Hindsight into the Future!

Yesterday a poll was published in Alberta. Unsurprisingly, it put the Wild Rose Party in the lead with 35% of voters supporting them. Nonetheless, the poll was a part of news stories that served to inspire this piece. So, let us review:

1. Somebody robbed the Wild Rose Party of some of its computers, and its membership data. This information is now being used to support Jason Kenney's leadership campaign.

2. The Provincial government reduced the donation cap from $15,000/$30,000 to $4000/year.

3. Federal government approved new oil pipelines, including the Kinder-Morgan pipeline to Burnaby, and generously credited the Alberta government for its leadership on climate change in making their decision.

4. The NDP are holding steady with 31% support in the latest public poll.

I feel I should address the latter before carrying on. People have a right to feel skeptical of this result, given that the last two polls put support at 19% and 15% respectively. However, I feel that history is on the side of the latest poll. A review of Alberta's elections going back to the days of Grant Notley shows that the Liberals and NDP polled in every election generally 35% to 50% of the electorate. As much as the conservatives would like to believe, there has always been a significant centre-left population within the province. One doesn't have to go back far to hear calls to unite the left in Alberta to oppose the PCs!

Given the likelihood of a Kenney victory, polls giving the PCs and WRP a combined support of roughly 75% pointed to a historic conversion to conservative politics that is without parallel. So polls that combined had the Liberals and NDP sinking below that 30% support threshold should be treated with skepticism.

So, on to the future...

Two and half years to go until the next election (in theory). A lot can happen. But there are things pointing in the direction of another surprise NDP success in 2019. Note that I didn't say win; I am not sure of that possibility, but the idea that the NDP are simply going to be wiped out in the next election I find increasingly unlikely.

The critics of the government have to deal with the reality that the NDP are already the highest grossing political party in the province. The banning of corporate donations crippled the PCs and Liberal parties, and the Wild Rose's much acclaimed ability to receive individual donations has already proved wanting. The dramatic reduction in the annual individual limit is going to yet another nail into the opposition parties, who have always benefited from the deep pockets of some select supporters. The NDP basically has almost three years to pad a donation lead before the next election, while the other parties struggle with declining revenue.

The other issue facing the opposition, particularly the WRP is the looming redrawing of the province's constituency boundaries. Alberta, contrary to popular belief, has long been one of the most urbanized provinces in the country, and an NDP government is much more likely to acknowledge that fact through action than anybody else. So, while the province's population continues to drift into the cities, it is likely that the seats will finally follow. While the PCs, NDP and WRP are all competitive in northern Alberta, the potential loss of seats in rural southern Alberta will do the WRP undoubted harm. To lose even two seats through redistricting here would wipe out 10% of their caucus, and this is a distinct possibility. To offset this they would have to do better in the cities, but they have always struggled to win there, a fact unlikely to change in North Calgary or Edmonton anytime soon.

Then there is the more sinister thing - Jason Kenney led implosion of the PCs. While destruction was always Kenney's stated intention, implosion is becoming a more apt word by the day. The reports of bullying, shenanigans and skulduggery emanating from the PCs can have no other effect. Jason Kenney will win the party leadership; there's simply no way he can't - the fix is in. And the fix is obvious. As much as the PC establishment is trying to make a fight of it, they are bound to lose as Kenney stocks the delegations with his supporters. Kenney always had a fine line to walk, though - he made it plain he wished to end the PC association, as he should have. However, he needed to keep its membership and supporters onside while this was happening, and here he is failing.

Many people have been comparing the takeover to what happened to the federal PCs over a decade ago. The comparison is not exactly apt - McKay surrendered his party to Stephen Harper after all. In any case, it needs to be remembered that the support they were expecting in the 2004 election did not exactly materialize - the Liberals won a minority. Indeed, the Conservatives have only won a single majority in the whole period I have been alive - so maybe there is a warning there.

Here I must admit I've sat on this article all weekend... and now more fuel for this fire.

