Alberta Election Blogging

I’m not saying it’s not surprising — I still don’t really believe it — but I argue that the NDP is not quite as inexplicable as it seems. In particular, it’s crucial to understand that 1)the provincial Alberta NDP is not a socialist party, and 2)calling Alberta the “Canadian Texas” or whatever is true to some extent but can also be pretty misleading:

We should start with some of the necessary qualifications to Heer’s analogy. Despite the socialist heritage of the federal NDP — which has only very loose connections to individual Canadian provincial parties — Notley is no leftist radical. (Warren and Sanders aren’t either, of course, but they are further to the left of their country’s center of political gravity.) With the arguable exception of a proposed $5/hour increase in the minimum wage, the basic ideas the party ran on — a 2 percent increase on the corporate tax rate, a more progressive income tax, expanded health care spending, and unspecified increases in the royalties paid by oil companies for extracting resources — are relatively anodyne mainstream liberalism. Particularly given that these proposals are likely to be enacted in more moderate form, they represent a shift to the left but not nearly as major a one as you might expect from the shift in party labels.

In addition, Alberta’s political culture is not as monolithically reactionary as some might assume. Like the Democratic Party of the New Deal era, Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives have been a dominant but ideologically heterogeneous coalition, and its turn towards more American-style conservatism is relatively recent. If Alberta is the Canadian Texas or Mississippi, the “Canadian” part is still doing an awful lot of the work. (Alberta, after all, has had single-payer health care since 1950.)

Like its federal counterpart prior to its electoral decimation in 1993, for much of its history Alberta’s PCs were quite moderate, comparable to the pre-Thatcher British Tories or European Christian Democrats. Under Peter Lougheed, premier from 1971 until 1985, Alberta’s Conservatives were business-friendly with a culturally traditionalist rural base, but also favored substantial public investments funded with progressive taxation. (Alberta remains the only Canadian province without a sales tax.) This is a striking contrast with oil-rich American states like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, all of which have tax codes in which the poor pay a higher percentage of their incomes in taxes than the rich.

It would be interesting to know how an election with instant runoff voting would have turned out. The natural assumption is that the remaining Wild Rose voters would have overwhelmingly split for the Tories rather than the NDP, and that’s probably right. But given how much Wild Rose support was just generalized anti-incumbent sentiment, and how furious Wild Rose voters were over Prentice’s attempted pre-emption, it’s not an entirely straightforward question.