Alberta election: PCs steamroll past Wildrose Party

Edmonton, ALTA.—The Progressive Conservatives steamrolled past the Wildrose Party to win a majority term in Alberta, defying what all polls had said leading up to election night.

Premier Alison Redford won a victory Monday evening in an election that even die-hard Conservatives believed was going to be a loss. She had predicted, at best, a minority government. The biggest loser of the evening was Danielle Smith, leader of the Wildrose.

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“We found out change might take a little longer than we thought,” Smith said in her concession speech.

“I acknowledge we wanted to do better . . . Am I disappointed? Yeah. Am I discouraged? Not a chance,” she said, adding “the growth of Wildrose has been nothing short of remarkable.”

Heading into the campaign, Smith was leading in polls — as she had been since the beginning. But at a muted Wildrose Party headquarters in High River, Alta., strategists huddled and blamed the loss on NDP and Liberal supporters who were wooed by the PCs.

“That’s so disappointing. We were so certain there was going to be a change in goverment,” said Wildrose supporter Jeff Engel, who had voted earlier in the day for Smith, confident that she would be the next premier. “The vote got split. That must have been what happened. It’s too bad.”

Stephen Carter, campaign manager for Redford, told the Toronto Star before the premier officially made her victory speech that the Progressive Conservatives were in a position of playing catch-up.

“We started from zero and we’re very very happy with the returns and we’re happy we’ve earned the trust of Albertans,” he said Monday night.

Redford’s win came as a surprise to many given the talk about a desire for change.

At Redford’s Calgary riding earlier on Monday, voter Karen Crosby refused to reveal who she had cast a ballot for but made clear who she voted against.

“Let’s just say I voted for change,” Crosby said as she walked out of the polling station in the Southwest Calgary riding. “I don’t care if it’s a minority government as long as our present government isn’t in power anymore.”

But voters like Jane Oxenbury helped the Progressives hold onto their majority.

Oxenbury, who has voted consistently for the Liberals provincially and federally since the 1970s, voted for the Progressive Conservatives for the first time Monday.

“I really struggled because I’ve been a loyal Liberal supporter and here in Alberta that’s saying a lot because we never do well,” Oxenbury said. “But the Conservatives here are moving into becoming more liberal and the Wildrose is just too unknown and conservative.”

Alberta elections have rarely been as divisive as this one. The province’s political history has followed a similar pattern since the 1930s — parties stay in power for decades until a grassroots opposition party emerges; that party takes over and rules for decades until the next grassroots opposition party emerges.

The Progressive Conservatives was the grassroots party in 1971 when it took over from the Social Credit, ending its 36-year reign. In this election, the Wildrose Party, the new grassroots party, had hoped to follow the pattern.

Last fall, when Redford, an international lawyer who was seen as a moderate, became the elected leader after former premier Ed Stelmach resigned because of internal dissent within his caucus, the party had a slight bounce back in the polls. But the Wildrose, which steadily gained in popularity, continued its rise and ran a mostly error-free campaign.

“The Conservatives didn’t think we could mount the campaign we did and we didn’t know we would get the support we would get from the public,” one Wildrose strategist said before the results were out. The fledgling party received $2.3 million in donations for the campaign compared with $1.5 million for the Conservatives.

What seemed to have hurt the Conservatives during this campaign were the typical issues that plague a party that has long been in power, including a dormant political machine with little reason to fire up over the past four decades.

A Conservative strategist said moving to the progressive side of the spectrum made the party more representative of the views of Albertans and better able to convince NDP and Liberal voters in the province that a Wildrose majority was not in their interest.

The Wildrose Party became a factor after former Fraser Institute researcher and Calgary Herald columnist Danielle Smith took over as a leader in 2009, a year after the Alliance and Wildrose provincial parties merged. The new Wildrose grew rapidly in membership as some former Conservative supporters, Conservative MLAs and members fled the party over concerns it was moving to the progressive side.

“So what we ended up with is an Americanization of our Alberta politics,” said PC supporter Anita Loowell of Edmonton. “What we’ve got at that end, the Wildrose, is people who believe that private health care is okay, that people should look after themselves, that public education doesn’t matter and we’re all on our own. That’s not what I want.”

Wildrose supporter Alan Weenink, who voted for Smith in her riding of High River, an hour’s drive south of Calgary, sees nothing wrong with that. The Conservatives’ shift to the middle, partly in response to internal politics and partly to distinguish itself after the rise of the Wildrose, made it impossible for him to support the party he once backed.

“The people who were too conservative for the Conservatives left but look at where we’re at? We’re going to have real conservatives like Danielle Smith become the premier and a real conservative like Stephen Harper as prime minister,” he said. “The rest of the country won’t like it but that can’t be helped. We got to do what’s right for us here.”

But Conservative supporter Jennifer Forbes in High River said despite all the pressure from neighbours and others who tried to convince her that the Wildrose was the party of the future, she decided to vote for the PC candidate.

“The people who were telling me to go Wildrose seemed angry and wanted to keep things the way they were in the past,” said Forbes. “They kept telling me the Conservatives deserved to be thrown out of office but I wasn’t convinced the Wildrose should get the chance.”