Decision 2012: Alberta Politics Thread

[Wooster]

The centre-left needs to do some serious soul searching following this result. The Liberals would be best to merge with the small but energetic Alberta Party under their banner (new brand without the baggage). Leave the NDP to their own on the left flank to distinguish this new entity as the centrist, pragmatic alternative the PCs. That's where Albertans are politically and they will continue to seek out competent alternatives to the potentially supplant PCs. The new merged Alberta Party can then set themselves up (under new leadership) as the government in waiting, a role the Wildrose proved to be too conservative at its core to fulfil for most voters.

I think Wildrose had one shot at it, and failed, which opens the door up to something new.

[You Need A Thneed]

Kang wins in Calgary-McCall, bringing the liberal total to 5.

[Tropics]

Originally Posted by Wooster

The centre-left needs to do some serious soul searching following this result.

I am not quite sure what they do from here or if they should really try to change alot. They clearly got messed up in this election by strategic voting by many of their usual supporters voting PC to block the WR. They never had a chance to form government and everyone knows that including them but they run in order to win some seats and give a left viewpoint with the few MLA's they normally get. They can change stuff but unless they ever had a real chance to win the actual leadership then any time you get something like the WR in there that scares the left leaning people you are going to get strategic voting from those people and the left parties are going to lose alot of their opposition seats they try to obtain.

Originally Posted by Wooster

I think Wildrose had one shot at it, and failed, which opens the door up to something new.

I am not sure they failed, they went from winning 0 seats in 2008 to winning 17 in 2012, that is not insignificant and is actually a remarkable rise. The reason they look like such a failure is largely due to the terrible polls and forcasting which greatly overestimated where they would end up. I am very interested to see what they do to their party in the next 5 years as the opposition, how many quality candidates they can they attract to get rid of the weak links they had in this election and that cost them dearly. I am interested to see how/if Smith matures as a leader of the party and if she becomes more politically astute.

She has charisma and is a great public speaker but she showed a lack of political seasoning in the campaign with her reactions to the comments of the two party members and a lack of ability to explain her position on global warming in a manner that did not make her seem like a uneducated denier.

Allison KILLED her on that point with her "when I go to Washington and speak of global warming they don't want to hear..." section of the debate. I have my own viewpoints on global warming that I have explained in this thread but IMO Allison actually has the better appraoch to how to deal with the international community when speaking of the oil sands and CO2 emmisions. Alberta does NOT need someone going out there and simply stating "the science is not settled, the debate is still going".

Luckily for Smith she did not dig "too" deep a hole for herself in what she said in that debate and her statements can be interpreted fairly harmlessly. She NEEDS to get someone who REALLY knows the science to coach her on what the issues actually are with regards to CO2 emmisions, what the science is actually saying, the multitude of factors that lead to global warming of which CO2 is only one of many, the potential use of CO2 in non-conventional oil extraction such as is currently being done in the Saskatchewan Bakken with USA coal plant derived CO2. The fact that the burning of natural gas for electricity still also released CO2.

Mason's idea of getting rid of coal and moving to natural gas is short sighted and in 100 years that will be seen as one of the most foolish ideas ever. Natural gas is a finite resource, just like oil and just like coal. Unlike coal though natural gas is a viable fuel for vehicles, it can be compressed and stored and used in a far easier fashion then coal. Non-coking grade thermal coal has one main use that it is remarkably well suited towards, electricity production. It produces cheap energy, "if" you use carbon storage it is almost emmision free at this point due to the technology used in new coal fired power plants, and we have boatloads of it.

We have ALOT of gas atm, so does the USA, so does Saudi Arabia and countless other places. The stuff is dirt cheap right now, but that does not mean we should be wasting the finite resource producing electricity with it when we have another fossil fuel that is far less varied in its usefuleness but that does that one particular job exceedingly well. There are going to be no coal cars in the future, there WILL be natural gas vehicles. God forbid the day we run out of natural gas because we burned 50tcf pruducing electricty and we still have 100 years worth of coal in the ground that "could" have produced that electricity instead.

Granted, we might have awesome solar by that time, but atm we do not and we don't know what the future holds in store. Wasting natural gas on electricity production is absurd. We WILL get some electricity as a byproduct from the oil sands production and that is a valid addition to the electrical grid from natural gas as the primary objective of burning that gas is steam production to extract bitumen in both mining and SAGD operations.

[suburbia]

Updated estimates

1993 - 989K voters (60.21%)
1997 - 946K voters (53.75%)
2001 - 1,013K voters (53.38%)
2004 - 891K voters (45.12%)
2008 - 950K voters (40.59%)
2012 - 1,255K voters counted as of midnight (over 50%)

[suburbia]

Originally Posted by You Need A Thneed

Kang wins in Calgary-McCall, bringing the liberal total to 5.

