcha said:

I'm pretty shocked. Like someone said upthread, it's like Texas elected a left-of-Democratic government.

It's going to be VERY interesting!

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On one hand, the NDP can trace their roots to Calgary during the 1930s when the agrarian social reform movements were taking hold. The CCF and the Social Credit's rise to power coincided with each other, but Alberta went with the Social Credit and Saskatchewan went with the CCF. The Socreds were quite taken to the left. Aberhart was quite left-wing, even if he was taken to many extreme religious positions. Ernest Manning was left wing too for quite the time but as time went on, the Socreds became the party of old men who could not get behind the social revolution of the 1960s and were thus seen as very right wing. Lougheed was seen as being on the left of Ernest Manning and Harry Strom.

The key to remember about Alberta is that it is a very populist jurisdiction. The victory of Brownlee over the Liberal opposition led by John Boyle in 1926 paved the way for Alberta prefering populist leaders. After Brownlee left in 1934, Bible Bill Aberhart, who ran a radio show preaching, would take power in 1936. After Aberhart died, Ernest Manning continued the tradition of preaching on radio while being premier. Lougheed was populist and so was Klein.

onuilmar said:

Just out of curiosity, what was the turnout? Or did your normal conservatives up there just decided to throw the bums out? Or did they just sit on their hands and the only ones voting were libs?

Must confess that I get lost in some of the party designations up north. But I do get left and right.

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The turnout was the highest since 1993, just short of 60%.

The conservatives were split between the Wildrose Party and the Progressive Conservative Party while the progressives bolted from the big tent of the PCs to the New Democratic Party.