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Off The Fence: Will the Conservative government lose power next election?
Susan Thompson
for Smoky River Express
Let’s face it. Alberta’s politics are not usually very interesting.
The conservative political geography of our province has remained relatively unchanged for the past 38 years.
There’s a reason. Alberta has always been blessed with an abundance of natural resources. In boom times, it’s easy to get complacent. Nobody wants to mess with success while life is good and the oil money is still filling everyone’s wallets. Never mind that our Conservative government had nothing to do with putting the oil in the ground. For years, voting Conservative has simply been what Albertans do in an attempt to hang on to the goose that sits on the golden egg.
Our current Premier Ed Stelmach himself came to power in a landslide victory shaken loose in large part by another oil boom, taking the Tories to their eleventh straight win.
That election also had a historically low voter turnout. Why bother voting, after all, if you know nothing will change? Or, as the government preferred to say, why bother voting if you think the government is doing a great job?
Yet today there are some signs of cracks in the venerable crust of our political landscape.
The reason? Put simply, the good life isn’t so good anymore. The twin Alberta Advantage of jobs and oil money have eroded away in a global economic recession. Our huge provincial surplus has yo-yoed to become an almost-as-huge provincial deficit. Natural gas prices have tanked, and drilling isn’t expected to resume next year despite a recovering oil price.
People are losing, or have lost, their jobs, and EI isn’t necessarily there to help those Albertans survive until they can replace them.
Then there’s health care. The new health superboard has been an exercise in confusing and uncaring – not to mention ineffective – bureaucracy. The global flu pandemic has made that abundantly clear. Faced with a debacle created by mixed government messages coupled with a reduced supply, Albertans suddenly found themselves getting angry enough to question if the government really did know how to run their health care system.
It can sometimes take a crisis to shake up the political landscape. Albertans have now been hit right where it hurts by not one but two crises, and tremors of discontent are putting the formerly unshakeable Tories on unsteady ground.
The government is at its lowest level of popular support in 16 years.
Meanwhile, the Wildrose Alliance won a surprise victory in the Calgary by-election and the latest polls show the Wildrose Alliance catching up to the ruling Conservatives, taking second place in political support and bumping the Liberals right out of contention.
There is no question the sudden popularity of the party is due to widespread discontent with the government. Worse, as a right-wing party with a strong rural base, the upstart party is more of a threat to the ruling Tories than any party has been for some time. That’s even with only one measly MLA actually elected so far.
Nothing to worry about, the Tories have said.
They know what will most likely happen is that the tremors of discontent will once again die away without damaging their dynasty.
Indeed, Premier Stelmach survived a leadership review on Nov. 6 with comfortable support, and an actual election is still two years away. By then, we may well have settled back into comfortable prosperity. The flu pandemic will also be over and consigned to history.
The question is simply whether Albertans will have been shaken awake long enough to commit to actually going to the polls when that next election rolls around.
If so, the Tories may well be facing an earthquake instead of a landslide.
After all, even the mighty dinosaurs didn’t rule forever.
However, considering the second choice of Albertans is another right-wing party, even then it will hardly be a political continental shift.
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