Calgary fails to deliver for Wildrose
Monday night, calgary-shaw candidate jeff wilson stood next to Paul Hinman, his party’s first elected mla, as they addressed the Wildrose faithful at what was supposed to be a big celebration for them both.
But it was more sombre. hinman was delivering a concession speech, and 34-year-old Wilson was acknowledging his win as one of only two people elected as Wildrose standardbearers in Cowtown.
“Here was the man who was the blueprint for this party in Alberta,” Wilson recalled Tuesday. “So it was incredibly humbling to stand next to him as this all played out.”
The numbers pointed to a Wildrose blowout in a city that polls had hyped as a Wildrose stronghold — Wilson had expected he’d be joined in the legislature by several fellow Calgary rookies under Danielle Smith’s charismatic leadership.
The Wildrose vote was woefully insufficient in Calgary. With 36 per cent, the party was 10 points behind the vote share of the Tories, but triple the Liberals’ total.
However, the Progressive Conservatives won 20 Calgary seats compared with their staunchly conservative rivals’ two seats. And even though the Liberal vote collapsed fantastically citywide, it actually held up right where it mattered, securing three Grit seats and giving the party more city clout than the Wildrose.
Both Wildrose winners, Wil- son and incumbent Heather Forsyth, scraped by with narrow victories. The party came within a few percentage points of knocking off several Tory incumbents like minister Jonathan Denis in Calgary-acadia — but then went down to double-digit defeats in many open ridings, like Calgary-varsity, Calgary-north West and Calgary-hawkwood.
The late-night tallies gave and took away from the Wildrose party — in Calgary-mcCall, candidate Grant Galpin was leading late into the night until the advance poll and special ballot counters declared a nearly 700-vote win for Liberal incumbent Darshan Kang.
Hawkwood candidate David Yager didn’t see it coming, but did find several undecided voters at the doorsteps “right to the bitter end.”
To his reckoning, many Calgarians saw the polls showing Wildrose headed for a crushing majority, and got nervous about putting an untested bunch so firmly in charge of Alberta’s strong economy.
“I’m going to suggest the voters of Alberta overcorrected,” Yager said. “nobody wanted a large Tory majority.”
In Hawkwood, PC winner Jason Luan said he had many voters tell him at the doorstep they found the Tories arrogant after 41 years.
Luan said that’s inevitable when a party is in power so long, but as a newcomer he stuck to Redford’s mantra of changing from the old guard ways.
“Once you put it on the table,” Luan said of the cronyism accusations, “there’s nothing they can do with it.” After that, the Tories and their modest platform won points for competent management, he argued.
Or, as Yager put it, voters chose “the enemy you know.”
In the inner city, debate among progressives raged about whether to strategically vote Tory to block the Wildrose party in the Liberal-held ridings of Calgary-buffalo and Calgary-mountain View.
But in both cases, the Wildrose were non-players, finishing third while popular Liberals Kent Hehr and David Swann won.
A pair of contests with latenight dramatics handed the Wildrose party one seat, then took another away.
Tory Wendelin Fraser wound up in the loss column around 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, when Calgary-fish Creek special ballots delivered a 74-vote win to Wildrose MLA Heather Forsyth, according to Elections Alberta’s unofficial results.
It’s the closest margin in the entire province, but Fraser has no plans at this point to consider demanding a judicial recount.
“I’m not sure. Certainly, I will wait for the official count,” she said in an interview.
In Calgary-mccall, candidate Grant Galpin, who lost to Kang, said his team would take a couple of days to review the final numbers before deciding what options they have.
“There were enough irregularities, from our perspective, that went on during the advance polls that we are reviewing all options going forward,” he said.
But Kang’s campaign manager, James Maxim, said he’s confident of Monday’s final result.
“I’m not worried,” Maxim said. “This is a substantial win. We worked hard.”
Kang said: “We wanted to get our vote out early, because on election day people have work or are working two jobs.”
In 2008, Kang led Tory veteran Shiraz Shariff by 98 votes according to the unofficial results, but came out 118 votes ahead after the official count.
After the official count, candidates may apply for a judicial recount.
There is no particular threshold for which such recounts are automatic.