Morphing to the Middle

The prize was in reach at last, after an election campaign in which wildfires burned a million hectares of forest in northern Alberta during an anomalous heat dome and neither the United Conservative Party nor the Alberta NDP mentioned the words “climate change,” a campaign where UCP candidates were heard comparing trans youth to feces and a majority of Albertans to followers of Hitler, a campaign in which homegrown intellectual Jordan Peterson globe-trotted into the province and warned sold-out crowds about the authoritarian intentions of “net zero globalist utopians,” a campaign in which the NDP was obsessed with appearing blandly competent and the UCP with seeming not heartless to present to voters as not-scary-at-all, at the cost of their moral clarity and authenticity—a price both parties seemed absolutely willing to pay—a campaign in which the future of Alberta was blurred in a fog of polls, conflicting data and margins of error open to interpretation; after all that and more, as polling stations across the province closed at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, May 29, 2023, both the UCP and the NDP were ready to celebrate in Calgary.

Inside the Big Four Roadhouse on the Stampede grounds, a stage and facing chairs were swathed in blue light, primed for UCP leader Danielle Smith’s speech that evening. Mere blocks away, at the Palace Theatre on 8th Avenue in downtown Calgary, the multi-tiered space inside the 102-year-old venue was illuminated orange. NDP leader Rachel Notley would speak later in Edmonton, but media were assured all 26 NDP candidates in Calgary would be at the Palace. At both locations, TV cameras were set up and party supporters were arriving as election coverage played on giant screens.

By May 29 most pollsters were projecting that the UCP would win a slim majority over the NDP. But not all. The outcome hinged on Calgary (with the NDP projected to take Edmonton and the UCP most of the rest of the province). “If the UCP wins on Monday I might have to eat two hats,” tweeted Mainstreet Research’s Quito Maggi, on May 25, after seeing data from Calgary riding polls during advance voting (when across the province a record 758,640 votes were cast over five days of advance voting). “What I have been told, by both camps, is that the advance poll is skewing to the NDP, especially in Calgary,” said political strategist Stephen Carter, on The Strategists podcast on May 28. The advance polls would be counted first, he said, and “we may see a situation where 50 to 55 seats are immediately NDP.”

“An orange barrage,” said co-panellist Corey Hogan.

“If we don’t see it, then it’s going to be very clear in that first five minutes” that the NDP will lose, said Carter. “At 8:05 it might be over.”

But 8:05 came and went on May 29. Then 8:10… 8:15… Though Alberta elections are often called 20 to 30 minutes after the polls close, this election was different. At 8:22 the first result popped up for Calgary—a single vote for the UCP in Calgary-Buffalo. One vote. From a city of over 1.4 million people. It was going to be a long night.

Arguably, one surprise of the 2023 election was that it was even close. Since 1935 the combined vote for conservative parties had been over 50 per cent in all but three Alberta elections. When oil prices were high—such as in 1979 and early 2008, when Alberta’s oil-and-gas-dependent economy was booming—conservative parties won landslide majorities. In 2023 the UCP government’s pre-election budget reported record non-renewable resource revenue—buoyed by oil spiking to US$119 per barrel soon after Russia invaded Ukraine—a $2.4-billion surplus and a large increase in spending that forecast a balanced budget with an average oil price of US$79 per barrel in 2023–24. “If it’s always about the economy,” financial paper Bloomberg said on May 25, “Danielle Smith and [the UCP] should be cruising toward re-election.”

And yet, they were not. Many conservative commentators blamed Smith. Since turning 50, Smith, now 52, had on camera and in writing blamed Stage 4 cancer patients for their own diagnosis, said “the only answer for Ukraine is neutrality” in response to the Russian invasion, and advocated for healthcare spending accounts to wean citizens off public healthcare and restore “the payment relationship” between patients and doctors. As president of the Alberta Enterprise Group (which aims to impact public policy by “putting business first”) she lobbied the UCP government to adopt the RStar program—which would give public money to private oil and gas companies to clean up well sites they’re legally obligated to clean up. As soon as she was premier, she proposed a pilot RStar program (and then delayed implementation until after the election). On day one as premier she said the unvaccinated against COVID-19 were “the most discriminated-against group that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.” And that’s but a start; the list of questionable judgments seemed endless.