Isn't 5 an important threshold for party status, or am I mixing up federal and provincial.

I think Calgary-Shaw lost an opportunity to have a high ranking minister in their riding by going with the WRP and not Farouk Adatia, who has been on the rise for a decade and was the CFO for Allison's run at party leadership. He was put in a difficult spot, however, when the candidate stepped down really late and the party exec parachuted him in last second.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by suburbia

Isn't 5 an important threshold for party status, or am I mixing up federal and provincial.

I think Calgary-Shaw lost an opportunity to have a high ranking minister in their riding by going with the WRP and not Farouk Adatia, who has been on the rise for a decade and was the CFO for Allison's run at party leadership. He was put in a difficult spot, however, when the candidate stepped down really late and the party exec parachuted him in last second.

4 is the 'official party' threshold. 5 just makes them rank ahead of the NDP in question period, that is if there isn't some floor crossing amongst opposition members as the Liberals decide where to go from here.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by Tropics

I am not quite sure what they do from here or if they should really try to change alot. They clearly got messed up in this election by strategic voting by many of their usual supporters voting PC to block the WR.

The Liberal Party's vote intent had already dropped quite a bit according to polling even a year or two ago. There is a reason Dr. David Swann resigned last year not even having ran in one election as leader.

You can call the choice made by undecideds not to break in the traditional way strategic voting, but without a big swing away from someone not the Wildrose, it was only 1 thing: voting.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by Wooster

The centre-left needs to do some serious soul searching following this result. The Liberals would be best to merge with the small but energetic Alberta Party under their banner (new brand without the baggage). Leave the NDP to their own on the left flank to distinguish this new entity as the centrist, pragmatic alternative the PCs. That's where Albertans are politically and they will continue to seek out competent alternatives to the potentially supplant PCs. The new merged Alberta Party can then set themselves up (under new leadership) as the government in waiting, a role the Wildrose proved to be too conservative at its core to fulfil for most voters.

I think Wildrose had one shot at it, and failed, which opens the door up to something new.

I agree, but I doubt the Alberta Party experiment will live on as it is pretty obvious it completly failed.

Sure, if its members can decide that it has to be a bit more political in its structure it might be able to survive, but at this point where even its star candidates were fighting for third, when they were pumping themselves up as on the path to win, Alberta Party will be fighting a huge amount for any media 'oxygen'.

As for the Wildrose having one chance and failed, I don't think it is as likely as long as they learn the right lesson. That being said, what caused them difficulties is likely the most likely to donate part of their base. So they are going to be between a rock and a hard place.

[Jasper and one o nin]

What is funny and ironic is: Danielle Smith's comments regarding climate change and the fact that it was the hottest April 23rd on record in Calgary

[Surrealplaces]

Originally Posted by Urban_Genius

I'm surprised Calgary didn't go to wildrose that much. I thought more might go. I think th WR made a fundamental mistake by alienating voters in Edmonton.
It also looks like the Liberals are a rock caught in a hard place in Alberta. It seems that the "progressive" vote is clearly with the NDP. Is it because Albertans consider the PCs as the centrist party?

Like Freeweed had said the polls might be flawed these days. Calgarians will remember the municipal election as the prime example, where the polls missed alot of the young population who don't traditionally own landlines and miss out on polling.

[MalcolmTucker]

Originally Posted by Surrealplaces

Like Freeweed had said the polls might be flawed these days. Calgarians will remember the municipal election as the prime example. Once again the polls may have missed alot of the young population (who don't traditionally own landlines).

At least some of the polls were measuring Calgary's CMA, not Calgary proper.

[eternallyme]

After looking through the results, they seem like a result VERY similar to recent Manitoba and Ontario elections - with the cities sticking hard for the more progressive party (in this case the PC's, in Manitoba the NDP and in Ontario the Liberals - yet they are all fairly close on the spectrum), while the rural southern areas went hard to the right (ditto in those two provinces - especially listening to the campaign rhetoric). The northern areas didn't seem to show any trends in any of those provinces either. It shows that Alberta cannot be dismissed as a bunch of "rednecks" as the eastern media seems to want to believe, but rather little different than any other province and an integral part of Canada.

A sign for the BC election next year perhaps? Interestingly, that trend doesn't seem to apply very well in Atlantic Canada, with the possible exception of Nova Scotia.

