One By-election Later
Calgary-Foothills, & the by-election that changed nothing.
Congratulations to Prasad Panda of the Wildrose Political Association, on his election as to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta, representing the riding of Calgary-Foothills in the city’s northwest. Panda won approximately 38% of the votes cast.
Bob Hawkesworth, a former Calgary city councillor and Member of the Legislative Assembly from 1986 to 1993, was the candidate for the governing Alberta New Democratic Party. Hawkesworth placed second, with 26% of the votes.
In third place was Blair Houston of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, attempting to hold the seat for the recently defeated political dynasty that governed the province from 1971 until their election defeat this past May. Houston won 22% of the votes.
Candidates from the Alberta Party, the Alberta Liberal Party and the Green Party also contested the by-election, however their results were negligible.
This seat was previously held by Jim Prentice, the former Progressive Conservative Premier, who called the 2015 Alberta General Election a year earlier than normally scheduled and led the party to its historic defeat. After forming 12 majority governments in succession, the PCs crashed to third place in the May election, winning only 10 seats in the Legislature including Prentice’s own seat in Calgary-Foothills.
Jim Prentice opted to resign as Premier and as the just re-elected MLA for Calgary-Foothills, triggering the September 3rd by-election to replace him. His resignation reduced his party’s surviving caucus to 9 members.
It Means Nothing
The best piece of commentary I’ve ever heard on the subject of by-elections was something my Dad said to me following the four provincial by-elections held on October 27, 2014.
The 2014 by-elections had followed Jim Prentice winning the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives and becoming Premier.
Staged in order to appear as a mini-general election, Jim Prentice along with the 3 other PC candidates, won all four of the seats.
The results seemed to send a resounding signal that the then 43 year old PC Government still had deep reservoirs of voter support. A particularly inept campaign by the Wildrose Party, under the leadership of Danielle Smith, left a strong impression that the Opposition was unable to compete with the PCs.
Watching the results on TV, I said to my Dad that change in Alberta probably wouldn’t come until I was pushing 50.
Over the course of Allison Redford’s premiership, Albertans had finally seemed to turn on the party decisively. Following her resignation and the contest for the party leadership, it seemed as though Albertans had slipped back into their habitual political apathy. The failure of any of the opposition parties to capture even one of the seats seemed to confirm this.
My Dad, looking and sounding as frustrating as I felt, looked at me and said: “It means nothing.”
Even as he said it, he didn’t sound convinced of his own words. “I really hope you’re right,” I said to him. “But I really doubt it.”
A year later, only one of the four Progressive Conservative MLAs elected that day is still in office.
Ultimately a by-election, whatever its real impacts on representation and regardless of what opportunities become possible that would be drowned out in a general election, is still a small data point that can easily be overwhelmed by later events.
In the grand scheme of Alberta politics, last October’s by-elections were of very minor import. Those who thought the results did portend something far deeper, such as the leadership of the Wildrose and Jim Prentice himself, would all be swept off the political scene half a year later in an election that cleared the deck of Alberta politics.
Those who thought they could predict the future off a by-election were proved to be catastrophically wrong.
By-election results, in the grand scheme of things, say much about a particular riding. They perhaps tell you a bit about the state-of-play at that exact moment and sometimes provide some insight into the thought process at work inside the various political camps.
By the time the next election has rolled around, almost everyone will have forgotten that Prasad Panda came to Legislature 4 months after everyone else.
Is the Orange Chinook Dissipating?
Given the Alberta New Democratic Party’s second place finish, many in the corporate media (with conservatives online) have been framing this by-election as a massive and stinging rebuke to the new Government.
The message for Premier Rachel Notley and the NDP is that they will spend the next four years castigating them solely for the sin of being elected against the wishes of corporate Calgary.
The corporate media has a narrative of failure and it will frame every story about the NDP. Reality and the actual context of events is irrelevant.
The CBC, which generally tries to be neutral and useful, was only modestly better. Having never reported on a competitive political climate in Alberta, the local news team decided to state an obvious fact and present it as a helpful insight: that Calgary is still a “small-c” conservative town.