“Her politics amount to libertarian-laced populism, directly opposed to the sort of principled, incrementalist politics Albertans have appreciated from conservative governments in the past,” wrote conservative strategist Ken Boessenkool and University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley in a joint article in The Line, on April 28. “Nearly half of all Albertans identify as conservative…. Her politics are out of step with theirs,” they wrote. The campaign “will be a real test of what it means to vote conservative.”

If nothing else, Danielle Smith was prepped for that test. She’d been a Calgary School Board trustee, a Calgary Herald columnist, a corporate lobbyist, the leader of the Wildrose Party who crossed the floor to the Progressive Conservatives and doomed both parties, a radio host and then a podcaster and again a party leader. It was an eyes-on-the-prize career arc. Throughout it all she’d shown ideological consistency—“I started on the free enterprise side, with my internship at the Fraser Institute, so I’ve always been thinking, how do we apply our free enterprise values?” she told podcaster Jordan Peterson, shortly after becoming premier. A good salesperson, Smith can parrot what people in a room are hoping to hear. On radio and her locals.com podcast, she’d listened to Alberta conservatives. Her bet was that she wasn’t the one who was “out of step.”

Smith is out of step with many Albertans. The campaign was a test of what it means to be conservative.

“We need to stop the woke, leftist mob from dictating where we stand as conservatives,” said Chelsae Petrovic, a UCP nomination candidate with close ties to the conservative organizing movement Take Back Alberta, in her opening statement at the party’s Livingstone-Macleod forum in High River on March 4, 2023. Although Smith lives in High River, she wasn’t there that night, when a snowstorm was coming in and the parking lot at the Highwood Golf Course was slick with ice, but over 200 people crammed into a big meeting room at the clubhouse. I stood next to a hefty man wearing a “Truck You Trudeau” ballcap. He glanced over sharply if someone didn’t clap when everyone else clapped loudly.

The moments of unanimous applause were not for local issues. When nomination candidate Don Whalen, a pastor, said that after he heard about proposed new coal mining in the Rockies, “the first thing I did was try and find both sides of the story” and “I don’t think it’s something that should go ahead,” he got a few tepid claps. But when Whalen said, “It’s horrendous that there’s four men sitting in jail for over a year,” in reference to the men charged with conspiracy to murder RCMP officers at the Coutts border blockade, he got rousing cheers and loud clapping.

“I participated in the convoys,” said the third nomination candidate, Tanya Clemons. “It really was a time that brought everybody together.”

“I was there at Coutts,” said Petrovic. “I was a supporter of it.”

And it went on like that, the competition to be the most conservative of all. “One thing that bugs me is people saying we’re too right-wing,” said Whalen. “What does that even mean? We’re conservatives. We’re not centrists. We’re right-wing conservatives. And I’m not ashamed of that.”

“Currently my child is learning [at school in Claresholm] how to be a ‘global citizen’ and I would have to say I am extremely disappointed,” said Petrovic, who would go on to win the UCP nomination for the riding. “I am against 15-minute cities. I am against the WEF [World Economic Forum]. I believe in community…. We need to stick to what we do best and that is our own way of living.” The crowd clapped loudly. “I’ll repeat it over and over again,” she said. “I’m a big supporter of what Danielle Smith is trying to do.”

“We ran out of signs. we had at least 1,100 and had to order more,” said Nagwan Al-Guneid at the start of an afternoon door-knocking shift on May 12. Since winning the NDP nomination race in Calgary-Glenmore a year earlier, Al-Guneid said she and her team had “knocked on thousands of doors.” That effort ramped up during the campaign to three volunteer shifts a day—morning, afternoon and evening. “It’s 19,000 steps a day, for sure,” she said. “It’s about putting in the work. ‘Disciplined’ is the key word.” Today, in the community of Lakeview, she and other NDP doorknockers were focusing on “undecided” voters who at a previous visit said they were unsure who they were going to vote for—Al-Guneid, UCP candidate Whitney Issik (the incumbent) or another party—and door knocking at houses where no one was home at an earlier visit.

