Are The Days Of One-Party Governance In Alberta Over?

As required by provincial law, Alberta will hold a provincial election sometime between March and May.

Our last election in 2015 was a watershed in Alberta politics by marking the end of the old Progressive Conservatives’ 44-year reign over the province.

This election will be another watershed in that there are multiple competitive parties that all have decent chances of forming the next government.

Most Alberta elections since 1935 weren’t very competitive. The successful Social Credit and later Conservative parties have usually won landslide majorities in the legislature, with the Opposition parties usually only getting a few seats each.

2015 was an exception not just for the NDP’s dark horse victory, but for the Wildrose Alliance and the PCs getting 31 seats between them. Since then, the Wildrose and the PCs have united to form the new United Conservative Party, while the Alberta Party continues to make itself known.

Regardless of who wins the upcoming election, having multiple competitive parties can only be a good thing for Alberta.

One of the most important elements of our parliamentary government system is a healthy Opposition that can hold the governing party’s feet to the fire. When that Opposition is lacking, it can reduce the quality of governance.

A perfect example is the state of the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund. While Peter Lougheed established it as a rainy day fund, his PC successors spent most of the royalty money from later oil booms as it came in instead of saving it. This approach was criticized by think tanks such as the left-wing Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the right-wing Fraser Institute, that noted the Trust Fund has become much smaller than its counterparts in Alaska or Norway.

Preston Manning once noted that, like diapers, politicians should be changed every so often and for the same reasons.

Most other Canadian provinces, including the rest of Western Canada, have regularly rotated political parties in and out of office for years. Even when they don’t form government, Opposition parties can still wield political influence.

While Manning’s Reform party never formed government in the 1990s, their calls for getting Canada’s finances in order gave additional incentive for the Jean Chrétien Liberals to make the spending cuts that balanced the federal budget.

If we’re lucky, the days of one party dominating Alberta politics for decades at a time are over.

What’s important in the upcoming election, even more than whoever wins, is that they have an Opposition to keep them on their toes.

The worst thing that could happen is for a political party to think that it’s the only one that really represents Alberta — witness conservative activist Craig Chandler claiming that conservatism was Alberta’s culture, and that new arrivals should vote conservative or leave. That’s no better than claiming that the federal Liberals are Canada’s “natural governing party” — and many Albertans are probably familiar with the contempt some Liberals displayed to us for generally voting conservative.

That, more than any particular policy, is bad for both Alberta and Canada.

Pretty sure that the NDP effectively killed their already-slim odds of remaining as the government by appointing last week another anti-oil & gas extremist nutcase, one who's been personally involved in distributing American anti-oilsands money to multiple anti-Alberta Canadian protest groups. to a five-year contract to sit on the Alberta Energy Regulator board of executives. I don't like Kenney or the UCP in the slightest but if the Dippers are as blind as to do something like that then they probably deserve to lose. The UCP won't make anything better, not while the oil prices are dictated elsewhere and because our main enemy is in Ottawa still actively stifling pipeline development, but the NDP obviously no longer deserves to have the confidence of the Alberta voter that they're going to do the right thing for our most important economic sector.

This is now an existential fight, in that our economic existence is in jeopardy due to the deliberate actions of a wide array of obvious enemies. There is no middle ground to be had anymore. You're either with us or against us, and a government that appoints an open enemy of Alberta's well-being to a position of influence & control in this province should no longer be in power.

Jason Kenney is not the saviour of Alberta and the biggest problem with Rachel Notley’s Government is her unhinged cabinet members.

Kenney can promise all he wants but he won't succeed in making anything better around here any more that Notley was able to. Until external factors shift, i.e. a consistent, stable, & long-term rise in the oil price combined with a change of government in Ottawa, the situation will remain the same. People here are going to get blinkered by the upcoming war Kenney launches against the BC leftists and by whatever tax cuts the UCP implements, especially when he shoots a torpedo right at Trudeau by getting rid of the provincial carbon tax, but it's all gonna be just for show. If anything it will get worse when he starts messing around with Klein-brand austerity measures. When that happens it'll cement the current recession into a permanent institutional feature of the provincial economy, something that will be hovering over us for the entire next generation.

Change in gov't there or in Ottawa won't make sweet fuck all difference.
You already hate the guy who spent $5 billion so the pipeline wasn't killed dead once and for all forever by TransMountain.
You can have someone who'll sell it back to private enterprise for a penny on the dollar so they can sing faint hope songs like Enbridge did for a decade and an arsehole who will put up a nice staged fight so you'll forget he's not doing fuck all to actually help your personal situations at all.
Fuck maybe they'll follow up with their 'stand up to China' threats so China boycotts Alberta oil.

Trudeau will get full credit for Transmountain when it's completed, which it won't be because the system of "consultations" both he & the courts put into place ensure that anyone at anytime can come along at any stage of construction and bring the entire project to another shuddering halt. The government's written off bigger losses in the past than the $5 billion for Transmountain, Herb, they won't even break a sweat if they have to do it again. Lost taxpayer money, lost directly due to their own endless chicanery, means nothing to them at all and it never will.

I expect the UPC to win the election, however, it will be interesting to see whether Kenney's contradictory policies have any success. If they fail he is going to create an even worse recession. I also suspect that the labour movement is not going to roll over for him the way it did for Ralph Klein. It is a case of being once bitten twice shy.

Here's a perfect example. Jason Kenney wants the NDP to kill the proposed 'Superlab' for testing medical samples across the province.

'NDP waste': UCP would kill $590-million 'Superlab'

Except, I have a memory!

I can only hope there are enough people to see that Kenney is not good for Alberta.

I'm not so sure it's going to be the rout a lot of people are expecting, particularly with the rise of the Alberta Advantage and Freedom Conservative parties siphoning conservative votes, the allegations about the "kamikaze" candidates and Jason Kenney supposedly abandoning the UCP's "grassroots guarantee", not to mention irritation with him nominating candidates like former Edmonton Eskimos president Len Rhodes.

More than that, though, I'm wondering how much things would change for us even with a UCP government, since so much of our pipeline expansion is tied up legally and I've seen reports that Energy East was abandoned due to market conditions making it less viable, and now there are reports about TransMountain having the same problem. Not to mention that expanded capacity in the U.S. and supply gluts keeping prices low.

And for that matter, will Kenney actually do anything about the boom/bust cycle we seem to be stuck with? I've seen everybody from the Walrus magazine to bootlegga on this very board talking about how we demand high social spending but throw a fit at having to pay taxes for them. The problems we're having right now are exactly why Peter Lougheed created the Heritage Trust Fund. At least Notley, for all her sins, at least tried to give us a more stable revenue stream with her tax increases and lessen our dependency on oil prices.