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Everything I say in this post, I say as a private citizen of Alberta. None of it will change my attitudes towards how I conduct my work or anything else. With that in mind, I cast my advance vote today for the NDP. There were a couple of factors that went into this.

For one thing, our local candidate Marie Renaud has done a great job representing us and she's more than earned my support. She's also a kind personal friend.

I also voted NDP because I can't in good conscience vote for Danielle Smith. She has a long track record of very poor judgement, and I'm worried about what she'd do over four years. From the original version of the Sovereignty Act allowing Cabinet to rewrite Alberta's laws without consulting the legislature, to her foolish interactions with Artur Pawlowski (which compounded her original mistake of listening to Ezra 'Brainy Smurf' Levant) to her comments about people fundraising for their healthcare and anti-vaxxers being the most oppressed people in history to her proposal to pay energy companies to clean up the messes they're legally required to remedy, Smith's antics have raised too many red flags for me.

More generally, I'm frustrated at the UCP's budgeting strategy to just dust off the bumper stickers asking God for another oil boom and promising not to piss it away, despite all the booms we've pissed away already. Say what you want about Rachel Notley, but at least she tried to provide us with a more stable source of revenue than just relying so much on oil prices. The UCP, on the other hand, just seems content with the status quo, especially when they just passed one of the highest-spending budgets in recent memory.

I won't make any firm predictions about who'll win on Monday, but while I gave the UCP a 55% chance of winning compared to the NDP's 45%, I'm actually switching those numbers now. From all the people coming out to advance polling to the backlash against many of the UCP's actions to the tensions in the conservative movement itself (such as with all the conservatives from previous generations going back to Peter Lougheed's criticizing Smith's actions, and the reports that some UCP door-knockers try to reassure voters who dislike Smith that she won't be around forever), that makes me wonder if Notley and the NDP are about to make history in being the first party and premier to ever regain power after losing it in Alberta.

Even if it doesn't, I think we've seen the permanent change I've written about before where, like the other Western provinces, we've developed a system where the NDP and a conservative rival start regularly rotating in and out of office.

   

I too cannot vote UCP. They were corrupt from the start, and the fact they don't fully own up to being influenced by "Take Back Alberta", a group I did not and can not vote for, means I can't vote UCP.

I don't know who I will vote for, but I do know who I won't.

   

I don't particularly want to vote for the NDP, because much like the UCP, their policies cost me thousands of dollars when they were in office. Mostly, it was the minimum wage increases that jacked up my daycare costs, but I also earned just enough not to qualify for any rebates from the carbon tax.

Having said that, the Alberta Party doesn't have a snowballs chance in hell, so I'm going to vote for the NDP candidate instead. Honestly, even if Smith wasn't the UCP leader, I still wouldn't vote for the UCP candidate because he is the former Edmonton councilor who thought it was okay to get the city to pay for his MBA degree. Talk about a grifter.

   

Based on the way things have been going in Alberta for awhile now and the posts I read in here by our Alberta members I'd be shocked if the UCP gets elected. It seems the NDP is a better choice at this point.

   

Polls right now show the UCP in the lead by a few points. There is only one poll that matters though.

   

I would never vote UCP because:

- I would rather die that vote for a party whose leader said that any Albertan who got a vaccine during COVID was the same as the sheep who supported the Nazi party in Germany
- and said that cancer sufferers in the terminal stage have only themselves to blame
- and who went to bat for an insane hate preacher who openly advocated violence during COVID and still does do today
- and who quietly, during the last few months of total chaos in Alberta, sold off a mountain near Grande Cache to an Australian coal mining company who are going to obliterate their claimed area with mountaintop removal methods
- and who, like their leader does with cancer sufferers, has another candidate out in the sticks who think anyone who has a heart attack deserved to have it happen to them
- and who has all their rural constituency boards now fully controlled by a medieval-thinking hate group called Take Back Alberta that is co-headed by another misanthrope from the absolutely wretched & utterly poisonous Byfield family
- and who left the x-ray machine in the Morinville hospital broken back in 2020 and have done nothing at all to fix or replace it over the last three years
- and who would kick out the RCMP and replace it with a supposedly provincial police force that would be entirely at the disposal and subject to the direct control of the premier's office and whatever clown sits as attorney general, meaning that it would be far more of a political party's private police force than a government-directed & supervised one
- and who would take over the direction of the CPP contributions that millions of Albertans have paid into over the decades and most likely blow it all overnight by investing it in a Ponzi scam or into crypto

I could go on. But what's the point? If I could even remember every awful or outright moronic thing the UCP has done since 2019 I'd be here all night and all of tomorrow making up the list. The UCP revealed their true selves with their chaotic and insincere form of "governing" under Jason Kenney. Since his fall and Danielle Smith's ascent they've done nothing else but triple-down on every single bit of stupidity and extremist bullshit that they can find. They are by far the single worst government to have ever held power in the entire history of Canada, and that's saying something considering some of the doozies that got voted in at the federal level and in other provinces over the years.