Some people who hadn’t previously answered the door were not going to vote NDP. One middle-aged man opened the door, stared silently as Al-Guneid introduced herself as the NDP candidate, and shut the door without saying a word. A block away, an older lady heard “NDP” about 10 seconds in and said, “I think no,” and closed her door.

Others were more receptive. At a house in an upscale cul-de-sac, a man in his mid-50s emerged from his backyard wearing khaki shorts and flip-flops. “I haven’t had time to think about it,” he said, when asked about the election. “But I’m tending to vote NDP this time.”

“That’s great to hear,” said Al-Guneid.

“As long as it can stay, like, centre-right, rather than far left,” he said. “I don’t want a far left government that doesn’t care about spending. But we need to look after our healthcare system, and education is really important.”

The NDP government from 2015 to 2019 under Rachel Notley “was a pretty conservative government,” said Al-Guneid. “Oil prices were super low” in those years, she said, but the NDP “supported families and made investments in healthcare and education.”

For this 2023 campaign, said Al-Guneid, Notley commissioned a report from a former chief economist at ATB, Todd Hirsch, to advise an NDP government on how to manage Alberta’s windfall surplus from energy revenues. “She committed to a balanced budget.”

“Yes, I saw that. I was happy,” he said. “And what about the oil and gas industry? I know we need to change environmentally, but I worry… is she going to be premier for all of Alberta?”

“She got us the TMX pipeline last time,” said Al-Guneid. “She literally negotiated with the feds to get the pipeline done. But I can tell you as well, I spent 15 years in the energy sector, so I did oil and gas and oil sands and now I’m in renewables [as director of Business Renewables Centre Canada]. The industry is ahead of government,” she said. “They want a decarbonization plan. But what policies will enable that? Like, private investment follows stability, not this chaos that we’ve seen in the last four years. We need stability and clear direction.”

“I want [the Alberta NDP] to differentiate from the federal NDP,” he said. “I want Rachel to be for Alberta.”

“The federal NDP, they’re anti oil and gas, it’s a different party, frankly,” said Al-Guneid. “I think Rachel Notley will govern for everyone.”

“You think she’ll do that?”

“100 per cent.”

“Okay,” he said. “We don’t want to wreck the economy.”

Winning the undecided vote was key to the NDP’s election strategy. In 2019 they were trounced in a head-to-head campaign against Jason Kenney’s UCP. In 2021, at the height of COVID, the NDP had a 20-point lead among decided voters in the polls, but that lead had evaporated. By May 1, 2023, day one of the campaign, poll aggregator 338Canada projected that the UCP would win 49 seats and the NDP 38, with each party winning 13 in Calgary.

In suburban Calgary, and in the “donut” of seats around Edmonton, many of the ridings projected to go UCP were considered toss-ups, with the polls extremely close. If the NDP could get a few more votes in traditionally conservative south Calgary seats such as Calgary-Glenmore, Calgary-Acadia and Calgary-Peigan, along with ridings in the city’s suburban north such as Calgary-North West and Calgary-Foothills, they had a chance to win. The election would be decided, said Abacus Data’s David Coletto, by “reluctant” UCPers—those who voted UCP in 2019 but were now on the fence and could potentially vote NDP.

On May 4 Rachel Notley stood in front of media in downtown Calgary and made a pitch directly to conservative voters. “To Albertans who feel the UCP has abandoned the values of the Progressive Conservatives,” she said, “maybe you’ve never voted for me, but this election is different. It’s about leadership and trust.

“If I am your premier, I will not raise your income taxes. I will not increase fees. And I will not increase your personal costs,” promised Notley.

