Alberta’s new premier will be Jim Prentice, who won 77 per cent of Saturday’s vote.
Mind you, 77 per cent may sound like a lot, but when you consider there were only a total of 23,386 votes, the shine on the victory begins to fade.
In 2006, 100,000 registered Progressive Conservative Party members voted on the first ballot for premier, which ended up going to Ed Stelmach, then in 2011, 60,000 came out.
So, why the low turnout?
1) Let’s be honest, does Jim Prentice (or the other PC candidates, Ric McIver and Thomas Lukaszuk) really get anyone’s political juices flowing?
2) There was no real excitement whatsoever when it came to this election. That was in part due to a lack of exciting candidates (see point #1), but there also seemed to be no appetite for an election…even in democratic societies, people tire of voting for politicians.
3) Alberta just had a provincial election in 2012, and voters elected Alison Redford, who, in addition to preferring to fly alone, left a bad taste in the mouths of many Albertans…would you be excited to vote for yet another leader of the same party?
4) The province’s next general election is expected to be held in 2016, only two years from now. If there are going to be elections held every two years, expect to see lower and lower turnouts.
All these four points taken into consideration, there are a few things that need to be made clear.
Until Alberta voters show otherwise, this is a conservative-minded province.
Some on social media are using Sept. 6’s election of Prentice to try and make the point that voters are tired of the PCs and in 2016 there will be a shift towards their respective parties.
This may be true to some extent – some people are tired of what the PC Party has given them in the past couple years, but even more, they are tired of elections – but the reality is that in the next general election, it will likely be a battle between the PCs and Wildrose Party, and if you’re yelling at your newspaper or screen right now, you are either an unwavering liberal-minded optimist, or you know something that few others are privy to.
In 2012, the PCs received 44 per cent of the vote; Wildrose got 34 per cent…that’s 78 per cent to the right. The Liberal Party, New Democrats and Alberta Party tallied 21 per cent combined.
The remaining one per cent went to a collection of five parties.
The Alberta Party says it is ‘centrist’, but taking a look at who has been selected to lead the party, current leader Greg Clark formerly worked for the Alberta Liberal Party leader, former leader Glenn Taylor was an NDP candidate in the late 90s and another former leader, Edwin Erickson, was the deputy leader of the Alberta Green Party…this makes it difficult for Alberta voters to view them as truly centrist.
For Banff-Cochrane, the PCs had 42 per cent of the vote in the 2012 election; Wildrose received 37 per cent, Liberals 14 per cent and NDP seven per cent.
That’s 79 per cent to right-leaning parties and 21 per cent to the left.
So, unless you transplant the Alberta population with Ontario’s, you would need to have one heck of an argument that there is going to be some kind of surge from the Liberals, NDP or Alberta Party.
In 2012, those who were leaning toward the Wildrose Party (if you remember, the final poll pointed to a Wildrose victory – Forum Research had it 38 to 36 per cent for Wildrose) defected at the last minute and put their checkmark next to the PC candidate. They certainly wouldn’t defect to the Liberals, NDP or Alberta Party.
Maybe Saturday’s low turnout to select Alberta’s next premier was due to PC Party members grieving because they voted for someone like Redford, whose clear disconnect with Albertans could not have been clearer as evident from her actions and subsequent stepping down as party leader.
Perhaps we’ll see in 2016 if that hangover will last, if it will be forgotten, or if Prentice will be the answer PC supporters were looking for.
