Opinion | The Danielle Smith vs. Rachel Notley campaign revealed some hard truth about Alberta and its future

EDMONTON—Here’s one thing you can take from all the spectacle, acrimony and chaos of the Alberta election campaign: This is not the Alberta you thought it was.

Alberta is no longer a one-party, monolithic political culture in which votes are so plentiful for Conservatives that Elections Alberta can pretty much weigh the ballots rather than count them.

Alberta is now emerging, blinking into the light of a two-party political system: United Conservatives versus New Democrats.

It is a bitterly partisan arrangement that divides the province along demographic and geographic lines.

But while the choice Alberta voters were presented with before choosing Danielle Smith on Monday night was draped in the animosity of partisan political rhetoric, there was also significant overlap between the visions of Alberta and its future presented by the winning UCP and the NDP.

That’s because the issues facing Alberta are, in some ways, existential.

Neither party had the answers to some of the most fundamental questions.

Both contenders in this election tried to grapple with a future in which the province must deal seriously with climate change and the evolving nature of fossil fuel consumption. But climate change was never a front-row issue, even for the NDP, even as wildfires devoured parts of northern Alberta. And it became clear neither party really knows how to get the province off the resource-revenue roller-coaster. We remain firmly strapped in our seats.

Instead, both parties played on the good-old Alberta political ethic of voters wanting a government that, thanks to robust oil and natural gas prices, can shower them with money, keep taxes low and balance the provincial budget.

What happens when that changes?

Election campaign 2023 never provided answers. That’s because the answers are hard and unpopular and, to paraphrase a federal candidate from days gone by, elections are not the time for Albertans to discuss a post-oil-boom Alberta.

Instead, the election campaign weaponized policy debates.

Smith was happy to attack the NDP during the campaign as anti-oil socialists out to tax-and-spend Alberta into financial ruin.

NDP Leader Rachel Notley eagerly took shots at Smith’s controversial history as a fringe right-winger who would sell off hospitals and force Albertans to pay to see a doctor. But Notley also expressed support for Albertans’ conservative sensibilities, promising to freeze personal taxes, balance the budget and safeguard those energy jobs.

Notley has also publicly fought with federal NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh over pipelines and, as premier in 2018, helped force the federal Liberal government to buy and expand the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Smith put forward a more “progressive” face promising to improve ambulance response times, provided a “guarantee” against paying for doctors’ visits, and is spending an extra $1 billion this year to improve the health-care system. For all her talk of fiscal conservatism, Smith looked much like a New Democrat in promising to spend a record $68 billion this year from a provincial budget flush with oil and gas money.

The parties certainly had differences on issues dealing with, for example, drug abuse, protecting the vulnerable, and just how defiant they would get with the federal government.

But if you had taken campaign literature from both parties and stripped them of logos and fiery rhetoric, you’d have been hard-pressed on the big issues of health care, jobs and cost of living to figure out which were UCP and which NDP.

Smith is the reason this election campaign was such a closely fought battle for 28 days. Not because she was the scrappy underdog, but because she was an unpopular top dog. Her litany of controversial comments and actions forced many Alberta Conservatives to ponder what it means to be conservative.

It was an election campaign that raised all sorts of existential questions for Albertans.

The irony is that by presenting so many superficial examples of how Albertans are divided, the campaign obscured how much they have in common, and how much this province needs unity as it faces an uncertain future.

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