Edmonton student campaigns for all Alberta parties in final week of election

April 21, 2012 Updated: April 20, 2012 | 6:24 pm

By Laurie Callsen Metro Edmonton

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University of Alberta political science student Navneet Khinda stands with lawn signs advertising canidates in Edmonton-Glenora, the city's most contested riding in the Alberta Election. Khinda hs spent the last week volunteering for all political parties to gain a better understanding of Alberta politics.

A University of Alberta student is getting a good glimpse of life on the campaign trail by volunteering for every party in one of the most highly contested ridings in Edmonton.

Political science student Navneet Khinda was encouraged by a friend to volunteer for the Progressive Conservatives, the Wildrose, the Liberals, the New Democrats and the Alberta Party in Edmonton-Glenora, a riding that could be anyone’s race come Monday.

“Everyone I talk to in Glenora can’t predict who’s going to win, but each party is confident,” she said, adding that she lives in the riding of Edmonton-Mill Creek, so she’s completely unbiased when out campaigning for the Glenora candidates.

In addition to balancing exam week, Khinda has volunteered two hours of her time to every party, except for the Wildrose, who have yet to return her phone calls and emails. She door-knocked in a blizzard for Alberta Party candidate Sue Huff, made phone calls on behalf of the NDP’s Ray Martin, stuffed envelopes in Bruce Miller’s Liberal campaign office and did paperwork at Heather Klimchuk’s PC headquaters.

Along the way she’s been documenting her experience on her blog, La Politique.

“By doing this, you see the whole spectrum. You pick up the nuances and the differences between parties, and it helps you make an informed decision,” she said.

“It wasn’t what I expected. I wish I could have sent more time volunteering so I could have talked to more people. I really wanted to have good conversations out of this experience.”

She wishes the campaign had been more issues and candidate focused instead of a fight between Wildrose leader Danielle Smith and PC leader Alison Redford. Khinda hopes people vote for the candidate that best represents them in their riding as opposed to voting for a certain party or its leader.

Khinda laments that the election happened at the same time as her exams and that she didn’t start the idea until later in the campaign. She would be interested in doing a more long-term volunteer experiment in the future.

Wildrose poised to take down one of the greatest political empires in Canadian history - Andrew Coyne

Andrew Coyne  Apr 23, 2012 – 6:38 PM ET

Last Updated: Apr 23, 2012 7:27 PM ET

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Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith smiles as she casts her ballot in front of her husband, David Moretta, in High River, Alberta, on Monday. Albertans go to the polls to elect a new premier today in a close race between the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose Party.

Unless something astonishing happens, the Wildrose Party will form the next government of Alberta. All that remain is to discover whether it will be a minority or majority.

Wait a minute: unless something astonishing happens? That Wildrose should even be in contention, let alone poised to govern, is surely one of the most astonishing somethings in living memory. Never mind that it has never governed, or has only ever elected one member of the legislature. The party did not even exist until about four years ago.

Yet it will have taken down one of the most powerful political empires in the country’s history: the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, fourth and greatest of the succession of dynasties that have governed the province, winner of 11 consecutive majorities going back to 1971, usually by thumping margins (in 11 elections, the Tories averaged 52.9% of the vote).

It will have done so, what is more, at a time when the province has never been more prosperous, with the country’s second-lowest unemployment rate, its highest per capita income, its lowest tax rates. Astonishing doesn’t begin to describe it.

To be fair, it had help. “Association” has a nice, homey ring to it, but the Progressive Conservatives had long ago come to define machine politics, with all that that connotes: a certain ideological indeterminacy, extravagance (how do you run five straight deficits at a time of historically high oil prices?), clubbiness, arrogance, and, increasingly, a tinge of corruption — the same vices that seem to accrete around any party that has been in power too long.

Recent months had seen the party stumble through a series of scandals in that way that parties do when they have lost the plot: the thousands of dollars paid to members of a committee that never met; the threats of reprisals against doctors who complained of problems in the health care system; the revelation that municipalities, school boards and other public agencies had been making donations to the ruling party — at times this spring it seemed there was another one every day. That the party’s new leader, Alison Redford, seemed unable or unwilling to clean up the mess compounded the fin de siècle impression.

Even so, as late as January the party was still at more than 50% in the polls; no poll showed Wildrose ahead until the day the writ was dropped. As is often the way, it was only with the launch of the campaign that the public really began to focus: what had until then been an inchoate discontent suddenly coalesced around Wildrose, and its leader, Danielle Smith.

New as it is, the party is familiar enough in many respects. Its candidates and activists are in many cases defectors from the Tories. Its policies are squarely in the Reform Party tradition. Whole sections of its campaign are straight out of the federal Conservative playbook.

