In a refreshing sign of intelligent life on the Great Plains of Alberta, voters in the Lethbridge-West by-election sent New Democrat Rob Miyashiro to the provincial Legislature in Edmonton yesterday.
Judging from the unofficial numbers on the Elections Alberta website, the vote appeared to be a squeaker until about 11 p.m. when results of the first of two advance polls rolled in, swamping the hopes of United Conservative Party candidate John Middleton-Hope, who up until then had appeared to be within 200 votes of Miyashiro.
With all advance poll results having reported by about a quarter after 11, the final unofficial tally was 7,239 votes for Miyashiro to 6,089 for Middleton-Hope, a difference of 1,150 in the NDP candidate’s favour. Official results will be posted by Elections Alberta on Saturday.
So, obviously, the Opposition NDP did a far better job of organizing its supporters to get their votes in early than did the governing United Conservative Party (UCP).
The UCP’s effort to schedule the by-election a few days before Christmas, presumably on the theory many NDP-inclined students at the University of Lethbridge in the riding would be out of town with their families, also didn’t work.
And if the UCP thought running a former Lethbridge police chief would do the trick for them, that flopped too. Middleton-Hope is a current member of the Lethbridge City Council. Miyashiro is a former city councillor.
Mount Royal University political science professor Keith Brownsey said last night the by-election results “are a very good indication of NDP strength.”
“The NDP focused on economic issues,” Dr. Brownsey told AlbertaPolitics.ca. “There was also, anecdotally, a lot of concern over pensions” – that is, Premier Danielle Smith’s plan to replace the Canada Pension Plan with an Alberta pension.
Miyashiro replaces former NDP cabinet minister Shannon Phillips, who resigned her seat on June 10 after representing the Lethbridge-West voters since the 2015 general election. In her decision to leave politics, she cited the refusal of the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team to charge Lethbridge police officers who spied on her and circulated profane and insulting memes about her.
“I can take being criticized on a political level,” she said at the time of her resignation. “What I can’t take is what happened from the LPS, given that it is so far outside the acceptable norms of the rule of law and the institutions of liberal democracy, for which they have never been held accountable and have never shown a whiff of responsibility.”
Naturally, the by-election was described repeatedly in media as a crucial first test of NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi, the former three-term Calgary mayor who was overwhelmingly chosen by party members in June to replace former premier Rachel Notley.
While Nenshi has been criticized for his low-key approach to the party’s province-wide voter engagement strategy up to now, last night’s results would suggest that it isn’t doing any harm and may be working.
The 13,561 ballots cast amounted to about 37 per cent of the riding’s approximately 37,000 eligible voters.
While the turnout in the riding was over 60 per cent in the last two general elections, this is a significant turnout for a by-election,Brownsey observed. “Some by-elections, as we have seen recently, are a good indication of how voters are feeling.”
Miyashiro won a clear majority, 53.38 per cent of the vote, in the only NDP riding south of Calgary. That matched Ms. Phillips’ 53.92-per-cent showing in the 2023 general election.
Of the votes cast, only 233 were for the Alberta Party’s Layton Veverka, the only other candidate to contest the by-election. So the Alberta Party, it is fair to say, continues having difficulty getting on the political radar in this province.
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