April 17, 2019 - Loonie Politics

Looks like it's another swing and a miss for me, folks. I really and truly thought Kenney was going to get shellacked. I thought the lines he crossed, accidentally and on purpose, were red lines.

But the Canada that tossed aside conservative leaders one after another, for far lesser offences, appears to be gone. Hell, the Alberta that nuked the Wild Rose over homophobic blog posts, that returned Naheed Nenshi to office, is gone. The wind, and the window, has shifted. We can now be sure of that.

The first thing we can surmise from the UCP victory is that the anger out there is real. The leader that captures that lightning in a bottle carries the day.

Doug Ford, Francois Legault, and now Jason Kenney won by tapping that well. We're not at the stage where we can let the crazy flags fly yet, but we're getting there. Controlled populism, rather than full on anti-government madness, is what's called for.

But it's also clear that Canadians want decisive leadership. Swiftly dealing with bozo eruptions now earns you points. Taking punches from the centre- like Kenney did from his friend Charles Adler- and bouncing back strengthens you.

The NDP, for their part, needs to abandon all hope of holding the middle ground. Motley ran a vicious campaign, but she tried to remain personally above the fray. She could have harnessed the power of the hard left. She chose not to. Like it or not, this loss will serve as a
powerful argument in favour of the loudest and angriest voices in the NDP camp.

But there are still a few questions left unanswered. The NDP are not the Liberals. They may have laid claim to the Lougheed legacy, but they lacked the institutional credibility that allows you to weather a storm like the one that blew through Alberta's economy. Peter Lougheed
faced down oil busts. Rachel Notley couldn't.

That's bad news for mild-mannered Andrew Scheer. Now more than ever, he's got to take the fight to Trudeau in October. He has to get a little mad if he wants to get even. He's been handed a gift in the form of LavScam, and he should go full tilt in running with it. The question is: can he?

We also need to see the results of a few more provincial elections before we can conclude whether the voters are willing to punish successive governments until they find one that works. They voted in the NDP, and then voted them out. This could hold true for upstart parties of the right as well. Ford and Legault can count themselves lucky, but they'd better rely on more than luck if they want to be re-elected.

And it must be said: the curse of female Premiers failing to win re-election is real. It did bring Notley down. Trudeau might well get away with being a fake feminist, simply because he himself is a (completely inadequate) man. I don't like it, but there it is.

Thinking more broadly about the state of the conservative movement Kenney's win means that it's unlikely to develop any further than being a vehicle for rage against the progressive machine. No organizing principle, or conservative principle, other than "Orange
Woman Bad", guided the UCP's march to victory. Well, other than flying together in tight formation.

And that enforced Unity means bad news for those Albertans hoping for freedom of political speech once Premier Kenney takes the front bench. We'll likely see more punishment of dissenters and those that refuse to be team players, or play poorly. Look forward to centralized
message control, repetition of slogans, and standing ovations.

And finally expect a growth and hardening of political partisanship. This has been the one thing that's remained consistent. Ideology has not completely trumped competence or civility yet in Canadian politics, but parties are becoming zealous ideologies unto themselves. We've lost this particular moral high ground over our neighbours to the south a long time ago, and it's only now becoming obvious.

Photo Credit: Times Colonist

Written by Josh Lieblein

The views, opinions and positions expressed by columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of our publication.

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The demise of Rachel Notley's NDP government in Alberta was not only predictable, but predicted. Once the Alberta Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties decided that, whatever their differences might have been, they were not worth giving a chance for the New Democrats to survive, it was game, set and match.

Of course, one cannot take anything for granted, least of all victory. There was never any guarantee that the merger of the right-wingers would automatically translate into the sums of the two ex-parties' votes, which would have been 52% in the 2015 election presumably.

That is, of course, leaving aside the fact that a poll by Ipsos at the time found that 33 per cent of Wildrose voters and 19 per cent of PC voters ranked the NDP as their second choice. The animosity between the two conservative camps was well entrenched.

Yet, since the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose parties merged on July 22, 2017, there has been 41 opinion polls conducted. The United Conservative Party has lead in all of them, peaking at 36.5% ahead of the NDP in October 2017.

In fact, the NDP was even trailing both the Wildrose party or the PCs before the merger, sometimes both. The last time New Democrats were ahead was on November 10th, 2015. It's been an uphill battle ever since. The arrival of the Freedom Conservative Party in June of last year, led by rogue UCP MLA Derek Fildebrandt, didn't materialize in a new split on the right.

Now, does this mean that the New Democrats' historic breakthrough in 2015 was accidental? Not so fast. Despite difficult economic circumstances beyond her control, including falling oil prices compounded by forest wildfires, Rachel Notley is not being driven out of town the way Bob Rae was in Ontario after the NDP's first (and only) term in government in the province.

The UCP's healthy lead shrunk to single digits in the dying days of the 2019 campaign. Notley ran a good campaign, an easy contrast versus Jason Kenney's performance and the multiple bozo eruptions in the UCP slate, under his watch.

The question Alberta New Democrats need to ask themselves now is, was this unavoidable? It would be easy, as I did at the outset, to say it was. Indeed, a bit lazy. There was a path to victory and it wasn't found, despite Notley's high personal popularity.

Adopting the same strident frame of Alberta-the-victim was perhaps not the best thing to do, although Alberta New Democrats would argue it was the only thing to do. Unfortunately, the Conservatives own that frame and the NDP could never complain loud enough to out-compete the UCP in tone against Ottawa and the other provinces.

Still, the NDP has firmly established itself as the only governing alternative to the Conservatives. It will form a robust, experienced Official opposition, ready to take over in 2023 should Albertans realize the UCP government is not living up to expectations.

Being now the government-in-waiting, after having formed a government that did not bring the apocalypse upon the Wild Rose Country has some hysterically predicted, Albertans now know they can count on someone else to take over. And perhaps they also now know that having a one-party state, as it was for 44 years under the Progressive-Conservatives, is not democratically healthy.

Photo Credit: Edmonton Journal

Day: April 17, 2019

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