But Smith represents something altogether new. It is rare enough to find a Canadian political leader of any description with a fully worked-out philosophy of government, still less one that departs from the status quo in so many important ways. It is even rarer to see one with the gumption to decamp from the party that was for 40 years the only possible route to power, in favour of a lightly regarded startup. But it is an entirely new model for women in politics.

Until now, the standard-issue female political leader, at least among those with aspirations to government, was a cautious centrist, one who had learned to work within the existing party apparatus. She might talk about “doing politics differently,” but she rarely stood for much in the way of actual changes in policy. Redford is very much in that mould. If she has taken her party to the left, it is only because it was already there.

There is another sense in which Smith represents something new. Though the conservative leader of a tradition-minded party who bristled at suggestions Alberta’s “character” needed to change, it is Smith who seems the more modern of the two in style and approach. She speaks directly, almost conversationally, without the evasions and equivocations that are the common language of politics. By contrast, Redford seems to be from the planet Politic, that strange place so many politicians inhabit, whose ways are utterly foreign to the rest of us.

I think the clinching moment for Smith came towards the end, in what was easily the worst week of the campaign for her, with one Wildrose candidate’s thoughts on the probable afterlife of homosexuals coming to light even as another was offering his Caucasianness as a qualification for office. I don’t mean to defend either statement: though neither was evidence of hatred, in my view, that is hardly the test that should apply.

But what was significant was Smith’s reaction. The script in these things calls for the offending candidate to be dropped, bound and gagged, off the nearest pier, while the leader boasts of his readiness to stifle such displays of deviance, to the applause of the media. But Smith didn’t do that. She refused to disavow or belittle either man, even as she made clear that neither spoke for the party. Good. Canadian democracy can survive the odd nutjob pastor. It cannot long survive the suppression of divergent opinions, however daft, or the subjugation of every member of the legislature to the leader’s dictates.

For Smith to have withstood that temptation, with an election hanging in the balance, took guts, and not a little sang-froid. With any luck, it is a sign of how she’ll govern.

Kelly McParland: Alberta decides Wildrose is too wild for now

Kelly McParland  Apr 23, 2012 – 11:50 PM ET

Last Updated: Apr 24, 2012 12:20 AM ET

Souirce

Wildrose supporter Dr. Martin Breton watches the results roll in at party headquarters in High River, Alberta

Can a government upset itself in an election race? If so, Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives managed it last night, pulling off a victory most of the pre-election prognosticators had given to the upstart Wildrose party. Wildrose was accorded everything from a sweeping majority to a slim majority to a possible minority. No one outside the Tory camp was suggesting the PCs would walk away with their 12th consecutive victory.

But they did. In a result that pulled out all the cliches — nailbiter, roller-coaster, cliffhanger — the PCs went from sure victory six weeks ago to expectations of a shock defeat a few days ago, back to victory when the votes were cast. Everyone got it wrong (“We didn’t get is as wrong,” one pollster insisted defensively).

Something in the last days of the election — a collapse of the Liberal vote, late gaffes by Wildrose, successful fear-mongering by everyone to the left of the Rosers (which would be almost everyone), convinced Albertans to go with the party they know.

Still, when When Alison Redford wakes up Tuesday still secure in her job as Alberta premier, she it might be foolish to conclude it’s because Albertans are enamoured of her or her policies. The Tories campaign was like one of those movies in which the stars find themselves in a car careening wildly towards certain death, only to veer miraculously out of the way at the last moment. The correct response of the premier and her party, therefore, would be: “Phew, that was close,” followed by an oath never to drive that car again.

It’s the accepted wisdom in politics that governments defeat themselves, and the longer you give them they better they get at it. The Tories have had 41 years. That’s 12 consecutive victories. Five premiers. A month from now they’ll pass the Ontario party’s record of 41 years and nine months of uninterrupted power. The Ontario crew lost its dominant position when it selected a new leader who was too right-wing for the voters. Alberta went in the opposite direction, replacing the bumbling Ed Stelmach with Alison Redford, who, as one diehard Liberal put it, “is likely the closest thing to a Liberal Premier Alberta will ever get.”

Redford seems like a pleasant enough person and is certainly bright and capable, but she often gives the impression she’d make a great middle-level United Nations apparatchik, cozy in an office in an anonymous government highrise, welcoming a visiting delegation from Gabon or Papua New Guinea.

You don’t have to be able to wrestle a calf to the ground to be an authentic Albertan, but Red ford has the misfortune of looking awkward at anything that doesn’t involve a desk, a podium or the intricacies of policy. Sometimes she even talks like she’s a visiting dignitary. When she won the leadership in October she professed that “the relationship between Alberta and Canada is very important and it is a priority for me … I think we are going to have a close relationship. The agenda that we need to set together really speaks to the success of Canada.”  Did no one tell her Alberta is in Canada?

