MAKE ALBERTA GREAT AGAIN?

Ain Edmonton new poll from Lethbridge College, which is apparently a thing that exists, has created a stir in Alberta politics this week. Its content is perhaps not so much surprising as it is an overdue reminder: the province that voted for Progressive Conservative governments in 12 consecutive elections did not suddenly disappear overnight in May 2015.

Pollster Faron Ellis had students interview 1,513 Albertans and found that the PCs have surged back into the lead provincewide, with the governing NDP (yep, still strange to type that) slipping into third place. There is two-to-one support among the general public, Ellis reports, for the PC-Wildrose merger that ex-MP Jason Kenney is trying to finagle.

It is a little weird to quiz people on their feelings about a PC party that hasn’t quite decided whether, or how, it wants to go on existing yet. None of the questions mentioned Kenney explicitly, so one has to make an inferential leap to conclude that this is good news for his cause. But it’s a pretty modest one, maybe more of a step than a leap. The findings from the unite-the-right part of the questionnaire show that 79 per cent of the self-described PC supporters and 82 per cent of Wildrose backers in the survey favour the merger push either “strongly” or “somewhat.”

Kenney has finally attracted openly declared rivals for the PC leadership in the past few weeks, and he will have to win the title by getting a majority of votes at an old-school delegated PC convention next spring. There will be extra representation from the directors of the riding associations, the old hands in the party and from youth delegates. It has been thought that these are obstacles to a Kenney coronation, and that he may need to win outright on the first ballot to prevent being overtaken by anyone-but-Kenney sentiment.

But it is hard to ignore the problems for the advocates of a separate existence for the PCs — let’s call them the “continuity PC” tendency. First of all, how many of them actually are there? Once the election law was changed and the PC party was no longer allowed to sponge off of government contractors and industries that knew the PCs would win the next three general elections, the party’s financial condition collapsed, reducing its quarterly finance filings to a short list consisting of ex-MPs and a few grateful beneficiaries of past pork. If there are more than a handful of continuity PCs, it would be hard to prove it using Ellis’ numbers.

The recent appearance of four two about retail politics. It almost had the character of a taunt.

One of the surprising items hidden in the cross-tabs of the Ellis poll is that younger Albertans are, if anything, more eager for a rightwing merger than older ones. The New Democrats did poorly with voting-age respondents under 30, polling just under 10 per cent in the voter-intention part of the survey, and support for the merger was highest among that group, hitting 73 per cent.

This raises the question whether the struggling Alberta economy is costing the NDP support with very young voters, whose view of Alberta history might be that, golly, things seemed better before Premier Rachel Notley took charge. Over the coming years, this demographic will be most sensitive to the NDP’s gradual hike in the Alberta minimum wage, which may be good for people trying to make a permanent living in lowskill jobs, but perhaps not so hot for young casual and part-time workers who benefit from lower barriers to hiring.

When youth was given formal representation at the future PC leadership convention, this was thought to be a possible disadvantage for Kenney. But in Alberta, it is the federal Conservatives who have an apparatus for teaching and recruiting young activists, and Kenney’s experience as a Conservative minister makes him a rock star among that set. He is what every young suit-wearing conservative nerd dreams of becoming.

He has the hard-earned ethnic connections that made him a putative favourite for the federal PC leadership, and he knows social media. He has a sense of humour. The emerging tactic of the continuity PCs is to cast him as an Albertan Donald Trump — an undisciplined, unsavoury extremist. And you never know: that might work. Any candidate is partly a hostage to the character and behaviour of his supporters. But I do not know that I would want to gamble $30,000 on it.