Delayed election call cost the Alberta PCs some momentum.
by Ricardo Acuña for Vue Weekly
Albertans — well, at least some Albertans — will go to the polls on April 23 to elect a provincial government. In many ways the dropping of the writ was simply a formality. Alberta's political parties have been in full-out election mode since early fall, when Alison Redford was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, and was subsequently sworn in as Alberta's 14th Premier. Candidates have been nominated, signs have been ordered, campaign offices are open and functioning, and candidates and their volunteers have been knocking on doors for a couple of months now.
Despite the fact that everyone knew an election call was coming, the one person in the province with control over exactly when it would be is the only one who appears to have been tripped up by the timing of the election.
Almost immediately after Ms Redford's win in the leadership race, poll after poll began showing Conservative numbers climbing steadily. The province-wide polling numbers went from a virtual dead heat between Conservatives and the Wildrose Party last spring to putting the Conservatives back into comfortable majority government range after the holidays.
Polls conducted in January consistently put the Conservatives in the 40 to 45 percent range for popular support, with the Wildrose Party hovering in the 30 percent range. The New Democrats and Liberals both regularly registered 12 to 14 percent.
Had Redford called the election immediately after the tabling of the provincial budget in early February, these poll numbers would likely have translated into another Conservative majority government with just a handful of opposition MLAs in the Legislature, primarily from Wildrose and NDP.
It is common practice for governments to table a budget and call an election before it gets debated or voted on. This minimizes the amount of public scrutiny to which the budget is subjected, and allows the governing party to use the budget as a type of platform document during the election itself.
Instead of the PCs heading into an election riding high in the polls and with momentum on their side, the opposite dynamic is at play.
For some reason, however, Ms Redford decided against this strategy. She determined, instead, that it would be best to hold a full spring session of the legislature, debate and vote on the budget, and try to get a number of other contentious bills passed in the process. The result of this decision has been something of a disaster for the premier and her party.
Over the course of the six week spring session, serious evidence of public institutions illegally donating to the Conservatives was made public, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation very effectively exposed the committee that was being paid despite not meeting, and Redford called an investigation into questionable fundraising by her trade envoy to Asia, Gary Mar. There was huge public outcry when she moved the goal-posts on the promised judicial inquiry into health care, one of her MLAs announced his retirement a week before the election, and to wrap up the session, they failed to pass the new Education Act after coming under attack from the extremist right and the Wildrose Party.
So now, instead of heading into an election riding high in the polls and with momentum on their side, the opposite dynamic is at play. Recent polling shows the Conservatives lost five to seven percent province-wide in the month after the budget was released.
Interestingly, most of the polling conducted in the lead-up to the election had those points lost by the Conservatives migrate to the Liberals rather than to the Wildrose, who had actually remained steady in the 30 percent range throughout most of January and February. This would suggest that for most of that period the message of the Wildrose Party was not resonating with Conservative supporters, who appeared much more likely to seek out another centre-right alternative rather than move all the way over to the far right.
A new poll released by Ipsos on the day the writ was dropped, however, shows that perhaps this trend shifted in the last week before the election. The poll, which was in the field between March 20 and 25 has the PCs and the Wildrose both at 38 percent province-wide, with the NDs and Liberals back at 12 and 11 percent respectively. Electorally those numbers still likely translate to a Conservative majority, but not a terribly comfortable one.
How all of this will play out over the course of the election remains to be seen, but from this vantage point on the first few days of the race, it really does appear that the Conservatives remain in the driver's seat and that it's theirs to lose. Of course, as we've seen over the last month, 28 days is a very long time and anything can happen. Either way, one thing is sure: it will be a much more interesting election than we have seen in some time in this province.
Website: http://www.ualberta.ca/parkland/
About Ricardo Acuña
Ricardo Acuña is Executive Director of the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan public policy research institute housed at the University of Alberta.
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