Analysis of Alberta election

The Daily Twigg  Vol. 1 No. 42  Apr. 30, 2012

B.C. Politics Trendwatch
Alberta's confounding election result
holds big lessons for B.C.'s parties too

By John Twigg

With the benefit of hindsight and the analyses of others I think I can say now what really happened in that weird Alberta provincial election in which Premier Alison Redford and the Progressive Conservatives confounded the pundits and pollsters by winning another large majority while the upstart Wildrose Alliance Party snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

It may be a bit late to be doing such analysis (the election was on April 23) but it's still important because some key aspects could well be repeated and/or avoided by several parties and players in British Columbia's general election scheduled for May 14, 2013 - and anyway lots of other media and pundits are still discussing the matter too.

In short, WRAP leader Danielle Smith blew it because in her inexperience she let herself become infected by the arrogance of Premier Stephen Harper and his majority Conservative government, many of whose members were openly backing WRAP candidates following Harper's unusual move to remove his ban on federal Tories engaging in provincial politics, which he did partly because so many of his Alberta colleagues wanted to support WRAP's hard-c conservative platform and partly because in the B.C. byelections on April 19 Harper and his colleagues realized or decided that the best or only way to stop a future New Democratic Party government was to support the coalition called B.C. Liberal Party and not support the upstart hard-c conservative party called B.C. Conservative Party.

Got all that? The party names may change from province to province but the ideological songs remain the same: paramount!

Many analysts with vested interests have been quick to conclude that the Alberta election turned on a dime due mainly to their own issues, so the environmental activists claim the key issue was Smith's arrogant complete denial of global warming and other related issues including her party leaflets sneering at "environmental extremists".

Similarly, gay activists claimed the key issue was the late-in-campaign revelations that a WRAP candidate who was also a pastor had claimed in a posted sermon that homosexuals would be punished by eternal torment in the lake of fire, which Smith vainly tried to defend as his right to say as a pastor even though politically it is stupid and scripturally it is wrong. (The punishment stated in the Bible in Rev. 21:8 is not eternal torment but is a so-called second death in a lake of fire and that is the same merciful quick death that billions of other non-homosexual sinners including false preachers will get, as opposed to qualifying for eternal life. There is some eternal torment mentioned in Revelation 14 but it will apply only to those humans who choose to worship a yet-to-be-seen beast power who will rise up in rebellion against God.)

But even those two hot-button issues were not the only main factors in WRAP's defeat, and Smith herself also cited poorly-explained plans for a provincial police force, a provincial pension plan, conscience rights and approaches to oil industry pollution. Plus there were other issues too such as fiddling with Medicare and planning to scrap the Human Rights Commission that contributed to an apparent turnaround by voters in the last few days of the campaign.

So how did Wildrose build up such a large lead in early opinion polls and then apparently squander it all in the latter days? Well after 11 consecutive majority governments for the Progressive Conservatives and their choice of a very moderate new leader (who happened to be a woman) there was understandably some desire for regime change, especially because there were questions about some mismanaged issues - and then out of the south there came a new reform movement (all puns intended!) espousing a form of populist conservatism that felt and sounded a lot like the Harper Conservatives' mantras and though the party had only a handful of candidates with elected experience they had several skilled backroom advisers and a photogenic leader who looked and sounded more than a bit like American Sarah Palin (though as journalist Andrew Nikiforuk pointed out Smith was only a pale imitation and showed none of Palin's willingness to challenge authorities such as Palin did in sometimes fighting the oil industry in Alaska).

The media soon got a hold of the story and suddenly a juggernaut was born: out of nowhere an upstart party was going to win a large majority - if the polls were to be believed, and why not when dozens of different polls all found more or less the same thing. But apparently almost everyone overlooked the fact found afterwards by Angus Reid pollsters that an amazing 39% of voters decided their choices in the last three days.

Though Wildrose started strongly, once the campaign reached the stage of all-candidates and leaders debates the wheels began getting wobbly under WRAP's cart and by voting day they had simply fallen off; their momentum was gone.

Reports suggest the beginning of the decline was Smith's failure to more firmly deal with the clearly anti-homosexual candidate; to her credit (in the eyes of some pundits such as Andrew Coyne and Michael Den Tandt) she did defend the right of free speech for theologians but to her debit she failed to convince Albertans that under her leadership there would be zero tolerance of discrimination or abuse of human rights. Then that controversy was quickly followed by one in which a WRAP candidate claimed he had an advantage because he was a white guy running against visible minorities, which she also mishandled by treating too lightly, mainly dismissing it as a mis-speak by a rookie politician.