The protest in Edmonton on Saturday only adds to my growing conviction that the conservatives are farting their future away. Some Albertans are whining that the media isn't covering the rally fairly. They are right - but their work is wrong. The media should be crucifying Chris Alexander for his wimpy reaction to the chants of "lock her up." Ezra Levant should be getting sued (again), for slander, and all the awful things said and done need to be exposed by media - print, radio and TV. That they've been generalizing what happened is a total disservice the province (another shock); but it is a credit to the people here that most people have noticed just how insane the whole thing was. Just like how the 2012 election was lost in a lake of fire, the 2019 election is probably going to boil down, in some way, to the sins the opposition has committed in the previous four years, the list of which grows longer and heavier by the day.

Thoughts on the US Election

This is going to be an unorganized rip through my thoughts on the US election.

Since the winner was a narcissist, I will begin with some ego-aggrandizement of my own. I predicted (not here, but on facebook) that Donald Trump would win the election, while losing the popular vote by over a million. The first thought is blatantly true (I had no idea he would win so much, though), while it appears the second thought may come true soon. Also, and this I felt essential, voter turnout was much, much lower than in 2012. Isn't it amusing to know Mitt Romney got more votes than Clinton?

Nonetheless, my thoughts are certainly with the protesters. It's hard to defend a man being elected in such a dubious way, and clearly the electoral college needs to be abolished. Get working on a constitutional amendment, now.

My other thought concerns the importance of messaging during an election. Here I will draw comparisons to the last two elections I voted in: Canada's last October, and Alberta's in April, 2015. I really think Hillary Clinton suffered for lack of a message; when during her concession speech, she said, "this was never about me," I had to laugh. Your election slogan was "I'm with her!" and beyond that, she had no ideas about the shape of things to come, just that she had more experience than Trump (which isn't hard. Arguably, so do I - at least I was in an actual military).

Experience can be good or bad. In Clinton's case, unfortunately, her experience resonated with Americans as being of the negative sort. It is ok to be sceptical of "experience" being a primary factor in hiring a politician anyway. While Americans wondered just who she owed debts to, I think historically to the disastrous governments of Lloyd George after WW1 and Winston Churchill in the 1950s. Experience isn't everything. Canada has enjoyed a relatively successful history of experienced leadership. If a Prime Minister served longer than two terms in office, they seem to do a good enough job to earn a place on our money.

Two-terms (8-9 years) seems to be a big barrier, especially to Conservatives, to break. Borden needed to leave office, having nearly destroyed the country (and conveniently fallen in with the British establishment). Mulroney resigned as the most unpopular Prime Minister ever, and last year, Stephen Harper went down to colossal defeat. With his cabinet members abandoning ship, Harper still charged into the election believing his experience alone would vanquish his rivals.

When the Liberals swept Atlantic Canada, I was surprised only that the NDP didn't win a seat. Having family from there, and keeping track of their affairs, it did not shock me that they universally rejected a party that patronised and insulted them. My neighbours here in Alberta, on the other hand, wondered just how dumb they could be. I hear echoes of this discourse in the aftermath of the American election.

Harper's record, outside of Alberta and Saskatchewan was pretty shit, and he should have known it. Those two provinces, insulated by oil economies, survived Harper's time as PM as the only two which enjoyed any real growth. His stewardship of the rest of the country was undeniably worse. British Columbia saw it's average annual income drop year after year. Economic decline in the rest of Canada was concealed by blowing up the housing market to titanic proportions. Now the country is worse off than the USA in 2007-2008, and the new Prime Minister is doing a great deal to try and diffuse it. So, campaigning on experience when most of the country hates you we must admit is a poor formula. That the Clinton and Harper campaigns couldn't believe the facts must point to a great amount of conceit in both groups.

As a last word on messaging, I would like to compare the "surprise" NDP government of Alberta to that of the perennial heirs-apparent, the Wild Rose Party. Notley's victory in April 2015 is, depending on your point of view, intensely correlated to the fact that she had a positive message that resonated with the province. The late Mr. Prentice was eternally trying to remove his foot from his mouth, and most importantly, the Wild Rose Party, didn't have a message for Albertans. Who can forget the debate, when Brian Jean successfully imitated a medieval monk with his mantra of "no new taxes." The NDP won because in April 2015, they appeared to be the only option.

So Donald Trump won, too. He acknowledged there was a problem in the way the USA was doing things. The people who had suffered from decades of de-industrialization and mergers and downsizing who spoke up and handed him power. This possibility was always present; it was the failure of the Democrats, and pollsters, and media, that they ignored the data they did not welcome.