But she defeated  Smith or her band of hardy mutineers, which is what many of them are. Turncoats to the true blue Progressive Conservative party. People who had a sure thing and weren’t happy with it. People who could have backed the government and coasted to another victory, but opted instead to storm the bridge and try to put one of their own at the helm. (Adopting the terms used by Liberal leader Raj Sherman, it was a victory of the thugs over the bigots).

It’s a major victory and Redford deserves full credit for it. Still, for the first time in four decades, the Tories have been given a real scare. Since Peter Lougheed began the dynasty in 1971, the PCs have never faced a serious challenge. In the past, they only had to defeat Liberals, which in Alberta is like summer being more popular than winter, i.e. not very hard. The closest they came to being threatened was in 1993, when they only won 60% of the seats. But each victory has come with less enthusiasm: Turnout fell every year from 1993 to 2008, when only four in ten could stir themselves to go to the polls. So yesterday’s hair-raiser came in their first confrontation with a legitimate challenger, and considerable upgrading seems inevitable if they hope to survive the next.

One reason governments eventually implode is that they get weighed down defending all their past mistakes, and the Tories have lots of them: a healthcare system that performs no better than others in Canada, even though Alberta is the country’s richest province and pours money into doctors and hospitals at a rate second to none. A deficit that won’t go away even though everyone knows there’s no shortage of cash – and that if you want more you just go dig some from the ground. It’s probably not fair to expect to live in shangri-la just because the place is sitting on a bonanza of resources, but the perception persists that a province as wealthy as Alberta should have superior services and the ability to finance them without going deep into hock.

Another reason governments fail with age is that they cease to reflect the people they represent. They try to talk voters into programs the politicians want, rather than those the voters would prefer. They think they’re well-informed because they’ve been consulting with experts and lobbyists and think tanks and advisers. They acquire the same difficulty delivering a straight sentence as hockey players do during intermission interviews. They spout gobbledygook, generalities and some weird bureaucrat-speak that they learn by osmosis through years spent in meetings with themselves.

Consider the Tories policy platform, which pledged the government to:

“accelerate our uptake of best-practices that promote wellness”; “ take bold steps to tackle looming challenges”, “serve as the catalyst for a pan-Canadian energy strategy that promotes inter jurisdictional collaboration”; “develop a plan to make Alberta Public Service a leader in innovation, efficiency and delivery of services to Albertans” and “ensure all government programs and services are scrutinized, as part of our Results-Based budgeting approach.” Wha-a-a-a? In English, it was trying to say it would try to improve healthcare, ask the other provinces to quit bellyaching about the oilsands, try to get the civil service to work harder, and quit wasting money. Great. So why did it take 41 years to get around to it?

All Danielle Smith had to do was offer the appearance of a semi-competent alternative. She came close to pulling it off. Wildrose offered conservative government without all the baggage and fixed perceptions that weigh down the Tories. And Smith looked like she could deliver. Her caucus was another matter – homophobes really don’t bring in the votes – but Smith did a good job of appearing new, fresh and competent, and the Wildrose platform was gobbledygook-free and replete with promises to get the government out of peoples’ face.

It wasn’t enough to topple the Tories, but Redford would be foolish to conclude she’s been given a clean sheet. A reprieve, maybe. But a conditional one.

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Alberta Premeir

Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith

Thus ends the first phase of the battle between the right-of-center Alberta Conservative Party and the far-ultra-right Wildrose Party.

The Alberta Conservative Party now needs to fight hard to maintain the Liberal Party suppoters who voted stratigically for it to ward off the untra-right elements.

Of note, members of the Wildrose Party are the hard-core far-ultra-right members of the Alberta Conservative party that broke away within the past few years.

Alberta PC party leader Alison Redford celebrates her win in the provincial election in Calgary, Alta., Monday, April 23, 2012. (Jeff McIntosh / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith waves to the crowd in High River, Alberta, Monday, April, 23, 2012. (Jonathan Hayward / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason celebrates the winning his seat in the provincial election with his wife Karin Mason in Edmonton, Alta., Monday, April 23, 2012. (Jason Franson / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman is seen speaking at the Liberals headquarters in Edmonton, Monday, April 23, 2012.

Alberta PCs win historic 12th straight majority

Updated: Mon Apr. 23 2012 23:22:56
CTVNews.ca Staff

Source - CTV, Canada

Thank goodness those far right extreme people were stopped last night.  They scare the living day lights out of me.