Never mind everyone, this whole NDP government was just a fluke, it will be gone soon enough. Nothing to see here, move along.
It’s a ridiculous way to interpret the result of any by-election, let alone one happening in the shadow of the oil industry convulsing and following election that went beyond being a political realignment and has instead become a paradigm shift for the entire province.
A closer look at this riding provides some context to evaluate the results of the by-election. A suburban riding in the city’s northwest, Calgary-Foothills is centred on communities built over the last 30 years, that were marketed towards middle-class baby boomers with children.
Demographics for the riding shows a number of variances from the provincial averages that may favour conservative political parties: the average age of the riding’s population is higher than the province-wide average, the riding has average and median incomes higher than province-wide figures.
The riding also has a slightly higher proportion of workers in the oil and gas sector and working in managerial positions than the province-wide averages.
Calgary-Foothills has also voted for the Progressive Conservatives consistently for decades, although this has been a common feature of almost all ridings in Calgary and southern Alberta.
When Jim Prentice became party leader and Premier, his next step was to gain his own seat in the legislature. He chose to run in Calgary-Foothills because it was perceived as the safest riding for a PC candidate among the seats that had been vacant in Calgary in the autumn of 2014.
There is little about the area to suggest that it would be an expected win for the NDP, even given the extraordinary results of last May’s general election.
One puzzling aspect of this by-election was the frequent appearances by Premier Notley and Finance Minister Joe Ceci door knocking and appearing at campaign events. Appearances by the entire Calgary contingent of NDP MLAs and members by further cemented impressions of an outsize effort by the party to win this by-election.
Theories abound as to why this by-election was given so much face time by the new government, ranging from an all out attempt to add an experienced politician to the NDP’s caucus of nearly all brand-new MLAs to using the campaign to begin building the party infrastructure in Calgary.
Or perhaps just the reflexive action of a party whose recent history has been a series of tenacious fights to survive on the fringe of Alberta politics?
Whatever the reason, the optics are less than ideal. They suggest that the party is in such desperate need of either Bob Hawkesworth or worse, that it is prioritizing electioneering over governing during an economic crisis in the province.
With the aftershocks of last May’s election still being felt, politics in Alberta are shifting substantially and along with the economic situation, the outsize NDP attendance in the by-election campaign has mostly gone unnoticed by the public and largely being dismissed as an understandable over-eagerness on the part of inexperienced government.
During the General Election, the NDP won 32.3% of the vote in Calgary-Foothills and placed second overall.
Four months later, facing some voter fatigue from having gone to the polls 3 times in a year in this riding, with all three of the big parties investing a lot of effort in this by-election and the NDP still disadvantaged somewhat by demographics, they still managed a second place finish with 26% of the vote total.
A disappointment, if the 2015 General Election is the only data point to compare the by-election result to.
In the 2012 General Election, the NDP won 3.75% of the votes cast in Calgary-Foothills.
The NDP’s victories in Calgary have been repeatedly characterized as flukes, paired with another narrative, that impulsive voters are now having some buyer’s remorse for supporting the NDP, particularly in Calgary.
September 3rd’s results suggest that the NDP are holding onto most of their 2015 General Election voters. And while the next General Election is almost four years away, the results offer the first indication that the NDP can consolidate these voters and have a fighting chance to keep many of their Calgary wins.
Just a Matter of Marching
Naturally, the Official Opposition Wildrose Party has been jubilant from their win in Calgary-Foothills, with their partisans crowing about the achievement for days on end.
Despite the fact that any kind of partisan shouting in media (social, corporate or public) for this long can be annoying, I find myself hard pressed to blame Wildrose members for celebrating. Fittingly, this September 3 2015 by-election to replace Jim Prentice as an MLA was almost at the 1 year anniversary of Prentice’s victory in the race for the Progressive Conservative Leadership.
