Chapter 1
A Little Bit of History
Its voting day May 5, 2015 and a political earthquake is about to rumble through Alberta. It catches pundits and seasoned politicians off guard. Premier Jim Prentice expects his Progressive Conservative government to shake, perhaps, but not tumble from power.
The leader of Albertas New Democratic Party, Rachel Notley, knows whats about to happen. She may be the only party leader prepared for such a dramatic upheaval. But she is still shocked by the results on that tumultuous Tuesday night.
Soon after the polls close the extent of the PC collapse becomes evident. The NDP captures fifty-three of eighty-seven seats, securing the first left-of-centre Alberta government in eighty years. Notley has managed to unseat a forty-three-year-old Progressive Conservative regime, the most famous in Canada for longevity, if not recent accomplishment. She becomes the provinces seventeenth premier, instantly shattering every myth about Alberta being eternally conservative.
W hen Prentice called the election the Progressive Conservatives commanded seventy seats; on election night only nine PCs managed to win their ridings. The Wildrose Party, initially formed as a right-wing alternative to the PCs, earned twenty-one seats, four more than it had in 2012 when the party seriously challenged the Tories until the final week of the campaign. Wildrose would remain the Official Opposition. Conservatism lost the province that night, but it was far from dead.
This political upheaval in the unlikeliest province also signalled a vast political shift across Canada. Within five months Prime Minister Stephen Harpers Conservative government would be defeated by Justin Trudeaus Liberals, who would benefit from the same storming of the polls by urban, progressive, young voters.
The reasons for the Alberta upheaval, although fascinating in detail, are not wildly complicated. Notley was an appealing new leader who ran a brilliant campaign, while the PCs were out of touch with the modern province they believed they owned. Their seeming sense of entitlement, combined with their record of infighting and constant leadership crises (there had been four PC premiers in four years) had eroded public respect. The once-great party was creaky, top-heavy, and slow to adopt modern campaign methods. And yet, until the very last moment, the PCs failed to grasp that they might not be invincible.
It took a Prentice-led PC platform full of controversies and blunders, combined with a faultless NDP campaign that connected with a new generation of voters. Notley and her Orange Crush rushed the province with their talk of helping the struggling underclass, reviewing oil and gas royalties, and raising taxes on the well-to-do. Millennials and other alienated Albertans voted in droves for the first time. Many later said they had never cast a ballot in their adult lives because they thought nothing would change. This time they suddenly realized that something could actually happen, and they shook themselves out of their long political torpor.
The roots of the Alberta PC disaster were visible and growing years earlier, with the election of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi in 2010. Notley saw them for what they were. The Alberta Tories did not; nor did Harpers Conservatives.
While the Alberta Progressive Conservatives were mired in leadership schemes and scandals, they failed to notice their province had changed. It started with clear signs that even in Canadas most right-wing province younger voters were feeling ignored and dispossessed, that social concerns like LGBTQ rights were treated with contempt, and that the Tory government no longer connected with big-city voters. The election of Mayor Nenshi was a sharp sign that the youth of urban Canada were finally stirring. A bold thirty-eight-year-old Calgary academic, Nenshi organized his Purple Revolution, trounced two candidates who were heavily favoured over him, and became the first Muslim mayor of a major North American city, a fact that fascinated American networks like CNN. In Alberta, the more important political point was that he represented a victory for well-educated, urban progressives who were culturally and ethnically ecumenical. Rather than learning from his rise, however, both provincial and federal conservatives largely ignored it. They thought Nenshi was a political fluke a big mistake, as one PC MLA said on Twitter. But the mayor was the future.
A generation that felt powerless now believed change could come through the ballot box. One PC premier, Alison Redford, had grasped the trend and tried to put a progressive face on the PCs. Not your fathers party, she called it, to the annoyance of traditionalists. Redford resigned in March 2014, brought down by her own foibles and a party rebellion. When the PCs elected Jim Prentice as leader he felt forced by economic conditions into a tax-and-cut stance that seemed to belie his own more moderate brand of conservatism. To the end, the PCs never imagined that progressives would unite with fed-up moderates and take hold of a provincial election.
But Notleys NDP swept the province, riding heavy support from the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old generation, as well as the resentments of older voters who felt the more-than-four-decade-old regime was completely out of touch. By election day, Notley topped the polls in every age category.
N obody should have grasped the meaning of this more quickly than Stephen Harper. From his Calgary riding he had a perfect vantage point to sense and assess the profound changes that threatened his Alberta fortress, and his government in the country beyond.
But Harper chose to fight rather than adapt. The Conservatives summer-and-fall campaign of 2015 became a reactionary spasm against change. It sought to stifle, dismiss, and discredit the looming generational shift. The backlash against Harper was exactly like the one that ended the career of Prentice only five months earlier.
Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, derided as not ready by Harper, proved to be the exact opposite on the campaign trail.
Trudeau was saying what many millennials, seniors, and those who felt politically abandoned wanted to hear. He had expanded the conversation far beyond Harpers predictable and confined fiscal Conservative message. Stalwarts like Conservative MP Tony Clement explained to the Globe and Mail how those constraints played into their election defeat. They were wrapped into a straightjacket of only talking economy, generally, and security, noting that they didnt even go into crucial social issues such as poverty reduction, environment, indigenous rights, because they were considered off message. In the end, continued Clement, We didnt have anything to say to city dwellers, we didnt have anything to say to millennials.
The federal Conservatives failed to acknowledge the Alberta signs pointing to a massive voting shift, much to the benefit of Trudeau and the Liberals.
O ver time, success can make politicians stubborn. Harper refused even to try extending his partys reach beyond his own comfort zone. The Prentice PCs became positively sclerotic, convinced that whatever they offered, the voters would endorse. The apparent stability of Alberta politics certainly encouraged that belief twelve straight victories can breed a great deal of confidence in a party. Other Canadians too had some reason for seeing Alberta as stable to the point of paralysis.