Will they learn from this? Not by the looks of it.

Thanks for reading.

Alberta Media and Politics

Historically, it is not unusual for provinces to be governed by a single party for decades at a time. Some of these dynastic governments delivered great and positive change not just to their province, but the country itself. Saskatchewan's NDP dynasty inspired our modern health care system. Ontario's Conservative dynasty of the 19th century established the power of the provinces over the federal government. Many others had delivered good economic and social growth. They won elections because they were good governments.

Alberta's 44 year PC government (1971-2015) was not of the same calibre. I have already castigated this government on previous posts, but I think its impossible to say that the PCs ever inspired a wise action inside or outside the province, at least after Lougheed. So, that said, I do not believe that the PC dynasty started off badly. Peter Lougheed was probably the best premier the province had. Conveniently, he left government during the depths of Alberta's 1980s recession; the premiership was then picked up by fellow Edmonton Eskimos alumni Don Getty. Lougheed died only a few years ago, his funeral attended by all his successors who had made a living ignoring  his advice on development.

Now, by 1993 it was not clear that the PC dynasty would survive. Alberta, like the rest of Canada, became terrified of its debt levels. The Liberals looked like they could win the election that year, promising deep cuts to the budget, but were narrowly defeated by Ralph Klein's PC team. His first four years were hardly free of scandal, but Klein's 1997 victory, I believe, can be considered the beginning of the end for the PC dynasty. In the absence of a real opposition, poor government and corruption became hallmarks of his administration; however, not only did people not care, he became the evermore popular "King Ralph."

Why was this?

My family has lived in Alberta for over 100 years. From them, and from my own experience, I can speak to one alarming phenomenon: the monopoly of mass-market media by right wing interests. This monopoly began, at least in Calgary, in 1980 with the demise of The Albertan newspaper. I would say this monopoly has only ended recently thanks to online citizen journalism, and in a physical sense, by the publishing of the Metro by the Toronto Star and Albertaviews magazine. These things have only had an effect in the past 10 years at most, so we can say that the Right dominated Alberta's mass media from 1980 to around 2005/2010.

This domination was embodied in the newspapers, in the talk radio stations, in local TV, and in magazines like Alberta Report and later, the Western Standard. In cities with more than one newspaper, the editorial angle ranged from soft-right to far-right (in both Edmonton and Calgary, represented by the Sun). Even the Universities, contrary to popular belief, presented a right-wing perspective, as they continue to do today, with various representatives of the "Calgary School" presenting their dubious arguments in favour of the neoconservative perspective. The disreputable Fraser Institute and its supply of titled minions is usually a conspicuously regular presence in the media, and so merits my honourable mention as a source of right-wing claptrap. Alternate views were limited, if at all, to the letters to the editor.

The only alternative to the mountain of neoconservative rhetoric that dominated the province for a quarter century lay in the province's publishing industry. There are many titles published during this period which illuminate the dubious successes of the province's leadership. However, the market for such books never proved significant enough to affect debate within the province. I suspect some books, like William Marsden's "Stupid to the Last Drop," sold better outside Alberta than within it.

The effect this monolithic media presence in Alberta can be seen in the ways Albertans remember the past. The National Energy Program is a misunderstood boogieman invoked to crush debate and fuel hate towards the East. Ralph Klein squandered the province's wealth, squandered its crown corporations, and acted like a buffoon, but is remembered as our lovable saviour. In contrast, the Federal Liberal government of Chretien is not remembered for slaying the deficit, but is thought to have increased it. Stephen Harper apparently never ran a deficit, either. The Sponsorship Scandal, which cost the country $150M and became another reason to hate the Liberals, had nothing on contemporary provincial scandals. but those remained forgotten or ignored.

Indeed, the province exhibits a memory of events almost totally at variance with history and reality. Why this is so can only be considered a product of the province's partisan press. All media sources slavishly promoted conservative interests and parties, and if it wasn't conservative - it wasn't good. The NDP were blamed for "ruining provinces" even though the Saskatchewan NDP government was probably the most effective in Canada in the 1990s, and almost certainly saved it (after the Conservatives had gone off to jail). The Liberals hated the west. Quebec steals our money. The Atlantic provinces do too. Alberta was the model for the whole country, damn the facts and damn reality! It's just everybody who voted against the Conservatives from 1993 on was too stupid to notice.

