DON'T DO IT

The best thing Alberta's premier-elect can do now is avoid her election promises.

Canada’s Left is jubilant that the NDP won a majority in Tuesday night’s Alberta election. Fair enough — no-one else has beaten the Progressive Conservatives in almost 44 years, let alone a fringe socialist party in Canada’s most conservative province. Perhaps the revolution was finally here!

It could be. Rachel Notley, the incoming premier, wears a Che Guevara wrist watch. One of her new MLAs, Rod Loyola, publicly praises Hugo Chavez, the late Venezuelan authoritarian. And Alberta’s new First Husband, Lou Arab, is an executive with the labour union, CUPE.

As with the NDP’s 2011 federal election campaign, all sorts of flotsam and jetsam washed ashore in the big orange wave. Fringe candidates. Students still in school; sacrificial lambs who never thought they’d have a chance, and didn’t even bother campaigning. There are a dozen Ruth-Ellen Brousseaus that the media never bothered to vet — and the NDP probably didn’t either. But these are among the politicians who will be running a province with 173 billion barrels of oil.

That’s who the NDP is — but that’s not who Albertans voted for. For the 41% of Albertans who took a chance on the NDP, the image they had in mind was more likely a broom, not a hammer and sickle. The election was the ultimate anti-incumbent protest. Polls show that, by far, trust was the most important issue. Voting NDP was the sharpest rebuke 600,000 people could think of for Jim Prentice’s outrageous conduct over the past five months.

When Prentice left his corner office at a Toronto bank last summer to seek the leadership of the beleaguered Alberta PCs, he immediately took his new party back to first place in the polls. Here was someone who, by his long absence from the province, was untainted by endemic scandals and cronyism. Serving in Stephen Harper’s cabinet not only gave Prentice a reputation as a competent manager, but it also signalled to rock-ribbed conservatives who had migrated to the Wildrose opposition party that they could “come home.” And indeed, the moment he became leader, the PCs returned to first place — seven polls in a row showed them headed towards another majority government. The NDP were stuck in third place, in the mid-teens. Any rage the province had felt towards Premier Alison Redford left when she did.

But then, the inexplicable. Prentice met secretly with the Wildrose opposition leader, Danielle Smith, and convinced her to defect to the PCs, along with most of her caucus. It was a shocking, undemocratic move with no convincing goodfaith rationale. Prentice already had a majority; already was leading in the polls. It was cheating — a brazen attempt to remove what little opposition and scrutiny the PCs faced, when accountability and trust was already a sore point.

Those fears were confirmed when Prentice introduced the most irresponsible budget in Alberta history, with the largest deficit in history, despite more than 50 tax hikes. But with Smith and most of the Wildrose out of the way, who would stop him? And just to make sure of that, Prentice violated Alberta’s fixed elec- tion date law — calling a snap campaign just 10 days after Wildrose chose its new leader.

It was sneaky. Albertans were disgusted. Prentice started falling in the polls after the orchestrated defections; further after the budget; further still after the ambush election call. It wasn’t about ideology. It was about trickery.

Where the NDP was better known — in Edmonton, where the party always had a toehold — it was the default choice. In 21 mainly rural ridings, Wildrose was still seen as the natural alternative. It was the ultimate strategic election: anyone but Prentice.

This wasn’t an uprising of the proletariat. The NDP won many of the wealthiest, suburban ridings, even in the heart of the oilpatch.

So what happens now? The NDP immediately scrubbed its website of its campaign platform and candidate biographies — a good sign that it knows it must become more moderate. During the campaign, the party tried to walk back some of its earlier criticism of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Anti-capitalist clichés that go over well in the faculty lounge don’t work as well for the energy minister.

Can Notley, the accidental premier, succeed? If she gives Albertans a broom, not a hammer and sickle. Alberta doesn’t need higher taxes or more burdensome labour laws — especially not when the energy industry is already in a recession.

What Alberta desperately needs is a political housecleaning — 100 auditors to comb through 44 years of PC secret deals and back-scratching. New anticorruption laws. More accountability and democracy. That’s what Albertans want. And you don’t have to be a socialist to vote for that.

Alberta desperately needs a political housecleaning — 100 auditors to comb through 44 years of PC secret deals