Liberals battle to retain four seats; NDP make gains but fall short
Leader fights to hold on to his riding
The strategic voting issue did lose us some votes . . . LIBERAL PARTY PRESIDENT TODD VAN VLIET
With just two MLAS elected, one more candidate leading in the polls, and party leader Raj Sherman fighting for his seat as election results rolled in on Monday night, the Alberta Liberals were worried.
“Early results are often misleading, so we’re still hopeful. Obviously we’d like to be ahead in a couple more ridings by now. We’re worried and from what we can see the strategic voting issue did lose us some votes in some polls along the way,” said party president Todd Van Vliet.
“It’s a bit of an irony that the Liberal voter may have chosen the devil they knew instead of the devil they didn’t know.”
Remaining positive, Sherman said “it ain’t over yet,” with respect to his own seat, while flagging wins of incumbent MLAS Laurie Blakemanin Edmonton Centre and David Swann in Calgary-mountainview. Kent Hehr was also leading in Calgary-buffalo.
“The Liberals, we’re coming back,” he promised about 100 supporters gathered in downtown Edmonton just after 9:30 p.m., after he congratulated Conservative leader Alison Redford on her majority win.
On election night in 2008, the Alberta Liberals booked a hotel ballroom at Edmonton’s Mayfield Inn to celebrate what they hoped would be a provincial victory — if anyone was going to unseat then-premier Ed Stelmach, the Liberals seemed best-positioned to take over the premier’s office. Instead, with 26 per cent of the popular vote but just half the seats they’d won in 2004, supporters were distraught as they watched their official opposition party lose constitu- encies. They ended up with eight seats.
Four years later, the Liberals chose a much smaller venue for their election night party — the Yellowhead Brewery in downtown Edmonton — and face the distinct prospect of watching their team wiped entirely off the province’s electoral map.
Throughout the campaign, rookie Liberal leader and emer- gency room physician Raj Sherman has talked about improving the province’s health-care system,making-post-secondary tuition free, raising carbon taxes for major industrial polluters, offering sustainable funding to municipalities and community leagues, and raising personal income taxes for people making more than $100,000 annually.
But in an election dominated by the Progressive Conservative-wildrose battle, much of Sherman’s message was expected to be lost among progressive Albertans concerned the only way to hold off a majority Wildrose government was by voting for Redford’s Tories.
Sherman, a former Tory MLA himself, spent the last week of the campaign trying to show Albertans similarities he saw between the PC and Wildrose platforms, and making a last-ditch appeal to Albertans not to vote strategically for the Tories.
Stepping back from the provincial campaign, however, Liberal wins were hard to come by when drilling down to the constituency level. The Liberals had not put together a full roster of 87 candidates until two weeks after the election was called, and even then candidates included the party’s spokeswoman and Sherman’s chief of staffinkey Fort Mcmurray and Edmonton ridings.