Given how much grief Jim Prentice caused for Wildrose, there is a pleasing symmetry that one year from the start of his catastrophic tenure as Alberta Premier, he should be replaced as an MLA by a candidate of a reborn Wildrose Party. Given how his machinations to undermine parliamentary democracy nearly destroyed the party, I hope Albertans, regardless of partisan affiliation (and level of annoyance at Wildrose triumphalism) are able to appreciate this fitting capstone to the brief Prentice era of Alberta.
From all but dead last Christmas, Wildrose was back as a significant force in time for the early election call by Jim Prentice and was able to run a sufficiently competitive campaign, that a Wildrose Government was a real possibility.
That a Wildrose Government was not to be does not diminish the scale of the accomplishment.
By taking 21 seats, 4 more than in the 2012 Election and retaining the Official Opposition position, Wildrose 2.0 performed well. Considering how quickly this iteration of the party was pulled together, it was an excellent result.
And now that Wildrose 2.1 has won a seat in one of the province’s major urban centres, with Prasad Panda in Calgary-Foothills.
The win in Calgary-Foothills patches one of the last lingering wounds from Jim Prentice’s decapitation strike, effectively bringing Wildrose 2.1 to the same position Wildrose 1.0 held in Opposition in the last Legislature.
Wildrose is on a roll and even if the next General Election is three years away, Wildrose is now the government-in-waiting and will sweep through Calgary in 2019 and return Alberta to its true-blue (green/pink?) conservative roots.
It will just be a matter of marching into a welcoming and grateful Calgary, waving the banners of the conservatism and proclaiming all is right-wing in Alberta again.
Wait, what?
There has been an element excessive triumphalism in the air around the Wildrose Party and its partisan cheerleaders, that this one by-election is the herald of the glorious future victories to come.
I find it hard to fault the enthusiasm of Wildrose supporters, especially with the string successes that the party has enjoyed, starting with getting new leadership in place just in time for the early election call.
But, if I might suggest toning down the inevitable victory rhetoric?
There’s still more than 3 years to get through and your chances for winning next time do depend on how you perform as Opposition during that time.
After the 2012 election many said that Wildrose was a shoo-in to be elected as the Government the next time around. And for much of the last term of the Progressive Conservative government, Wildrose often in the lead in polls as it aggressively challenged Allison Redford’s government.
Despite all these advantages for much of the previous term, by the time the 2015 election was called, Wildrose’s biggest victory was to be re-elected as Official Opposition.
And while I highly doubt Brian Jean will make the same mistakes as Danielle Smith, three years is plenty of time for other events to overtake the party.
With 60% of the population of Alberta, the province’s two main cities of Calgary and Edmonton. The road to government passes through at least one of these cities.
Calgary-Foothills is the first toehold in the province’s big cities to be held by Wildrose 2.0 and the party fought hard for the riding, although the massive effort was not conspicuous as the NDP’s campaign was.
Despite the concerted effort and the demographic advantages offered to Wildrose in Calgary-Foothills, the party didn’t break the 40% mark.
Voters in the riding seem to be taking Wildrose for a test drive, experimenting with Wildrose 2.1, still not sure if this version will be more stable than the previous iteration.
The good news for Wildrose is they’ve still go a couple more years, plenty of time to tinker with the party and try various adjustments.
Done right, Wildrose 2.5 could be a formidable competitor in 2019.
Looking at the third place Progressive Conservatives and the 20% vote total that they won in Calgary-Foothills and I find myself at a loss.
I am hard-pressed to understand how 1 in 5 voters in the area would still turnout for a third time in a year to vote for a party, especially one whose leader has treated them very disrespectfully.
So at this time, I am still doing some research on what this particular result might suggest. Perhaps, it's just the force of habit, a twitch in the body of a dead political party. But I still need to find more on the subject, which I will be including in my next few posts.
The first provincial budget of the NDP Government is expected at approximately the end of October (after the Federal election) and in the lead up to that budget, I will be posting a more indepth look at some of the challenges and opportunities presented to all of the political forces in Alberta.