A very good example of the provincial media's lingering double standard is blatantly apparent at the moment. First, there is the Purchase Power Agreement scandal. If what the NDP alleges is true, which we have little reason yet to doubt, then the scandal should be yet another example of PC corruption. Instead, we have series after series of articles in all the Alberta papers trying to establish the incompetence, corruption, and bad faith of the current government. The Calgary Sun typically picked and chose its sources quoting people saying the government has little chance to win its lawsuit, when its Siamese twin, the Herald acknowledged other claims that its actually 50-50, or better. I can only assume the papers are looking out for our best interests, and not the interests of their corporate overlords.

On the other hand, Jason Kenney recently began his travelling tour of the province. His speech from the Legislature grounds was broadcast live across the province, and all the talk was about the possibilities in store for him, us, and ultimately, the defeat of the NDP. In other words, the return of our Golden Future. What went totally unsaid was the question of why a taxpayer paid Member of Parliament is spending all of his time campaigning outside of his riding, outside of election time, and in a different level of government altogether. That this is a basic ethics violation should not come as a surprise to the editors of Alberta's remaining newspapers (which are all basically the same one at this point), but remember, these were the people who endorsed the Wildrose Party and the Conservatives in the last provincial and federal elections, regardless of the effect on their readers.

While I have already mentioned how new forms of media, and new entities like Albertaviews helped break the right-wing monopoly in Alberta, I believe the real nail in the coffin was something much more ironic. While the PCs remained the sole right-wing option (of repute) in the province, there could be no criticism of them. This all changed after Premier Stelmach's royalty review. The province's oil industry turned the Wildrose Alliance from a southern, regional, rural fringe party to competitor. Now that there was a more corporate friendly party on the scene, Alberta's mass media began to do its job and hold the government to account. Stelmach is rather demeaned in provincial memory as an incompetent nincompoop sort of Premier. Alison Redford was basically the Antichrist.

However, the long awaited return to form was not without its issues. I found especially dubious the U of C economics professors using their lectures to tell students to vote Wildrose. But more significantly, Danielle Smith, former leader of the WRP and member of the "Calgary School," was married to the head editor of the Calgary Sun, coincidentally the party's biggest cheerleader. Such a conflict of interest remained unnoted, though I noted that they were the first news source to publicize a Wildrose lead in the 2012 election polls. Following her disastrous decision to abort the WRP in 2014, Danielle Smith found employment as a talk show host on Calgary's QR77. You can imagine her take on events.

During its heyday, the neoconservative leaders of the Province were able to effect a near-total echo chamber in Alberta discourse. Its effect on public memory can still be seen in the bizarre myths that still pervade and pervert the province's population. I do mean pervert: there is ample evidence both on the internet and on people's cars and shirts that don't just reflect a distaste for the new governments, but a vitriolic hate for them, and democracy itself. Unfortunately, it will be a long time indeed before the damage to our consciousness is healed, but I am hopeful. After all, Albertans rejected the "no new tax" and "big cuts" of the Wildrose Party in favour of reasoned answers and acknowledged realities with the NDP. That really is a sign of something to be celebrated.

Now all I can recommend from this point is to go read some history.

Thanks for reading.

Alberta's Perfect Storm, Part 2

Last time I looked at some of the ways Alberta's economic pillar, the fossil fuel industry, was recently affected negatively by a combination of technological change, competition and strategic interference. However, to understand the present economic bust more fully, we need consider more than the industrial side of things, but the human side, too. Unfortunately, much of the province's suffering today is result of poor choices made by people in government, and in their private lives, as it is a matter of circumstance. Accordingly, I believe much of what has happened was avoidable, as our predicament was predictable, but our leaders, and our selves, failed us.

To be gentle, we should start by considering the failings of the PC government.

The most common complaint about the past government is that they failed to plan for the future. This is a big charge, made up of two major components. The first is that they failed to save for days like this. Another component is that they failed to diversify the economy.

