If the Tories were rattled by the results of last Monday’s Alberta election, they did an admirable job of hiding it.
“Eighty per cent of Albertans voted Conservative,” said MP Blaine Calkins (Wetaskiwin, Alta.), chair of his party’s Alberta caucus, brushing off the suggestion that his home province had made a left turn with Ms. Redford’s re-election.
Mr. Calkins’ home province saw a significant spike in voter turnout for last week’s contest—57 per cent, up from 40 per cent in 2008. The Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose combined for nearly 80 per cent of the vote, while provincial New Democrats and Liberals combined for nearly 20 per cent of the popular vote. The PCs garnered 44 per cent of ballots cast, while the Wildrose claimed 34.5 per cent, but the results translated into a strong mandate for Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservatives.
Although the Wildrose bolstered its seat count more than fourfold from four MLAs to 17, it was a far cry from the majority government that had been predicted throughout the campaign. Ms. Redford’s PCs lost 11 of the 72 seats they won under the leadership of then-premier Ed Stelmach in 2008, but still came away with a commanding 61 seat majority in the now 87 seat Alberta Legislature.
From the outset the five-year old Wildrose Alliance Party was an imminent threat to the Progressive Conservatives’ 41-year dynasty. Throughout the four-week campaign the populist-revival Wildrose led Alberta’s natural governing party by a healthy 10-point spread in polls conducted daily, but on election day it was a landslide upset for the PCs.
While most of the federal Tories’ 26-member Alberta caucus stayed tight-lipped on their allegiances during the provincial campaign, it was an open secret that the Wildrose Alliance had strong support among Ottawa’s Alberta Conservative set.
Many members within the federal Tories’ Alberta caucus have careers that go back to the days of the Reform Party and the Canadian Alliance, and Wildrose was seen as a revival of the populist sentiment that once spurred those same factions.
Conservative MP Rob Anders (Calgary West, Alta.) had told The Hill Times in the lead up to the April 23 contest that the majority of his federal colleagues were leaning towards the Wildrose and shying away from making pronouncements of support for the apparently outbound PCs.
Conservative MP Brent Rathgeber (Edmonton-St. Alberta, Alta.), who declined to comment on which party he supported during the election, told The Hill Times that the result was good for Alberta and Canada.
“I think it’s a good outcome—a centrist premier with a fiscally conservative leader of the opposition holding her to account,” said Mr. Rathgeber, a former PC Alberta MLA who acknowledged that he had friends running for both parties during the election.
On federal-provincial relations, Mr. Rathgeber said that Premier Redford deserved credit for making “overt attempts to restore functional federal-provincial relations,” in comparison to Mr. Stelmach, who led the PCs and the province from 2006 to 2011.
Conservative MP Jim Hillyer (Lethbridge, Alta.) also downplayed any potential rift between Ottawa and Edmonton following the campaign. His federal riding, which encompasses four provincial ridings, was split 50-50 between the PCs and Wildrose.
Mr. Hillyer said that a Wildrose victory would have meant a “big difference” for how Alberta was governed, but suggested that federal-provincial relations would have followed the status quo.
“Since our Conservative government has been in charge, Albertans are far less upset about provincial-federal relations,” Mr. Hillyer told The Hill Times following last Tuesday’s Question Period.
The Wildrose Party ran on a campaign to downsize the Alberta government and limit its federal obligations. The party promised to withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan and create its own Alberta Pension Plan, establish a provincial police force to replace the RCMP within the province, open up the province’s health-care system to allow for more privatized services, and take on the current federally-imposed equalization system.
The policies were reminiscent of the now famous Alberta Firewall letter, a set of Alberta-centric policy recommendations that were delivered in 2001 to then-premier Ralph Klein, and signed by National Citizens’ Coalition president Stephen Harper and political strategist Tom Flanagan, among other leading architects of Alberta’s conservative movement.
Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, who publicly said she is pro-choice and in support of same-sex marriage during her campaign, also defended the contrary socially conservative views of some of her candidates on the grounds of free speech, and supported the idea of “conscience rights,” which would allow physicians and other professionals to deny services based on personal conviction. Ms. Smith also raised doubts over climate change science during her campaign.
Ms. Redford’s campaign was led by Stephen Carter, who also managed Naheed Nenshi’s successful Calgary mayoralty election win.
The policies were a far cry from those of the Progressive Conservatives, who in seven months with Ms. Redford as leader have been transformed into a party of grand social programs and aspirations of a greater national leadership role.
Mr. Anders, who fended off a nomination challenge from Ms. Redford in his riding of Calgary West in 2004, said that a Wildrose victory would have meant more independence from federal oversight for his home province.
“Quebec goes its own way on a lot of programs. Had the Wildrose won government in Alberta, it probably would have said that it’s time for Alberta to look at that in a more serious way,” said Mr. Anders, who was unabashed in his support for the Wildrose during the election.
Mr. Anders described the contest as a “cleverly-fought election,” and suggested that Wildrose was defeated by an “anybody-but-Wildrose-coalition” of former Liberal and NDP supporters who abandoned their parties for the Redford PCs.
Mr. Anders said that the coalition was solidified by some 1.5 million phone calls placed by the Alberta Federation of Labour in the final days of the campaign. Although the calls did not support a particular party, the calls polled respondents on their support for Wildrose’s privatized health care policy. The Edmonton Sun reported that unanswered calls were left with a message from AFL president Gil McGowan stating, “If you care about medicare, Wildrose is not the answer.”
The Progressive Conservatives are now a “fairly unstable, untenable coalition” after losing half their base to the Wildrose, said Mr. Anders.
“I think she’s more progressive than she is conservative,” Mr. Anders observed of his former challenger and current premier. “It’ll be interesting to see how the remainder of the conservative base reacts to that. The unions made millions of phone calls. On what conditions?”
Independent Conservative MP Peter Goldring (Edmonton East, Alta.), first elected in 1997 and who has served as a Reform, Canadian Alliance and Conservative MP, described Wildrose supporters in the Tories’ Alberta caucus as “profoundly disappointed” after the party’s collapse.
Mr. Goldring said that the Wildrose campaign made pivotal mistakes in the final week of the election by getting caught up in social conservative messages that “turned people off completely.”
“[Y]ou’ve got some traction but you lose it quickly by some stupid mistakes in the last two weeks,” said Mr. Goldring, recalling personal experiences from his 15 year career as an MP. “You cannot have those type of mistakes, and [Wildrose] made some of them in this campaign in the latter stages of it, unfortunately.”
Mr. Goldring, who describes himself as “still a Conservative, true and blue,” would not put a number on how many of his fellow Alberta MPs supported Wildrose, but said that the number was “significant.”
“They wanted to see change—it’s a sense and a feeling,” Mr. Goldring told The Hill Times. “There’s a need for change, and the change didn’t really happen, did it?”
If there’s a rift between Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives and the federal Tories, Ms. Redford also did her best to hide it following her party’s victory last week.
“From my perspective, the campaign is over and we have work to do on federal-provincial relations and to keep growing Canada,” Ms. Redford told media following a congratulatory phone call from Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Calgary Southwest, Alta.) on April 24. “[D]uring this campaign what we were doing as Progressive Conservatives was setting out a vision for this province that we believe is socially progressive and fiscally conservative—that allows us to succeed.”
Original Article
Source: hill times
Author: CHRIS PLECASH
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