With the economy on shaky ground and the Province racking up annual multi-billion dollar deficits, the PC party has spent the lion’s share of the past year attempting to convince voters that the government can change.
The unofficial slogan seems to be: Today’s PC Party - Exciting and New!
There’s just one problem. Nobody is buying it. Not yet, anyway.
Nobody bought it during the 2011 leadership campaign, which saw just 78,176 voters elect a premier, a drop of 46 per cent from the 2006 contest. Locally, only 650 PC party supporters voted in Airdrie-Chestermere, favouring Rick “Where Is He Now?” Orman on the first ballot.
The trend continued last week, as only 371 PCs cast a ballot to name the first-ever nominee for the new Airdrie constituency. This compares to the 2,150 who voted in the 2007 Airdrie-Chestermere PC nomination race. The new riding is smaller than the old, granted, but its not that much smaller.
Something else is happening here.
Let’s open our history books, class, to the year 1992.
The Don Getty government, after racking up ridiculous deficits and making a mockery of the ‘Conservative’ in Progressive Conservative, was sinking in the polls. After being unfairly run out the cabinet by Getty, MLA Connie Osterman stepped out of politics, prompting a byelection.
Sending a message to government, voters elected Don MacDonald under the Liberal banner. It was the first and only time a Liberal was elected in this region of the province in modern history.
MacDonald served seven months and 20 days in the legislature, before he was caught in the Klein revolution. A groundswell of support for across-the-board spending control and a return to fiscal conservatism propelled Klein, as well as Airdrie-Three Hills candidate Carol Haley, to victory over MacDonald and the Liberals. The parallels are apparent today. The question to be decided in this spring’s election is: Who is Premier Alison Redford?
Is Redford the Klein of this generation, the political leader who will bring fiscal sanity back to the government, and reinvigorate a PC party that lost its way over the past 10 years? Or, is she another Getty, happy to rack up debt rather than face tough decisions?
For greater insight, let’s look at Redford’s political record.
Like most Albertans, she supported the Mulroney PC federal government. She worked for both Joe Clark and the prime minister in the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
When the Mulroney government went horribly wrong, racking up deficits and imposing the GST rather than controlling spending, most Albertans stopped supporting the federal PCs. Most Albertans backed the Reform Party. Redford did not.
In 1993, while Airdrie was electing Reform MP Myron Thompson for the first time, Redford volunteered with Clark. In 1997, when the Reform Party became Canada’s official opposition, Redford worked with PC leader Jean Charest, who went on to become the Liberal premier of Quebec. In 2004, she lost a nomination fight against Calgary Conservative MP Rob Anders, first-elected as a Reform MP in 1997. In short, Redford has consistently backed the same big-spending Red Tory leaders Albertans opposed over the past 20 years.
She seems to be a lot closer to Getty than Klein. This, coupled with plunging PC voter turnout, doesn’t bode well for Redford and company.
Locally, voters have proven they will – under the right circumstances – send a message to the government through the ballot box. The PC party and its new Airdrie candidate must, at all costs, convince Albertans that Redford is exciting and new.
Judging by last week’s vote totals, Airdrie isn’t buying it.
Not yet, anyway.