On the first charge, that they failed to save, rings all too true. The PCs, from Klein to Redford will forever be condemned as both reckless and irresponsible. The Province's Heritage fund was left to stagnate, left undisturbed since the downturn of the 1980s. Since that downturn, Alberta had paid off its debt, and was in the position, I remember, "to pay off the debt of other provinces, so long as they promised never to go into debt again" (this was actually argued in the National Post over a decade ago). Instead, the government cut taxes on the rich, on corporations, and on royalties.

That the tax cuts favoured the rich is undeniable; a flat tax, set at the relatively high rate of 10%, were you poor, or the incredibly low rate of 10%, were you rich, was a massive giveaway of billions of dollars a year in revenue. It needs be remembered, for all time, that tax cuts for the rich were very much in vogue in the English speaking world of the early 2000s, but that just serves to reinforce how shortsighted these governments were globally. Now tax cuts in general are not necessarily bad things; I would argue though that you can't afford them when people are dying in your hospital waiting rooms, and the insane are being put out on the streets. The only thing that made these tax cuts doable were the high revenues the province received from natural gas, gambling, and oil, the complicity of the province's media, and the wishes of the voters, in that order.

Cutting taxes on corporations remains popular today; probably because all of our news media comes from blatantly self-interested media corporations. However, even I feel that this may have been a good idea at the time. Low taxes do attract new businesses; but it can be seen that this did not happen in Alberta for other reasons, which I will explore later. The companies we did have, those incredibly profitable corporations of Alberta, were able to save their profits, and if you look who owns what, remove them from the country altogether.

The cut in the rate of oil royalties was actually more of an accident than a deliberate giveaway. Still, the story that can be told tells the same story of moral cowardice as before. Royalties dropped because Alberta had two different kinds of royalties: one for conventional oil, and one for the oil sands. Like the rest of Earth, Alberta's conventional oil was cheap to access and of good quality. Accordingly, the government in the distant past effected a decent royalty rate. Cheap access and good quality are two characteristics lacking in the oil sands. The Oil Sands are so inaccessible that for many years the best plan for getting at the stuff was by nuking the ground around Fort McMurray, a plan approved by Premier Manning's government (more amazingly, the Soviet Union actually did this on its own soil). As for quality, the oil sands are so bad they require much refining before even becoming as good as conventional oil; hence the much lower price it fetches internationally. So, to encourage development of the oil sands, the government set royalty rates low, and provided further generous incentives to oil sands companies. The drop in oil royalties basically reflects the historical depletion of Alberta's conventional oil sources, and their replacement by the oil sands.

Now the moral cowardice. Premier Stelmach inherited the government around the time the oil sands displaced the conventional sources as Alberta's economic (and revenue) driver. He proposed a royalty review meant to address the discrepancy between the oil royalties. In those days the price of oil was galloping towards $150US a barrel, and if your Calgary based oil company wasn't insanely profitable, there was something terribly wrong with it, or more likely, you. Nonetheless, the royalty review was aborted, with the specious claim the royalties were fine. The only thing to come from the whole situation was that Alberta's oil companies threw their financial weight behind the offshot of the wilting Social Credit Party: the Wildrose Alliance.

During the Stelmach years, investment poured into the Alberta Oil Sands. The Province's economic growth and population growth were simply stunning. Already, though, problems were becoming apparent. Things were simply too good. The low tax regime adopted by the province undoubtedly encouraged the mass migration and investment we received (reducing regulations also helped, no doubt). It also encouraged massive inflation; at one time, the poverty line in Fort McMurray was an income of over $60,000 a year.

The government lacked the resources to keep up with the growth. Whole neighbourhoods were being built with no schools, community centres, parks. Calgary didn't get a new high school for 15 years, while the population increased by the hundreds of thousands. During the last election, one friend ran in a Northwest Calgary riding. I was astonished that it had as many schools - six - as the 60 year old community I reside in. There was a lack of hospitals, schools, teachers, doctors, nurses - there was a shortage of almost everything necessary for society to run.

There is perhaps a development lesson here. I feel the lesson is don't encourage more development than you can pay for or keep up with. The Alberta governments reckless tax cuts blew up a bubble economy, while reducing its ability to keep pace with it. And all the while, they didn't save a dime. Former Premier Lougheed criticized the government for its haphazard economic development. One think tank went so far as deem Alberta the province with the worst fiscal outlook in the country.

