Kenney’s win a reminder Alberta votes
On Thursday night, t he electors of the CalgaryLougheed riding sent Jason Kenney to the Alberta legislative assembly, symbolically completing the former federal minister’s extraordinary project for uniting two right-wing parties behind him. “Symbolically,” I say — as if the vote were a tidy abstraction instead of the cruel gang-stomping it was.
The Alberta Liberals ran their leader, David Khan, against Kenney as a means of gaining publicity. The governing New Democrats followed an old western tradition and ran a saintly doctor who promised endlessly to defend medicare. He was said to be a strong candidate, as saintly doctors with electoral ambitions always are.
( Physicians are always presumed to have large local followings of adoring patients, which makes me think I must have had pretty poor luck with my own doctors. One or two of them have saved my life, but that does not mean I would vote for them. Judging by our legislatures, lawyers seem a good deal better-liked...)
Kenney won every poll in Calgary-Lougheed, and gathered 7,760 votes, which is now the record for an Alberta byelection candidate in a single- member riding. (Some winners got larger totals when the province had multi- member representation in the big cities from 1909-1955: under those circumstances, when one seat in Calgary or Edmonton came open, the entire city would be eligible to vote.) It is a remarkable number on its face, considering that this is December, and that Calgary- Lougheed is in Alberta, and that every living adult with a job is desperately trying to put work and shopping in some semblance of order for the holidays.
Nearly 8,000 people in one sliver of Calgary could not find anything better to do on a Thursday than to turn out for Jason Kenney in an election he would have found it hard to lose. Don’t they have Netflix down there?
Like every other electoral test Kenney has faced during his campaign to reunite the Alberta right, it ended up being an impressive display of force. If you hang out on social media you might have the idea that Kenney is somehow damaged goods. Outside Alberta his prestige suffers from the lingering after- effects of Harper Derangement Syndrome. (He’s still lurking! Be vigilant!)
But Alberta never stopped voting for Stephen Harper’s Conservatives, as opposed to the now-extinct provincial PCs, and as the province rebuilds from a recession — with unemployment rates still high — voters here can, if anything, only grow more nostalgic about the broadly successful federal government of which Jason Kenney was an important part.
Kenney’s high vote total cannot, I think, reflect mere name recogni- tion — unless the term “name recognition” is taken as a loose term for personal popularity, inexhaustible ethnic outreach, and tremendous organizational resources. The pro- Kenney “dark money” funds that the government is making a half- hearted legislative effort to circumscribe has not even begun to be a factor yet. Still, none of the parties running against Kenney’s United Conservatives could scrape up enough votes in Lougheed to win an ordinary byelection.
Calgary- Lougheed is a historically conservative riding, but the New Democrats came just 500 votes short of winning it in the 2015 general election. If the NDP were in a position to make gains in Calgary, one would expect Lougheed to be fairly high on its target list. After Thursday it looks a bit more like the government will be playing defence in the city. ( Looking past Kenney’s impressive raw vote total, his share of the vote in Lougheed was higher than the combined Conservative and Wildrose share in 2015.)
And with an anti-socialist mood firmly established in the Alberta countryside, and the capital dyed deep orange, Calgary is pretty much the whole ball game. Then again, it’s just a byelection. There are still paths to a second NDP victory in 2019 — a year with a science- fiction- y number that is getting closer mighty fast.
Alberta politics are more unpredictable than the average province’s, for precisely the same reasons the revenue of the Alberta treasury is more unpredictable than average. With overall economic growth expected to recover here in 2018, the New Democrats may have increasing success defending their fiscal approach of turning on autopilot and borrowing like a degenerate gambler. The moral climate that is zapping male politicians like lightning might strike on either side. I have been cured forever of making wild predictions about future Alberta elections, but without doubt the new UCP got good news Thursday.