From unity schemer to unity premier

In the end it was as written. The ultra-hard final numbers in the Alberta election, as faithful readers have been warned, are going to take a while to arrive. But it became apparent shockingly early on Tuesday night that the United Conservative Party would secure a comfortable majority in the Alberta legislature, completing Jason Kenney’s journey from right-wing unity schemer to right-wing unity premier. The incumbent New Democrats held onto their fortress, Edmonton, and may still sweep it when absolutely all the votes are counted. But they appear to be retaining no more than a few satellite seats anywhere else. The final UCP seat total should be close to 60 of the province’s 87.

It was a strange election. The damaged Alberta economy is at the top of everyone’s mind, and yet economic management played little explicit role in the campaign. The parties did not quarrel too much about specific economic programs, beyond the dispute over corporate taxes. The New Democratic government had jerked them upward to a standard Canadian level at the outset of an economic slump; the UCP, arguably being the better Keynesians, promised to cut them. The NDP and UCP plans had a similar overall fiscal shape, best described as optimistic.

Some people have characterized this election as a

sort of zombie war between old Progressive Conservative identities: Peter Lougheed (well-bred '70s industrial-planning technocrat) and ralph Klein (unruly populist budget-slasher). This isn’t quite how things worked out. Which makes sense, since rachel Notley’s father was Peter Lougheed’s greatest domestic adversary and Jason Kenney (as young mouthpiece of the Taxpayers Federation) was arguably one of Klein’s.

The Notley policy of building subsidized oil refining and reprocessing capacity in Alberta to buy homegrown jobs is certainly a Lougheed throwback, but up until the election it remained more ambition than reality. Kenney’s UCP campaign took cuts to core areas of government off the table explicitly. Klein’s style was to apply an axe unapologetically, although public-sector workers suspicious of Kenney and the UCP might recall that the Tories ran to the left of the Alberta Liberals on deficits in 1993.

(Klein wasn’t much of a theorist, and when he got elected he found that his smartest caucus members were hawkish, that influential deficit crusaders like Kenney were circling outside government, and that elements of the civil service were surprisingly keen to point out budget fat. If Kenney ends up being the same kind of instinctive, intellectually vulnerable leader as Klein, that would be the biggest surprise of all.)

In any event, the 2019 campaigning ended up being about emotional stances above all — almost as if Alberta politics had been captured by a clique of spin doctors from every corner of Confederation, resulting in a general, unstoppable outbreak of furious tarantism. Kenney put policy in the background and proposed to fight Ottawa with an array of comic-opera methods. (you’ve tried the Marxists, now vote for the Groucho Marxists.) Notley campaigned on her winning personality while overseeing a personally vicious campaign operation, hoping voters would ignore or excuse her economic track record.

The NDP’S street-level campaigning all but censored the mention of the words “New Democratic Party.” (The radical side of the party will make hay of this. Why run away from your own identity?) While pundits sometimes snort at the suggestion that Alberta elected the NDP in a fit of absence of mind, and I may have done a little of this snorting myself, the Alberta NDP campaign was conducted exactly as if Albertans still thought the acronym “NDP” described a painful venereal disease. It’s worth remembering that in the past, other ruling parties being tossed out of office in the province always received much harsher treatment than this.

Kenney’s easy win creates uncertainty on the grander stage of Confederation. he ran largely against Justin Trudeau rather than rachel Notley, and this seems to have worked pretty darned well. The UCP government will replace the province’s pioneering carbon tax with one that lets individuals off the hook and restores something like the regime that the old PCS were creating for the oilpatch and other large industrial concerns.

Alberta’s trailblazing on carbon taxes might be more important to the cause of eco-taxation, in the long run, than the local setback it has received. But the UCP victory serves as a reminder that avant-garde environmental policy already fouled up the federal Liberals before. Even though the mind of Alberta occupies a particular and unique position on the subject of carbon, you can’t help beginning to wonder whether the whole country is as ready to fight total war on climate change as the federal government has assumed.