Why did economic diversification fail? Deregulating the electricity markets didn't help. Experts say it has cost the province's people and businesses $20 billion since it was implemented. This alone may not have been fatal to Alberta's other industries, but the massive economic growth in the province drove up rents and leases, too. The last nail in the coffin of Alberta's economic diversification was the success of the Oil Sands itself. One could simply make so much money, so fast, regardless of your passions or qualifications, that almost all the province's energies and talents were sucked into the oil sector. This was not a bad thing at the time, but were something to happen to oil, we would definitely be in an uncomfortable position.

And here we are.

I realize I have spent too long bashing the government. The people of Alberta deserve a shake too. Next time.

Again, thanks for reading.

Unite the Right?

I feel like I had to start this blog because I feel isolated. I listen to the radio, I read the newspapers, and nowhere do I see people asking the questions I feel like asking. I don't see people raising the objections I do, or following up with the follow ups I think. So, this is my place to examine the issues from one of those unexamined angles that are hidden, but oh so common in this province of Alberta.

So what are the media discussing these days in the province? Jason Kenney, and the latest attempt to Unite the Right.

So, I feel I must discuss the reasons why I feel all this hot air is not going to equal electoral success.

My wife asked me today if I think the NDP are going to win the election in 2019. Normally, when asked such a question, I hide behind the cliche that "x is a long time in politics," and at least, that's very true. However, this time I had to admit that yes, I thought they would. I saved the cliche for after. Unite the right or not, I don't yet feel the NDP will lose; but that's another story. For now, I must explain why I feel uniting the right will mean bumkiss in 2019.

As a starting point, let's expose the presumption of The Media that it is possible to "unite the right?"

Simply, no.

While The Media may have forgot, Alberta currently has three right wing parties which sit in its legislature: the PCs, the Wildrose, and the Alberta Party. In addition, there remains a Social Credit Party in the countryside which still receives thousands of votes each election, the various separatist parties (which in turn receive hundreds to thousands combined), and lastly, there is the new Reform Party of Alberta. This latter party is designed for Wildrose Party members who find the Wildrose Party just isn't socially conservative enough. The birth of this new party should be a first giant red flag in the quest for a United Right - with or without Jason Kenney.

We also need remember that the PCs and the Wildrose Party exist for good reasons. The PCs were a big tent party that included Progressive and Conservative people, united by political power. Their ability to govern for 40 years was largely the result of their ability to play the centre and the right wings of the province so ably. They did indeed have right wing opposition throughout - the Social Credit party never truly died and even if it stopped electing MLAs, it did receive tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of votes in elections after 1971.

The Wildrose Party was basically the successor to the Social Credit Party that had limped into irrelevance since 1971. It was the home of Social Conservatives whose views most aligned federally with the far right of the Conservative Party/Christian Heritage Party. It would likely have remained a marginal rural fringe party had it not been for an infusion of cash from big business after Ed Stelmach became premier. The empowerment of the WRP turned it into the opposition, and pulled Alberta politics far to the right. Premiers and Stelmach could rightly be considered moderates as individuals, but once in power, necessity drove them both to play right wing to keep the WRP under wraps.

The Wildrose Party sucked away many supporters from the PCs. In 2012 it seemed like they could be the ones to knock the PCs out of government. However, this opportunity did something which I find reported nowhere - it inspired greater voter turnout, and secondly, it inspired many traditional Liberal  voters to vote PC to keep the Wildrose Party out of office. The Liberal Party went from having won 9 seats in 2008 to 5 in 2012, saw its proportion of the popular vote fall from 26% to 10%, and its actual number of votes received plunge from 251,128 to 127,626. Meanwhile, voter turnout across the province soared from the record setting embarrassment of 40.6% in 2008 to a still measly 54% in 2012. All seats lost by the Liberals were picked up by the PCs. This story should also serve as a warning to the "Unite the Right" campaigners. Albertans showed a great willingness to desert the PCs for the WRP in 2012; they were only undone by the willingness of Liberals and the apathetic to show up to keep them out of office.

