TIGHT RACE PORTENDS ROUGH RIDE

With politics often more about emotion than logic, PCs are nervous

What a very odd start to the election campaign that was supposed to bring political peace in our time.

Poll after poll shows the voters are upset, really upset, enough to push Wildrose ahead of the Progressive Conservatives as the favoured party.

This is so unexpected that pollsters themselves don’t feel the numbers will hold on election day, May 5.

“We need to be very careful about reading too much into the early horse- race numbers,” says Marc Henry, whose firm ThinkHQ has Wildrose at 31 per cent, the PCs at 25, and the NDP at 26, if an election were held tomorrow. That’s right, the NDP is one point ahead of the PCs.

There’s a big undecided vote — 21 per cent — which is hardly surprising, since hardly anybody believes any opposition party is in fit shape to govern the province.

The logical conclusion is that people will drift to the PCs during the campaign, if they vote at all. As Henry says, voters may want “to take the PCs to the woodshed, but not necessarily to the gallows.”

Politics is often more about emotion than logic, though. And something emotional is definitely going on here. It makes the PCs distinctly nervous.

For instance, when NDP Leader Rachel Notley held an event in Inglewood with candidate Joe Ceci on Wednesday, the campaign office was so jam- packed that a late- arriving columnist could barely get in the back door.

There was no way to hear what Notley said back there. She was drowned out by cheering from the overflow crew in the parking lot.

Henry’s poll shows that in Calgary, the New Democrats have surged to 19 per cent, only eight points behind the PCs.

Then, Mayor Naheed Nenshi blasted the PCs for calling the election, asking how the government can afford up to $ 30 million for this exercise when “it’s difficult to find $ 200,000 to investigate the deaths of children in care.”

He was talking about just one of the PCs controversial recent cuts. They may privately dismiss him as a rogue leftie mayor, but Nenshi’s opinion matters, especially among young urbanites the PCs sincerely hope do not bother to vote.

In many elections the Tories have been powerfully motivated by threats like this. It happened in the crazy 2012 campaign when they were in serious danger until the final days. Their comeback was a monumental display of the party’s energy and guile under pressure.

But this time, it’s the battered opposition that needs an emotional boost — and suddenly gets it from the surprising polls.

Wildrose had almost declared itself dead only four months ago. The NDP was assumed to be as marginal as ever. Now the public itself is providing CPR.

What must Danielle Smith be thinking?

The clearest sign of PC jitters came on the first day, when Premier Jim Prentice immediately attacked the opposition, saying “it’s fine for those on the extreme right and extreme left to criticize, but it’s incumbent upon them to put forward a plan that’s realistic.”

Many Albertans might find it insulting to be branded as extreme because they support another party. Especially when, only two months ago, Prentice was proposing fairly extreme spending cuts in the budget of five per cent, or nine per cent counting growth and inflation.

Prentice praised ex- premier Ralph Klein many times, and still does. But then, last month’s PC budget backed away from the cuts that Prentice talked about.

And now, it seems, Klein’s brand of PC cost- cutting is being redefined as extreme.

Somewhere the late premier must be getting used to it; no Alberta politician has been subjected to more posthumous image makeovers, from friends and foes alike.

These polls may not guarantee PC defeat, or even serious trouble on voting day. But the big campaign guns are rolling out. The PCs were already airing radio and TV ads on Day 2.

And soon enough, this could get rough enough to make the Lake of Fire look like a bird bath.