In a teeter-totter effect, the return to majority rule at the federal level has spelled the beginning of the end for a period of continuity in the larger provinces.
One would look in vain in the entrails of last May’s federal vote for an ideological pattern to the trends that are reshaping the political landscapes of Alberta, British Columbia and Quebec.
In all three provinces, voters are marching to a beat that bears little or no resemblance to that of the drums that brought Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to government and the NDP to official opposition last spring.
In Alberta, the flip side of a united federal Conservative party has been a divided provincial family within which a Tory dynasty led by premier Alison Redford is struggling to fend off a challenge from the right-wing purists regrouped under the Wildrose flag of Danielle Smith.
But in neighbouring British Columbia, it is the NDP that is on the move. A set of byelections on Thursday saw Adrian Dix’s New Democrats take two former Liberal bastions.
In Quebec — the ground zero of an unprecedented sovereigntist rout only a year ago — the Parti Québécois has built a solid lead in voting intentions.
A students’ strike has festered for more than two months and the ability of Jean Charest’s Liberal government to maintain the social peace is increasingly in question.
And then the first major wave of arrests triggered by a police investigation into corruption has yielded suspects with too many links to the Quebec Liberal party for government comfort. Those arrested over the past week include a former candidate and the party’s 2010 “volunteer of the year.”
In fact, the list of names already associated with both allegations of corruption and the provincial Liberal machine is on the way to exceeding the number of federal Liberals fingered over the course of the sponsorship scandal — and that’s before a public inquiry really gets underway.
This weekend, a symposium designed to put the spotlight on Charest’s Plan Nord in the lead-up to a possible election call is unfolding against the backdrop of student demonstrations and under the cloud of a Radio-Canada investigative report that suggests collusion and influence peddling are spreading to the premier’s pet project.
The ongoing shift in the provincial tectonic plates in Central and Western Canada is not taking place in silos.
Led as it is by its most fragile government in more than two decades, Ontario is hardly immune to the tides of change. Nor would anyone describe Queen’s Park as an oasis of stability these days. On the contrary.
The advent of a sovereigntist government in Quebec always impacts on the national conversation. The possible annihilation of Charest’s Liberals in the next Quebec campaign would leave the province without a fully functioning mainstream federalist party.
But the arrival on the scene of a strongly autonomous Alberta Wildrose government at a time when the province is central to both the fortunes of the current federal government and the health of the country’s economy would be no less of a watershed event.
Monday’s Alberta results could also set the stage for a major collision between that province and British Columbia over energy exports.
Clouds are accumulating on the unity front in Quebec.
An ongoing fiscal storm is raising political volatility to new heights in Ontario.
A showdown that would pit the joint energy dreams of the Harper and Alberta governments against the environmental nightmares of a New Democrat British Columbia could be in the making.
The so-called era of stability that last year’s federal election was purported to bring on could be about to become anything but that.
Original Article
Source: Star
Author: Chantal Hébert
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