The reaction to former Alberta premier Alison Redford’s resignation as Calgary-Elbow MLA this morning among Opposition politicians was universal and predictable.
To wit: the problems with the 43-year-old Progressive Conservative Dynasty are bigger than just Ms. Redford’s political failings, however spectacular they may have been, and there’s no way the people of Alberta will ever forget that!
If you’ve been paying attention, it’s hard to argue with the first part of that proposition. But are voters paying attention?
The thing to remember about the disgraced former premier’s bland and passively voiced announcement of her departure this morning is that from the PC Party’s perspective, it just might work.
The Tories of course, will privately fear that this time they’ve really done it … that they’ve gone too far and will finally get caught by the voters.
But they’ll work hard over the next two years under whichever leader they select to use the natural advantage of power to ensure they slip back into power one more time. Count on it, though, no PC supporter will be chanting “Four more years” in 2016!
The Opposition leader, the would-be Opposition leader and the former Opposition leader will all say essentially the same thing, that is, what they were saying this morning: It’s not just Ms. Redford, as spectacularly catastrophic as she turned out to be, it’s her party. Both are long past their best-before dates.
The Sixty-Four-Billion-Dollar Question, as it were, is whether the voters of Alberta will finally reach the same conclusion, or if old habits die hard enough to save the decrepit Tories one more time under any of Jim Prentice, Ric McIver or Thomas Lukaszuk.
It is said here it’s not a foregone conclusion that they won’t.
The embarrassing Ms. Redford’s departure the day before a report from the Auditor General that almost certainly would have resulted in her expulsion from the caucus that fired her as premier in March, really does change the political game in Alberta in important ways, the results of which are not yet as clear as the Opposition would like you to believe.
This post also apepars on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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