Vote shift isn’t rocket science
Another poll (if you can stomach one) confirms what was already obvious. A huge number of voters, 31 percent, considered voting for Wildrose in Monday’s election, but ended up backing another party.
The shift in the final week was monumental. Most voters abandoned Wildrose because of the Hunsperger-leech eruptions, according to the April 24 poll by Leger Marketing. The main beneficiaries were Premier Alison Redford’s PCS.
The poll didn’t probe other reasons for the great shunning, but it seems to me that several led Albertans to decide Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith disqualified herself from the premier’s office.
One was her attitude toward climate change. She said the science “isn’t settled.” That instantly branded her everywhere as a “climate-change denier.”
Her belief is hardly the intellectual crime of the century, but for Canada’s oilsands province, it’s potentially lethal. Oilpatch leaders, including some who donated to Wildrose, were stunned.
Her stance would have fixed Alberta’s image in prehistoric stone. It wouldn’t matter if producers eliminated tailings ponds and brought the ducks back to life. The question in Washington, New York and Brussels would always be — wow, does your political leader really believe climate change is bogus?
If you’re a premier, even one who’s a big believer in free speech, there are times you just have to shut up, because the echoes can hurt everyone.
While Smith was grappling with science, Redford explained how her national diplomacy aims at discouraging other provinces from smearing the oilsands at the Rio Plus 20 development conference in June.
She wants no repeat of the wreckage caused by Quebec and Ontario’s complaints at Copenhagen in 2009. Neither does anybody else. Redford’s sensible approach is clearly best for the province.
Smith says the party’s stance on climate change will be reviewed. Too late.
Smith says the party’s stance on climate change will be reviewed. Too late.
On the most important economic hurdle facing Alberta, she didn’t clear the bar.
A cluster of moral/ social issues also damaged Smith, who now says she’ll think again about the party’s commitment to “conscience rights” that would allow civil marriage commissioners and even health-care workers to refuse services based on their beliefs.
That’s a start. But she still refuses to draw any line around what her candidates or MLAS are free to say, even after the massive damage inflicted by candidates Allan Hunsperger and Ron Leech, with their comments about the lake of fire and the white man’s burden.
Her free-speech principles, Smith says, were behind her refusal either to condemn or punish the candidates.
She shows no sign of compromise on a point that frightened thousands of voters away from her party’s door.
Political trouble was further magnified by another Wildrose policy: the plan to abolish Alberta’s Human Rights Commission.
Smith offered a complex argument about replacing the commission with a special court division. It never made sense, espe- cially since the PCS have reformed the commission to eliminate bureaucratic abuses.
And the symbolism was terrible: You don’t abolish something called the Human Rights Commission without making people wonder if you’re against human rights. Riding this hobby horse into a campaign was not wise.
Eventually, voters got the sense of a serious disconnect between Wildrose and mainstream attitudes about tolerance, environment, and much else.
The PC campaign magnified every nuance, of course, but Redford’s party was essentially correct: Wildrose was not ready to run this place.