[suburbia]

The polls were not wrong, it is just that most people don't know how to read polls:

1. Polls find out what people are thinking when they are sitting at home, and do not consider which of those individuals will actually leave their homes to vote.
2. Polls inherently are limited by who has a land line (or whatever the method to tap people).
3. Polls don't get a full flavor of strategic voting.
4. Polls are what people thought yesterday or the day before.

As an aside, as we often have discussions about walkable areas of the city, density, urban / suburban, I'd be curious to see a comparison of voter turn-out by riding. Anyone have that?

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by eternallyme

After looking through the results, they seem like a result VERY similar to recent Manitoba and Ontario elections - with the cities sticking hard for the more progressive party (in this case the PC's, in Manitoba the NDP and in Ontario the Liberals - yet they are all fairly close on the spectrum), while the rural southern areas went hard to the right (ditto in those two provinces - especially listening to the campaign rhetoric). The northern areas didn't seem to show any trends in any of those provinces either. It shows that Alberta cannot be dismissed as a bunch of "rednecks" as the eastern media seems to want to believe, but rather little different than any other province and an integral part of Canada.

A sign for the BC election next year perhaps? Interestingly, that trend doesn't seem to apply very well in Atlantic Canada, with the possible exception of Nova Scotia.

I'm not sure I can agree with that. Look at Federal elections. Where most province change their voting preferences, you can pretty much guarantee a
Alberta will be 95% blue in every election(and yes, I'd count old Reform and Canadian Alliance as blue).

[Full Mountain]

Originally Posted by suburbia

The polls were not wrong, it is just that most people don't know how to read polls:

1. Polls find out what people are thinking when they are sitting at home, and do not consider which of those individuals will actually leave their homes to vote.
2. Polls inherently are limited by who has a land line (or whatever the method to tap people).
3. Polls don't get a full flavor of strategic voting.
4. Polls are what people thought yesterday or the day before.

As an aside, as we often have discussions about walkable areas of the city, density, urban / suburban, I'd be curious to see a comparison of voter turn-out by riding. Anyone have that?

See here click on the number to left of the Riding Name to see the exact breakdown eligible vs. voters

[freeweed]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

I'm not sure I can agree with that. Look at Federal elections. Where most province change their voting preferences, you can pretty much guarantee a
Alberta will be 95% blue in every election(and yes, I'd count old Reform and Canadian Alliance as blue).

This is a relatively recent phenomenon; before the 60s Alberta mostly voted SoCred and Liberal (and the old Progressive Party back when they existed as a distinct entity). The mid-60s and 70s were really the only standout time where AB voted blue to the rest of the country's red - and then the NEP hit. Which pretty much doomed the federal Libs here for at least another generation. And as AB isn't inclined to vote for extreme left or right parties (witness last night) - that only leaves the Tories as an option.

Given a decent centrist (for wide ranges of centrist) party, AB votes for it. As long as it hasn't introduced the NEP.

[lubicon]

Was anyone else as annoyed as I was with the never ending automated phone calls over the campaign? We must have received at least one every evening. Some were polling type calls (or thinly veiled polling calls), some were flat out solicitations for votes. Always automated though.

I received the last one at 7:55 PM (5 minutes before the polls closed) from our PC candidate. Not sure what they thought they could accomplish by calling that late - other than pissing me off. Which they had done enough already by that point to make me change my vote to another candidate. First time in my life I have not voted PC in a provincial election.

[suburbia]

Well - turns out voter turn out was actually quite solid. Sitting at 57% with some still left to count!

See:
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/po...179/story.html

Voter turnout stood at 57 per cent Tuesday morning, with four polls left to report. Elections Alberta had counted 1,287,770 votes out of a possible 2,265,169 voters.

The raw number blows away all prior years, and 57%+ is close to the 60% of 1993.

[eternallyme]

Originally Posted by freeweed

This is a relatively recent phenomenon; before the 60s Alberta mostly voted SoCred and Liberal (and the old Progressive Party back when they existed as a distinct entity). The mid-60s and 70s were really the only standout time where AB voted blue to the rest of the country's red - and then the NEP hit. Which pretty much doomed the federal Libs here for at least another generation. And as AB isn't inclined to vote for extreme left or right parties (witness last night) - that only leaves the Tories as an option.

Given a decent centrist (for wide ranges of centrist) party, AB votes for it. As long as it hasn't introduced the NEP.

Rural Alberta seems a lot more willing to go to the hard right, but I think the growth in interprovincial and international migration hurt Wildrose badly.

The federal Liberals are probably doomed forever because of the NEP, so centrist or even centre-left voters go Conservative (and, in the past, Reform/Alliance) as a result.

[DizzyEdge]

I have to admit I never even got around to reading the AP's platform.. since I had to vote strategically.