KHEIRIDDIN

You can’t blame Quebecers for crowing.

For decades, Alberta has lorded it over Quebec. We love freedom, you love government. We are a have province, you are a havenot. Unlike you, we have a booming economy and low unemployment: we’re poaching your immigrants, your head offices, and your political power. If not for the hard-earned equalization payments we fork over, you socialists couldn’t keep your hospitals open, never mind afford $7-aday daycare and super-cheap university tuition. (And oh yeah, we still have two NHL hockey teams, and you’ve only got one.)

So you can’t blame Quebecers for crowing: who’s the loser now? Not only are Albertans grappling with plummeting oil revenues, a fat deficit, and a full percentage point increase in unemployment over last year, they’ve elected an NDP government. This, in the “most conservative of Canadian provinces,” according to Le Devoir. “The earth shook in Alberta,” the paper gleefully reported after the NDP triumph. In Calgary, you can hear the chuckling all the way from Montreal.

Grant it, Alberta New Democrats probably sit to the right of most Parti Québécois MNAs, and possibly even some Quebec Liberals. But after years of Quebec-bashing, la belle province has had enough. Forget serving revenge cold; like poutine, sometimes it tastes better steaming hot. So expect the gloating to continue, at least for a little while.

After it dies down, however, two important questions remain. First, what does the NDP victory mean for the relationship of Alberta and Quebec and the provincial power dynamic within the Canadian federation? And second, how could the NDP’s success in Alberta impact the fortunes of its Quebec-heavy federal counterpart in the upcoming national election?

Provincially, the NDP win could affect co-operation on energy and the environment. Next to British Columbians, Quebecers are probably the greenest voters in the country. They routinely oppose economic development for environmental reasons, whether it’s an oil refinery that threatens beluga populations, or fracking that would purportedly contaminate water supplies. And they decry Alberta’s “dirty oil”: in advance of the last premiers’ meeting in April, 25,000 protesters marched in front of Quebec’s National Assembly, demanding a halt to pipeline projects like Northern Gateway and Energy East, as well as more action on climate change.

Out west, outgoing Alberta premier Jim Prentice supported both pipelines and rejected imposing a cap-and-trade emissions system, one which Quebec embraced years ago and which Ontario joined just last month. But NDP Premier-designate Rachel Notley sings a different tune. While she supports Energy East, she opposes Northern Gateway. She also said that while it was “premature” to support cap and trade, Alberta is “a critical player in that discussion and we need to be showing leadership. We shouldn’t be hiding from it.” This could signal more environmental co-operation between Alberta and Quebec, and between them and other Canadian provinces in general.

On the federal scene, the NDP’s Alberta triumph can only help their Ottawa counterparts. Quebecers love a winner, and tend to vote for them en bloc, as they did for Jack Layton in 2011. It’s true that Notley succeeded on her own merits, not those of federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair, and also benefited from Prentice’s faux pas and Alberta’s curiously dynastic politics. But she nonetheless gives the NDP brand a national boost. The NDP’s Twitter-spin is already “first Quebec, now Alberta, next Ottawa,” a left-wing revival of the old Brian Mulroney PC coalition.

And the slogan has merit to it: the better the NDP does elsewhere in the country, the more incentive Quebec voters will have to back them at home. Quebecers searching for the anti-Conservatives will have to choose between the NDP and the Liberals, and if the NDP can topple the Tories in their own heartland, Quebecers might figure they’re the best bet to knock them out federally, too.

Which paradoxically should bring a smile to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s face. He needs the NDP to hold their Quebec seats against the Liberals, while siphoning just enough votes from them in the rest of the country to let Tories come up, or hold on to, the middle. The last few federal byelections in Western Canada have all seen the Liberals make impressive gains in popular support. If the NDP cuts into those margins, they’ll split the anyone-but-Conservative vote, and deny the Liberals actual seat gains.

So who’s the loser now? Provincially, the Alberta oilpatch, who could see a more eastern-friendly environmental policy adversely affect their interests. Federally, the Liberals and Justin Trudeau, if the Orange wave sweeps aside their hopes of returning to 24 Sussex Dr. Either way, Quebecers are just happy that it isn’t them.

That sound you’re hearing in Calgary and Edmonton? The hysterical chuckles from Quebec