Den Tandt: NDP’s rise remarkable.
While the polls may be wrong, mere suggestion of change is revolutionary
So, Jim Prentice doesn’t have the chops. Who knew? And what a pity for his supporters that this should be revealed now, in such stark fashion, with Alberta’s election five days away.
The aggregate of recent surveys, as tracked by ThreeHundredEight.com, has Rachel Notley’s New Democrats bolting into the home stretch with 38.7 per cent support. Prentice’s governing Tories are 10 points back at 28.7 per cent. Wildrose, led by Brian Jean, runs a close third at 25.1 per cent. These numbers, should they hold through Tuesday, could see the NDP with a comfortable minority or even a razor-thin majority. It is, in a word, odd. Revolutionary would also do.
First, the caveat, made obligatory by the 2012 election: These polls could be wrong. They were wrong last time. There could be a flinch response whereby, at the moment of truth, thousands of change-minded Albertans find their pencils twitching away from the NDP candidate and toward the Progressive Conservative. Or the fearmongering now in full swing — bury your silverware, send the kids to grandma’s, Notley is coming! — could stop the NDP in its tracks. Governing parties in extremis haul out the monster masks for a reason: They often work.
And there’s this. The NDP platform really is, just as Notley’s opponents say it is, full of holes. It’s a pastiche of feel-goodery and promise-hurling that would make Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne blush. It is really a set of wishes — some interesting and understandable, many apparent retreads of measures that have proved disastrously expensive and ineffective in other jurisdictions. Wind power! Co-generation for the oilpatch! Better services, smaller classrooms, better health care, lower fees!
The costing, like all fiscal projections based on estimates of future revenue and expenses, is creative, to put it generously. The NDP plan posits $1.1 billion in found money in fiscal 2015/16 — found, that is, in the pockets of the province’s top 10 per cent of earners, who are to pay “a little bit more” income tax. Notley expects to garner an additional $800 million this fiscal year and next again from corporations, whose taxation rate will rise to 12 per cent from the current 10. A crackdown on delinquent tax filers is to yield another $100 million annually.
But the heart of the NDP’s plan is not dollars and cents but emotion and tone. That tone says, simply: Jim Prentice took you for granted; he disrespected democracy with his disgraceful, backroom-hatched Wildrose mass floor-crossing in December; he handed you a budget that is neither fish nor fowl, neither austere nor generous, but a Frankenstein monster of wishy-washiness, more debt, combined with lots of fee increases; and he forced on you this miserable election, in a transparent, opportunistic bid to buy himself four more years in power. He and his entitled pals deserve to go down, and damn the torpedoes.
It is, as others have already noted, not unlike the dynamic in Ontario in 1990 when a supremely confident Liberal premier David Peterson faced a plucky, articulate young NDP upstart named Bob Rae. Ontarians were sick to death of the old and hungry for the new, as Albertans seem to be now. That Rae lacked a plan for governing — he figured it out late in his third year in power, or thereabouts, too late to avoid putting the province’s finances in the ditch — was less important than voter fatigue with the sound of Peterson’s voice. They just stopped liking him.
This can explain part of what’s happened in Alberta. But there’s more to it. Notley, it turns out, is a natural — smart, likable, quick and forceful in debate, without seeming harsh. And Prentice, it turns out, has an alarming deer-in-the-headlights quality, hemming and hawing and plodding along as though constantly startled that not everyone agrees with him.
In the TV debate a week ago, he started out sounding quietly confident, as one would expect of an august former federal minister with a reputation for success. By the end he just looked shell-shocked and defeated. A followup outing this week on Calgary’s News Talk 770, apparently an effort at damage control, was disastrous. The Premier seemed tentative, defensive and, at times strangely unprepared for the straightforward questions thrown at him by hosts Roger Kingcade and Rob Breakenridge.
Any minority, whether led by Conservatives, New Democrats or Wildrose, will inaugurate a period of political flux unlike anything Alberta has seen before. The province has never had a minority government and has been held by Conservatives in unbroken line since 1971. If it’s anything but a Prentice majority, meantime, this former conquering hero will be hugely diminished, perhaps crippled.
For a man often mentioned as a possible future prime minister, it’s a stunning turnabout. Because of the history this election can’t be called, polls notwithstanding. But that an NDP-led government in Alberta is even possible is truly remarkable. Tuesday, maybe, we go through the looking glass. Odd, is what it is. Revolutionary would also do. National Post