Wildrose targets suburban voters with new formula
On an empty field on the far south side of Edmonton, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith held a news conference this week to reveal yet another policy designed to woo Albertans with aspirations.
The Progressive Conservatives had promised to build a school in the Heritage Valley neighbourhood south of the Anthony Henday ring road, but had failed to do so, partly because of their costly, inefficient and now scaled back public-private school building model.
If elected in 2016, Smith announced the Wildrose would spend $2 billion to build 100 schools by 2020.
“Neighbourhoods like this are sprouting up all across Alberta, attracting young families that need a place to send their kids to a school that is safe and close to home,” she said.
“This is really a policy that we’re hearing about because we have a young, growing, vibrant population with young families.”
The Wildrose promise will be welcome news to aspirational Albertans. Just who are these people? Folks who want two vehicles in their driveway, two storeys on their house, children who can compete academically with anyone else in the world, and also a city that is built smartly, not just with proper roads and schools, but with a vast LRT system and fine recreational centres.
It took the Wildrose some time to figure out how to reach out to this group, partly because the party has such a large component of old, conservative, white guys.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with old, white guys. I’m one of them myself. But we don’t have all the right answers, and neither did the Wildrose in 2012, which is why so many Albertans voters rightly rejected them.
A wiser, more experienced Wildrose party is now attempting to rectify things. For instance, in the last election the Wildrose promised to kill the $2 billion provincial fund for mass transit, a terrible idea if you want to win over aspirational Albertans.
Fast-forward to the Wildrose’s current run of 2016 election promises, and Smith now says the Wildrose will spend $1.2 billion over four years for LRT in Calgary and Edmonton. This funding comes close to matching PC funding promises for mass transit.
The Wildrose proposal for mass transit is significant because it means all parties representing every spectrum of Alberta voters are now onside with dedicated funding for a major LRT build-out.
I asked Smith why her party now supports dedicated LRT funding.
“We had thought that there was a greater appetite among Albertans to receive some of their dollars back,” she said, referring a plan to take 20 per cent of any annual budget surplus and pay it out to individual Albertans. “We talked about a dividend to do so. We heard loud and clear from the public that they weren’t interested in that, that if we did have any surplus dollars, they wanted those dollars dedicated toward infrastructure.”
During the 2012 campaign, the Wildrose also didn’t appear to realize that the values it holds dearest — hard work and a particular kind of fairness, where people get what they deserve in this world, not what they think they’re entitled to — aren’t just old, conservative, whiteguy values, they’re also the prime directive for many immigrant families from Asia.
Smith and her party had some patching up to do with immigrant communities after Wildrose candidate Ron Leech’s clumsy remarks in the last election about his “white advantage.” It’s hard to know how well the repair job is going, but the Wildrose is leading opinion polls in Alberta and is second in Edmonton to the New Democrats. It’s certainly making a sustained effort to win over aspirational Albertans, first with its fierce commitment to bolster Alberta’s slipping educational standards and accountability, and now with its school and LRT announcements.
The Wildrose did best last election in rural communities that venerate old-school, conservative values, but with this new platform, it’s likely to make inroads in the city suburbs, especially in Calgary.
In the last election, there were 27 seats that the Wildrose came within 10 percentage points of winning, 12 of them in the Calgary, seven in the smaller cities, not one in Edmonton. Unless there’s a Progressive Conservative collapse, it’s hard to imagine the Wildrose making major headway in Edmonton in 2016, but with new policies that appeal to old and new Albertans with similar material aspirations and conservative values, it’s easy to foresee the Wildrose winning the 2016 election.