“We are going to beat the NDP in rural Alberta, we are going to beat the NDP in Edmonton, and we are going to beat the NDP in Calgary,” shouts Alberta Premier Danielle Smith in a little video ad for voters in next Tuesday’s Brooks-Medicine Hat by-election that popped up on social media Thursday.
Cheerful music plays in the background.
But if an election were held today in Alberta, Rachel Notley’s NDP would win a majority, says a new survey by respected Calgary pollster Janet Brown, who has an enviable history of accurate election calls. A major factor, the Janet Brown Opinion Research poll commissioned by the CBC indicates, is that Albertans don’t like Premier Smith.
No music plays in the background of the CBC’s online news story. The sound of Chopin’s Funeral March you’re hearing is just your mind’s reaction to what you’re reading.
If Smith’s ad sounds a little desperate, that’s probably because it is. She may win next Tuesday’s by-election in a safe rural riding, but anything short of total electoral shock and awe is going to contribute to the narrative of an inevitable NDP victory in 2023.
Perhaps former premier Jason Kenney’s favoured candidate to replace him as leader of the United Conservative Party (UCP), Travis Toews, had it right when he warned that choosing Smith instead of him as premier would lead to the election of the NDP when Albertans finally had a chance to vote throughout the province.
Well, he’s in Smith’s cabinet now, so you won’t hear him saying that for the time being.
And maybe Mr. Kenney himself was on the mark when he warned that the party he by and large created in his own image was on the verge of being taken over by lunatics. “The lunatics are trying to take over the asylum,” was the way he put it, which seems fair.
He promised not to let them. He seems to have failed. Thirteen days after Smith was sworn in as premier of Alberta, a slate of vaccine-objectors and convoy sympathizers loosely allied with her campaign captured all nine contested positions on the UCP’s 18-member board during the party’s annual general meeting.
According to a better-late-than-never look at the Take Back Alberta slate in the Globe and Mail Wednesday, up to 900 of the 1,800 delegates at the AGM in Edmonton were adherents of the Q-adjacent insurgents.
So, what happened sounds more like a coup than a hostile takeover like the ones Kenney imposed on Alberta’s Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties in 2017.
Say what you will, though, about the folks behind the TBA takeover, what’s left of the UCP is definitely not your father’s Conservative Party!
Which gets us back to Brown’s look at the numbers.
Notwithstanding TBA leader David Parker’s vow to the Globe’s reporter that “Phase 4 of our plan is defeat the NDP,” Brown’s poll results suggest Albertans are recoiling in horror from the New UCP, even in some rural areas on the edge of suburbia.
Her tally puts NDP support at 47 per cent (up from 32 per cent in the 2019 election won by Kenney’s version of the UCP). The poll shows the UCP now at 38 per cent (down from 55 per cent in 2019). Smaller parties are just ghostly traces on the political radar, as voters worried about the hands the UCP is now in move to the NDP.
The survey of 1,200 Albertans was in the field from October 12-to-30.
As noted, Brown’s poll also looked at the personal popularity of Premier Smith and former premier Notley.
Only 18 per cent of respondents were “highly impressed” by Smith; 39 per cent were highly impressed by Notley. More than half, 54 per cent, were “not impressed” with the premier; 35 per cent were not impressed with the Opposition leader.
Voters’ skeptical reaction to the premier “really stems from the fact that Albertans are really disappointed in Danielle Smith as a leader,” Brown explained politely.
By every measure noted by Brown’s poll, the UCP fares worse than the NDP. And on health care, which the conventional wisdom sees as the biggest concern of Alberta voters right now, 78 per cent of respondents thought the UCP is on the wrong track.
UCP results for managing education, post-secondary education, and just being honest are similarly terrible. Even when it came to “building pipelines,” supposedly the UCP’s strong suit, Brown’s survey suggested more Albertans think the UCP is on the wrong track than the right track.
If this trend continues, especially if it gains momentum in rural areas, it seems likely Premier Smith will have to find a way to wiggle out of the May 29, 2023, fixed election date.
It probably also means that more traditional Conservatives in the UCP Caucus – at least those who haven’t been co-opted by membership in Smith’s humongous cabinet – may finally try to take back their party.
Pass the popcorn!
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Nick Seebruch, editor