Some conservatives, such as Thomas Lukaszuk (a PC MLA from 2001 to 2015 and a former deputy premier), were already encouraging undecided conservatives to support the NDP. “If you have to hold your nose, lend [the NDP] your vote this time around,” he said, advocating a strategic vote to prevent the UCP from getting another four-year mandate. Under Smith the UCP “is the Wildrose that we so much detested as Progressive Conservatives, except it’s on steroids right now,” Lukaszuk told CTV News.

Near-daily revelations of video and audio clips from Smith’s podcast or past interviews gave that message resonance. On May 7 Albertans heard a clip from November 10, 2021, where Smith compared the “75 per cent” of Albertans who got a COVID vaccine to followers of Hitler and said that because of the “diabolical” vaccine mandates imposed by Canadian governments, she wouldn’t wear a Remembrance Day poppy.

It didn’t go over well. “This is vile,” tweeted Ken Boessenkool. “Who thinks like this?” wrote influential conservative columnist Rick Bell in the Calgary Sun. “This is harmful, dangerous stuff,” said former conservative city councillor and mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas, on CBC radio’s Calgary morning show on May 12. “These are not conservative values.”

“I think that Danielle’s got a mouth on her which is far too big and she’s saying all the wrong things,” said a tall, white-haired man with an English accent, talking to NDP candidate Nagwan Al-Guneid at the gate to his backyard later that afternoon of May 12.

“I think so too,” said Al-Guneid.

“I went and got a mask, and I had shots [for COVID], but I’m nowhere near following the path of the Nazis. I had them dropping bombs on me when I was a kid [in England],” he said. “And then she looked up and said, ‘All these things were said in the past, I don’t want to talk about them, just the future.’ All the things she said in the past I’m afraid she’s going to have to answer for. Maybe she will.”

“Hopefully,” said Al-Guneid.

“But you do understand I won’t be putting a sign on my lawn,” he said. “And I won’t be shouting at my neighbours if they vote conservative either.”

A few blocks away in Lakeview, Al-Guneid spoke to a woman sitting on her front porch waiting for her daughter to come home from elementary school. “I think we, or I—I won’t speak for my husband—will vote based on character rather than platform,” she said. “I feel good about Rachel Notley, and I feel not good about Danielle Smith. Quite not good about Danielle Smith. Like, not everything her party is running for is terrible, but she is a person not to get my vote.”

Those voters weren’t alone. Halfway through the campaign it appeared change might be afoot. On May 13 a poll from Abacus Data showed the NDP with an eight-point lead across the province. “Campaign events have pushed a large portion of reluctant UCPers towards the NDP, despite their natural inclination to vote for Conservative parties,” said pollster Coletto. “What’s driving this behaviour? At this point, it’s all about Danielle Smith.”

“Elections are largely determined by fear and loathing,” said Tom Flanagan, quoting Hunter S. Thompson, on a Western Standard podcast near the start of the campaign. “I think the UCP should actually be doing more to stoke that.”

A professor emeritus of political science at the University of Calgary, and the campaign manager for Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives in 2004 and Smith’s Wildrose Party in 2012, Flanagan implied that vitriol and silence would clinch a win. Silence, because even though Smith won the UCP leadership with the support of “populist rural right” conservatives, “there simply isn’t enough support for the populist right, even in Alberta, to win the election.” The UCP had to downplay Smith’s “edgier positions,” he said, to appeal to “median voters who could be swayed in either direction.” Stay quiet on the controversial stuff. Promise money. “That strategy is tried and true,” he said. But it wasn’t enough. “Negative campaigning is essential,” he said.

He might as well have been talking about the strategy for both parties.

From the start, the UCP’s campaign platform was simple—they took credit for a Calgary arena deal and promised stability through cracking down on crime and by not raising taxes. Smith’s signature policies during the 2022 UCP leadership race—the Sovereignty Act, the RStar program, replacing the RCMP with a provincial police force and dropping the Canada Pension Plan for an Alberta pension plan—were not mentioned, as if they didn’t exist. What the UCP did try to conjure in voters’ minds, over and over, was the spectre of tax increases under the NDP.