Today, the PCs and the WRP remain fundamentally different parties. While the Wildrose Party may seem to socially liberal to some, its social conservatism and doctrine of market fundamentalism (a term I hate, but is apt in this situation), differentiates them markedly from the PCs. Jim Prentice, to give him a minimum of credit, at least realised in 2014-2015 that his government would have to raise taxes. It may have been years in the making, this realisation, but it remains one that has eluded the WRP to this day. Further, when it comes to social legislation, the PCs are more on the side of the government (with a handful of exceptions) than they are on the side of the opposition.

So if Jason Kenney were to show up, take over the PCs, and try to "unite the right," what do I see happening?

The Wildrose Party leadership we already know would favour such an opportunity for them. Their electoral success is pretty much dependent upon a future where they are the only conservative option in the province; this they already seem to know. Unfortunately, they mean a takeover like the Alliance did to the federal PCs back in the early 2000s, where the more viable body of the Progressive Conservative Party became the host to Alliance's more extreme ideas and values. They don't wish a merger - they want an annexation and occupation.

However, we have seen that such a situation is incredibly unlikely. We have already seen that disgruntled WRP members are willing to jump ship to new islands of extreme conservatism. We have also seen that conservatives have other small-c options in the province: the Alberta Party and even the Liberal Party.

So what do I envision? At least two exoduses (exodi?).

There is simply little chance that the average PC member will basically just give up for the sake of beating the NDP in 2019. I know many feel they are the best shot to beat the NDP in 2019 already, united right or not. But, why would they wish to stay in a far right party that not merely is unrepresentative of their views and values, but many find embarrassing? Memberships of the Alberta Party are sure to increase, and vote totals too, as that party marches forward.

The United Right party will have to reach out to these people, and they know it. Simply saying that its to beat the NDP will not suffice. This brings the second possible exodus into being, as Wildrose members unhappy with their party's moderation flock to the Reform Party, Social Credit, or the separatist parties.

As you are still reading this, you probably disagree with my conclusion that these people simply can't cooperate to defeat the NDP. You assume that the memberships of these two parties are rational and humble enough to join together. I can assure you the opposite is the case. The memberships are hardly rational (in any party), and there is a great deal of pride to overcome. Why else would Alberta have more parties in its legislature than any other province in Canada, even with 40 years of one-party rule? If the average PC or average Wildroser could work together, they would already have tried. Instead, they are all getting forced to from above.

So, one cannot simply unite the right; at least, not yet.

But, we need to consider the other reasons why I don't think a new Conservative party will have such an easy time winning in 2019. These I can put down to two factors: experience, and demographics.

Regarding experience, the NDP were not an accidental government, and in spite of polling to the contrary, Albertans have very little reason to be upset with the government. Having been elected at the worst possible time, there is literally nothing yet that the opposition parties could use as election fodder in 2019. The NDP are running a pretty tight ship, and unless oil becomes obsolete in the next three years, things should only get better for them as time goes by. The other side of the coin is that the "Alberta Advantage" isn't just thought of as dead, but people seem to have realised that it was a mistake. That mistake was that of the PCs, and the WRP rhetoric that cutting taxes and services will save the province is not an idea that holds water with the majority of the population.

The next issue is the demographic one. Conservative voters generally are older; and conservative ridings are generally rural ones. The issue with the former is simply that many conservative voters are literally dying, and are not likely being replaced by younger people.

The second point is that rural ridings are in danger of dying, too. The NDP government has already hinted that they will redraw the boundaries of the province's constituencies for the next election - as any government had to do. What makes this interesting is that NDP have nothing to lose and much to gain by actually balancing the distribution of seats to urban and rural areas. Throughout the history of the province, rural constituencies were heavily over-represented in the legislature. These rural areas, particularly in the south of the province, are the heartland of the WRP.

As one example "Northern Alberta" has 11 seats currently, whereas Edmonton, with more than double the population of that region, as 21. Another way of looking at it, the Lesser Slave Lake constituency had half as many votes cast within it as any in Edmonton. This is gerrymandering at its simplest, and its elimination is looming. It also doesn't help the conservative parties that courtesy of the economic downturn in the province some entire towns in the countryside, such as Grande Cache, are liable to disappear soon. It may only be a shift of a few seats, but this could have great implications for the 2019 election.

Thank you for reading all of this. Please let me know where I've gone wrong.

Damo