The turning point though appeared to be the main leaders debate on the evening of Thursday April 19 before a live audience in the CBC's Edmonton studios - which is about as left-leaning as one can get in Alberta and sure enough featured a mob booing and almost wanting to lynch Smith because she dared to doubt the supposed science of global warming though she did advocate measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which NDP leader Brian Mason ridiculed with outrage while the urban audience cheered.

It didn't help that in the final days of the campaign Smith seemed to tour aimlessly by bus in a bubble through Conservative strongholds while the national media, especially the Toronto Globe and Mail, threw numerous smears at her, such as on April 21 with columnists Margaret Wente citing "a party full of bigots and climate-change deniers" and Jeffrey Simpson warning of plans "to build 'firewalls' around the province" - i.e. threats to cut off equalization payments.

Other notable media slams included a Den Tandt column on April 19 headlined "Wildrose win wouldn't be as scary as some say" and Simpson on April 20 headlined "Nothing's rosy for climate if Wildrose wins".

Also notable in retrospect was the Globe's edition of Saturday April 14 which featured a nasty profile of Smith topped by an unflattering photo and accompanied by brief profiles of some candidates including one of journalist Link Byfield that unfairly smeared him as anti-Semitic.

So now we can more clearly see that what happened in the Alberta election was this: an upstart conservative movement developed an overly-simplistic platform that appealed to lots of people but once the mainstream media exposed the flaws in it a large proportion of voters went to the more moderate incumbent in order to stop them.

In the end the Progressive Conservatives won 61 seats with 44% of the votes, Wildrose won only 17 seats with 34%, the Liberals 5 seats with about 10% and the New Democrats 4 seats (up two to regain official party status) with 10%.

That was a big turnaround from early in the campaign when several pollsters had Wildrose at about 45% and the PCs at only 31%, though that apparently ignored a reality that there was a very large undecided and that campaign tactics could still swing many voters.

The turnout was up sharply to 57% too, the highest since 1993, which further suggests that many Alberta voters were stampeded into stopping Wildrose, which is especially reflected in the realtive weakness of the Liberal and NDP results.

It should also be noted that PC leader Alison Redford is a very red Tory, a politically-correct lawyer who won the party leadership with the assistance of flocks of teachers who joined simply to support her bid. Though she was criticized for being too liberal, that proved to be her greatest strength.

So while some headlines referred to Redford extending a 41-year dynasty, really it was a regime change inside the province's natural governing party, or Alberta's version of a free-enterprise coalition. And though Redford denied her win was due to strategic voting, that is exactly what happened: hordes of moderate people voted for a moderate regime called Progressive Conservative in order to thwart a radical conservative party.

Implications for B.C. politics

The implications of that result for B.C. politics could be huge, especially warning that the B.C. Conservative Party led by John Cummins will not have any success unless and until it too turns "red Tory" and eschews the Bible-thumping fundamentalism of some of its progenitors. It certainly is valid for its supporters to personally hold theologically-based principles but trying to use politics to impose them on society as a whole is simply a no-go non-starter, which also was somewhat reflected in the recent byelections.

But there's also a big lesson for B.C. Premier Christy Clark and her B.C. Liberal Party, namely that trying to masquerade as more conservative than the Conservatives is futile and really her and their best chance lies in the middle, building a big tent that will appeal to moderates of both left and right. That is what Redford did and look what it produced!

So Clark needs to do more like her first act in office: raise the minimum wage after a ridiculous, crazy and unconscionable 10-year freeze by her predecessor, and less pandering to Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his big-oil politics.

As for B.C.'s New Democrats, there should be lessons too, including that campaign tactics are still critical, and that having a moderate platform attractive to a broad range of voters is essential to avoiding a stop-them stampede by voters. And that they should be prepared to quickly counter smears from the mainstream media, especially out-of-province ones.

"We were focused on delivering a positive constructive plan that made sense to the people of Alberta to build our future,” Redford said on election night, and that's something all parties should emulate.

And let there be lessons for the pollsters too, some of whom seemed to get caught up in a game of being first to accurately predict an outlandish result, and some of whom went too far in predicting what the numbers would produce. Remember the surveys measure "if an election was held today" not in the election still several weeks away.

It is all too easy and tempting to make rash predictions, such as I did with a hope that the Canucks would win round one in five games, but when pollsters are dealing with the public interest they should be more cautious and circumspect, and not forget to report the undecided numbers too.

Finally, let's not overlook the impact of new media such as Twitter and Facebook, which are making the dissemination of information ever more rapid and wider. Even though many voters are still not involved in social media, those who are tend to be opinion leaders and they need to be cultivated like a special crop.
 

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/04/27/redfords-debt-to-albertas-left

http://ezralevant.com/2012/04/the-undertaker-alberta-premier.html

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