The NDP, in comparison, promised to boost spending on public services, eliminate the small business tax and not raise personal taxes. They laid out a policy platform on a website they asked voters to read. It was detailed, with backgrounders full of numbers and tables, a plan that perhaps wasn’t read by many even in the media, let alone voters. “If you cut through all the issues,” Sun columnist Rick Bell asked Notley on May 4 after she pitched conservatives on voting NDP, “what do you see as the ballot question at the door in this election?”

“Uh, I see the ballot question as being who is actually focused on Alberta’s priorities—healthcare, affordability—and who is capable of delivering on that,” said Notley. She would deliver stability, she said, as opposed to chaos.

Negative campaigning—such as the NDP’s large street signs showing Smith and the words “What will she do next?”—dominated the messaging to voters. When the NDP released a fully costed platform just before the leaders’ debate that included a proposed raise in the corporate tax rate from 8 per cent to 11 per cent (which would still be the lowest in Canada), Smith attacked it in near-apocalyptic terms: “We can’t go back to the dark days of the NDP [government]!”

But even as their attacks on each other in speeches and ads sharpened and got ugly, the UCP and the NDP morphed closer together in a shared silence. As wildfires burned in the north, towns were evacuated and smoke choked the cities, neither party linked the fires to climate change. Nor did either party focus attention on the growing bill that will one day be due to clean up unreclaimed oil and gas wells and unremediated tailings ponds. And when oil prices fell below $70—blowing a hole in balanced budget plans—not a peep was heard about a sales tax, arguably the simplest solution for smoothing out Alberta’s boom and bust revenue stream.

If each party had a playbook, it was the same: Don’t be scary to undecided voters. And go on the attack. “No sympathy for the Devil,” as Hunter S. Thompson wrote. “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

If you know that the candidate or the leader you’re voting for is vile… you deserve what you get.

On May 15 a poll by Janet Brown Opinion Research was leaked (by a private client) to Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid. The poll projected the UCP would win 56 seats, an easy win. Other pollsters had different numbers (both Ipsos and Angus Reid had a “statistical tie”), but Brown had accurately predicted the 2008 and 2019 elections (when other pollsters had been off the mark) and her work was respected by all parties. If her poll was correct, it meant yet another big win for a conservative-leaning party, same as in 22 of the other 23 Alberta elections going back to 1935.

On the ground, judging by the blooming garden of orange NDP or blue UCP signs on private lawns in suburban ridings in Calgary, the race felt closer than Brown projected. As if the election could be swayed by a memorable moment—a gaffe or some eloquence or wit—at the leaders’ debate on May 18 in Edmonton. It was hotly anticipated. Notley vs. Smith. The only time in the campaign they’d go head-to-head in person. In Calgary I went to a debate-watching party at Madame Premier, a feminist fashion store that promotes women in politics. The debate was “transformative,” said owner Sarah Elder-Chamanara, after it was over. “For Ella, who was here, who is 6,” she said, “she’s growing up thinking that having two women on a debate stage is completely normal [and] that ‘of course a woman can be premier,’ which is really important.”

She was less effusive about the actual debate, in which Notley and Smith stood side by side on a TV sound stage wearing identical conservative-blue jackets. “Danielle Smith has a way of communicating clearly that people can relate to. I don’t know if that same feeling comes across with Rachel Notley,” said Elder-Chamanara, who had also hosted a media event for the NDP’s small-business tax-cut promise a few days earlier. “I don’t think anyone really won,” she said. “More than anything I think anyone who watched the debate might be more confused.”

