Lessons For B.C. in the Alberta Election

Alberta election lessons | BCBusiness
Tony suggests parties dial down the pre-election hype and focus on reality.

For B.C., there are lessons to be learned in the “surprise” victory by the Progressive Conservatives in Alberta. One of them involves believing your own rhetoric.

The big, supposedly cataclysmic election was held in Alberta on Monday, and the voting results were … meh.

The PCs weren’t thrown out in what was supposed to be an “historic” election – all the press said it was, although it didn’t seem so historic to me. The results were roughly the same as they have been for 41 years.

And the extreme right didn’t sweep in from the hinterland and take office in the capital, as everybody was predicting.

So how could the pundits be so wrong? Because they wanted it to happen.

Alberta politics tend to be pretty boring. The Conservatives (or Social Credit, before them) always win, not much happens and life goes on the same. The press and critics are left to nit-pick about this or that.

So when an another result appeared possible, the press and political fans were all over it. At last it appeared they had an alternative to the same old boring story, and they milked it for everything it was worth.

But Wildrose never lived up to its high rating on the hype-meter. After all, this was a fight between the right and the ultra right. The NDP and the Liberals, although alive, were barely in the picture.

So the worst anyone could say about the Conservatives was that they were too close to the centre, were too conciliatory and therefore not right or religious enough. The only story left was that Alberta elected its first woman premier. Okay, that’s something, but hardly earthshaking.

What can we in B.C. learn from this?

I’d suggest for one, that we might want to dial down all this hype from the two recent by-elections in the suburbs of Vancouver. The conventional thinking is that this “proved” the Liberals were on the way down and the NDP was on the way up. In fact, much of the press treated NDP leader Adrian Dix like he had already won the election and was about to take the premier’s chair.

Maybe he will, but not because a couple of Liberal ridings went to the NDP. By-elections tend to be about protest votes, and a sitting government has never won one.

Just like in Alberta, the press and the pols may be guilty of drinking their own bathwater – of talking up a situation enough so that it appears to be reality.

Did the resurgent Conservative party in B.C. split the vote and signal the demise of the Liberals, as the story line goes? I’m sure there was some, but by-elections are notorious for their low turnout, so how much vote was there to split?

It was odd that Chilliwack, which has had a history of electing Conservatives in both provincial and federal elections, went NDP. Was this a signal that the population in B.C. had changed its voting habits? I don’t think so. I think it was hard work by the NDP, and a case of voters giving a sitting government a bop on the head, a reminder to not get too cocky, which they have been known to do.

So the main lesson from the Alberta election? Be wary about drowning in your own hype. Reality might be writing a different story line.