The UCP turned Alberta from the loudmouth drunk uncle who can't keep his obnoxious opinions to himself into the demented conspiracist shitbag uncle who's making pipe bombs in his basement and planning to blow up the local women's clinic. It's no longer a mere embarrassment to live here, it's now literally being at the ground-zero of an epidemic of true idiocy that shows no signs of ever stopping. This is entirely wrong and existentially unfair to any Albertan who isn't a total crank to have to go through, and we're only going through this because of the UCP's party policy of selling voting memberships to any demented or hateful piece of crap up to the very moment of the party's leadership vote. Smith only won thanks to the votes of 40000 or so ivermectin addicts and bleach drinkers, but due to the perversity of the UCP party system she became the boss over all of us.

That's why I voted NDP, because I refuse to live under these fuckheads without putting up some sort of resistance. I have to live with myself and I wouldn't want to live if I'd ever supported a hateful bitch like Danielle Smith and that cadre of utterly useless sock puppets she has standing behind her in the photo ops. As Warren Kinsella entirely accurately said recently, Smith isn't mentally or morally fit to serve as a dogcatcher in a hamlet with only twenty residents, much less rule as the boss of a province of 4 million people. She will wreck everything that's been built here if she is given the opportunity to do so.

   

It's sounding like it's going to be very close. Hopefully the turnout is good because of that.

   

NDP will lose.

   

I hope you're right, but in Alberta, far too many people vote for whatever fencepost the conservatives put up for election. Even the 'feces chocolate chip' UCP candidate' is going to win by 10 or 15 points (at least) in her riding.

At least I voted and tried to prevent the inevitable shitshow a full UCP term under Danielle Smith will be.

   

Yup. All I can do is vote for who I think will make life better, not pick unneeded fights with Ottawa because reasons.

   

It's weird that I'm finding myself more intrigued by this election than by ones in other provinces in recent years. Perhaps because Alberta is BC's neighbour, is a major contributor to our country's economy and also because there are so many members on this site that live there and share their perspectives on how things roll there.

I see that the major news sites have their trackers up and ready to roll when the polls close soon and the numbers get crunched. Hoping for a not batshit crazy outcome to this election.

   

Something that some conservative pundits probably don't want to admit (looking at you, Lorne Gunter) is that even if the UCP wins, there's still a hell of a lot more support for the NDP out there than there used to be. Any UCP victory is likely to be by a tight, bare majority-you need 44 seats for a majority, and as of this writing CBC news is "only" projecting a 49 seat win for the UCP. The blowouts of the old PC days are long gone.

Danielle Smith is going to have a really hard time holding her caucus together. She's got some MLAs who were trying to reassure nervous voters that she'd be gone soon enough, while the Take Back Alberta types will be chomping at the bit to implement a lot of the "firewall" policies they've been pushing for. It was the Take Back Alberta types that pushed Jason Kenney out the door-and they probably won't hesitate to do the same to Smith. Derek Fildebrandt has already called her a 'centrist sell-out.'

Smith also has a piss-poor track record when it comes to political judgment, and she seems to switch which foot she has in her mouth with every step she takes. After only six months on the job she's let the NDP catch up so the election is still a toss-up even now at 9 PM.

I've noticed that the Alberta conservative parties play a game I call "Pop Goes The Premier" where they immediately punt leaders who seem to be wearing out their welcomes, even if those leaders previously delivered big majority governments. It happened to Don Getty, it happened to Ralph Klein, it happened to Ed Stelmach, it happened to Allison Redford and it happened to Jason Kenney.

Will Danielle Smith be the next one?

   

I guarantee it will be. The right wants the Klein days back with all the power and swagger that came with it. If they see weakness they will instantly turn into face eating leopards until that happens, rinse and repeat.

This is the legacy of the Klein years. The populace has been lulled to sleep on civic responsibility and wants quick and easy solutions. The last thing they want is engagement on real issues. Just like Putin's leadership and we can all see where that leads.

   

And now all of the rest of us who weren't fooled or insane or part of a good ol' boys team preserving its privileges & interests get to find out what it's like to live under the rule of the sort of people who like to block the entrances to hospitals.

   

Going by the interactive map on the Postmedia papers there's three or four ridings in Calgary alone that the NDP would have won if the Liberals, Alberta Party, and Greens hadn't run candidates in them. So thanks a lot, you fucking irrelevant & utterly useless third-party assholes. Your precious right to run candidates means that there's three to four more UCP flakes in the next government who will back up, like the seat-filling puppets that they are will always do, the single most reckless, dangerous, and outright stupid elected politician in all of Canadian history.

Wildly switching right now between enraged and fighting off the urge to puke. I haven't been this upset over an election result since November 2016.

   

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