Or perhaps not. New polls released on May 22 by Mainstreet Research and Abacus Data both found the UCP in the lead. These came after a recording of the UCP candidate in Lacombe-Ponoka, Jennifer Johnson, hit the news. Johnson compared trans students in schools to mixing a spoonful of poop into cookie dough. Only after three days did Smith tell Johnson that if she won she couldn’t sit with the UCP caucus in the Legislature (though Johnson remained the UCP candidate on the ballot). The polls also came just days after Alberta’s ethics commissioner found that in January 2023 Smith tried to influence the minister of justice and attorney general, Tyler Shandro, to “help” Artur Pawlowski, a Calgary street preacher facing a criminal charge for his speech intended “to incite protesters to commit mischief” at the Coutts border blockade. Smith violated Alberta’s Conflicts of Interest Act. “It is a threat to democracy to interfere with the administration of justice,” the ethics commissioner wrote in her report.

Despite this, “almost equal numbers think the NDP [or] the UCP are the most risky and scary choice,” wrote Coletto, analyzing the results of the Abacus poll. “If either party can gain just a few points in either direction on that measure, it may be the difference between winning and losing.”

“Danielle has a hidden agenda,” warned Notley, in a speech to a packed hall of close to 1,000 sign-waving supporters in Calgary-Acadia on the afternoon of the 22nd.

“Rachel Notley has the worst record of any Alberta premier,” declared Smith, in a speech to at least 1,000 supporters outside the Grey Eagle Casino on May 25.

Fear and loathing and high-profile endorsements marked the last days of the campaign. Former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi stood with Notley and Court Ellingson (an economist with Calgary Economic Development when Nenshi was mayor and now the NDP candidate in Calgary-Foothills) in front of NDP supporters in a suburban backyard in the city’s north. “I have never seen an election that matters this much,” said Nenshi. “Danielle Smith is an existential threat to the future of Alberta.” One-time PC cabinet minister Doug Griffiths and former Conservative MP Lee Richardson endorsed Notley. Former prime minister Stephen Harper endorsed the UCP. Jordan Peterson flew in to Calgary before going to Red Deer for a political event sponsored by Take Back Alberta. “We saw a fascist enterprise arise during the COVID pandemic. It was actually an epidemic of tyranny and not an epidemic of virus, obviously,” he told the sold-out audience at the Calgary Jubilee, before adding “see if you can volunteer in this election.”

We just need to win 10 to 15 seats in Calgary and Edmonton,” Smith told the Sun’s Bell in October 2022, shortly after winning the UCP leadership. And she was right. When the election result was called, well after 10 p.m. on May 29, 2023, the results were 49 seats for the UCP and 38 for the NDP (with the UCP winning 12 in Calgary, almost the exact result that poll aggregator 338Canada projected on day one of the campaign). Nagwan Al-Guneid won Calgary-Glenmore by 48 votes and the NDP’s Diana Batten won Calgary-Acadia by 22 votes (initially just seven votes before a recount). Conversely, the UCP’s Chelsae Petrovic won with 66.9 per cent of the vote in Livingstone-Macleod, and Jennifer Johnson got 67.6 per cent in Lacombe-Ponoka, even though she wouldn’t be able (at least initially) to sit with the government caucus.

At the Palace Theatre in Calgary, just before the race was called, I talked to Chima Nkemdirim, the former chief of staff to mayor Nenshi. He was wearing a Court Ellingson button on his lapel. “I think no matter who wins, the political map of Alberta is permanently changed,” he said. The NDP have “really professionalized the party—they’ve got more volunteers, better candidates, a lot of these races are super close…. It’s a change in political culture in Alberta.”

Not everyone was so kind. “I think voting patterns are the best report card on a society,” said Lukaszuk, in an election post-mortem on The Breakdown podcast in early June. “If you go to a ballot box and you know that the candidate or the leader of the party you’re voting for is vile, but you’re willing to overlook anything because she isn’t NDP, or because she is conservative, and you will take anything in the name of conservatism, or any other political affiliation, you deserve exactly what you’re going to get.

“Whether you think with your heart, or with your wallet,” he said. “Who we have become… is not good for either.”

Tadzio Richards is the associate editor at Alberta Views. We welcome feedback on Alberta Views articles to letters@albertaviews.ca

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