Alberta voters deliver clear message

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/05/2015 (3816 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let’s get this straight.

Voters in Alberta — the land of black gold, sales tax-free purchasing and prairie populist ideology — turned the tables on their right-wing overlords to elect an NDP majority government that promised to raise taxes on corporations, the very rich and oil companies.

Pre-election surveys told us this was going to happen. The pundits that do seat projections said it was going to happen. However, we’ve been burned before by voters that make late, dramatic decisions to switch support.

As a result, the country could still act genuinely shocked this morning when the full-extent of this remarkable, alarming result was confirmed.

Now, we need to put some work into deducing what it all means. Over the coming days and weeks, we’ll be treated to all kinds of political, economic and demographic analyses that will seek to explain Alberta’s orange uprising.

There will be those, mostly the losers, who will take comfort from the fact that slightly more than half of all votes cast in Tuesday’s election went to right-wing or right of right wing parties. It’s true the Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose Party together got more votes than the now-governing NDP.

However, the right-wing, vote-splitting caveat ignores the fact that more Albertans voted in this election and that more of them voted NDP than in any previous election.

It takes a few days to finalize numbers, but media outlets in Alberta were estimating a record turnout of 1.5 million, or nearly 59 per cent of those eligible to vote. That is the best performance in Alberta in 22 years, and nearly five points better than turnout in 2012.

Before this election, the best NDP result was the 218,000 votes it received in 1989; in this election, the NDP received more than 603,000 votes.

In many ways, Alberta was ripe for change. Over the past decade, Alberta has become arguably the most important province in the federation. Incredible wealth driven by lofty oil prices put Alberta ahead of other provinces in terms of economic influence. But it wasn’t just economics that made Alberta so powerful.

In politics, Alberta populists rose to prominence in a united, right-of-centre political party. Ottawa may have been the national capital, but policy and ideology was being driven by politicians from Calgary.

What changed? The most salient event was the precipitous drop in oil prices that eviscerated government revenues and, in the process, revealed Alberta to be just as economically vulnerable as other provinces.

Along with its economic woes, Alberta was sending out early signs that its politics was evolving as well. Alberta became one of the fastest growing provinces in the country, and easily the youngest, as university grads and entrepreneurs alike arrived to seek their fortunes. This influx of new blood led to an evolution in the province’s traditional political ideology.

Edmonton and Calgary both elected young, dynamic and politically complex mayors who did not look or sound at all like Tory cabinet ministers in waiting.

However, the thing that may have pushed Albertans over the edge to embrace change like never before was a Tory premier with a penchant for profound, explicit spasms of frankness.

Premier Jim Prentice will forever be remembered for ending the PC Party’s historic run of 12 consecutive majority governments. And for his off-the-cuff remarks that Albertans were themselves to blame for the fiscal crisis that was threatening to bury the provincial treasury in billions of dollars in debt.

Prentice’s choice of words will be debated for decades. But his message was sound: Alberta had gone for nearly 20 years without having to make any tough decisions because of steady revenues generated by overheated oil prices.

The tragic irony for Prentice is that, having promised minor tax increases to address a $5-billion budget deficit, he was ultimately defeated by an NDP leader — Rachel Notley — who campaigned on bigger and broader tax increases.

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Notley’s majority mandate is proof that voters, especially those who return to vote after years of ignoring elections, have something to say about fiscal policy. In particular, that austerity alone is not the preferred option. Canadians are willing to pay more to protect the services they hold dear.

Despite his plan to increase some taxes and fees, Prentice would not increase the levies on corporations, choosing instead to cut back on health care and education. Prentice clearly did not understand that Alberta has outgrown the lower-taxes, smaller-government rhetoric of his predecessors.

Will this result have consequences for this fall’s federal election? Alberta, easily the most conservative province in the nation, saw voters reject a plan based on the assumption that higher taxes were a greater evil than cutbacks in services. In short, voters disagreed.

Federal Conservatives will likely dismiss the result as a one-off anomaly. But all those people who thought a NDP government in Alberta was unfathomable know better now.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.ca