Tag Archives: canada

Canada, Quebec

Live-blogging the Québec debates: Charest v. Marois

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I’ll be (hopefully — giving my French quite a test!) live-blogging tonight’s hourlong debate between Québec’s premier since 2003, Jean Charest, the leader of the centrist, federalist Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) and Pauline Marois, the leader of the leftist, sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ). 

Last night featured a four-way debate, tomorrow will see a debate between Charest and François Legault, leader of the newly formed Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), and Wednesday will bring the final debate between Marois and Legault.  Québec’s voters go to polls on September 4 to choose 125 members of Québec’s Assemblée nationale

Read Suffragio’s prior coverage of the Québécois election here.

So that was exciting! Jean Charest, so smiley in the Sunday night debate, sneered throughout tonight’s debate.  Whether on corruption, on tuition fees, on Plan Nord, on debt, on sovereignty, Charest went on the offensive all night long in a very aggressive manner (“Madame Marois! Madame MAROIS!”).

I’m not sure that will play so well with viewers, but it’s clear there’s no love lost here and that Charest knows he’s behind, and that he’s going to have to fight back against both the PQ and the CAQ in order to win the election.

Marois looked poised and more measured, even when playing offense.  But her party still has no clear competing budget plan, and she’s still not being clear on whether she’s seek a referendum if the PQ wins in two weeks.

I’m not sure whether the debate will have changed any minds — Charest looked angry and evasive and aggressive, and Marois still has no answer when it comes to the biggest doubt voters have about her party winning office.

Tomorrow night, we’ll see Charest and Legault — if anything, Charest has been more aggressive in his attacks on Legault in the past week or so, so I think it’s very likely we’ll see the fully adversarial Charest tomorrow as well.

Full live blog below the jump.

* * * *  Continue reading Live-blogging the Québec debates: Charest v. Marois →

Canada, Quebec

Charest comes out swinging in first Québec debate

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The party leaders of each of the four main political parties in Québec held their first debate Sunday in advance of the province’s September 4 election, with three additional one-on-one debates to follow tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday.

It’s always difficult to tell whether debates will change the dynamic of an election campaign, and it’s no different in this election.

Going into the debate, it was expected that the leader with the biggest target would be Jean Charest (pictured above, second to left), the leader of the centrist, federalist Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) and premier of Québec since 2003.

The PLQ, according to recent polls, is struggling against the leftist, sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ), and the new sorta-center-right-ish, sorta autonomous-ish Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) is polling an increasingly strong third place — a poll released Friday night showed the PQ with 35% to just 30% for the Liberals and 25% for the CAQ.  Most ominously, the poll shows that for the first time, anglophone voters are not supporting the Liberals en masse: although the Liberals still lead among non-francophone voters with 62% to just 20% for the CAQ, that result marks a fairly staggering loss for a party that normally has a monopoly on native English speakers, which comprise 10% of the Québécois electorate.

So on Sunday night, it was thought that PQ leader Pauline Marois (pictured above, second to right) and CAQ leader François Legault (pictured above, far left), as well as spokeswoman for the far-left Québec solidaire, Françoise David (pictured above, far right) would all target Charest — on his record on tuition fees, on a damaging and ongoing corruption inquiry, on his controversial plan to develop northern Québec.

That quite didn’t happen, as Marois and Legault and David targeted one another — and an aggressive Charest went on the offensive against both Maoris and Legault.  For example, he went directly at Marois and Legault for supporting cuts in the PQ-led administration of the 1990s (Legault is a former PQ minister), he attached the PQ for its past corruption scandals and he went directly on the attack on the issue of sovereignty:

Mr. Charest charged that the PQ’s main objective will be to achieve sovereignty and hold a referendum “as quickly as possible. She has set up a committee to achieve it,” he warned.

Tonight, Charest will face off in a one-on-one debate against Marois.  Tuesday night will feature Charest and Legault, while Wednesday night will feature Marois and Legault.

The French-language La Presse‘s recap and the English-language Montréal Gazette‘s recap largely concurred: Continue reading Charest comes out swinging in first Québec debate →

Canada, Quebec

Newly-formed third party CAQ rises in Québec

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A new poll out in Québec Friday from Leger Marketing shows an increasingly three-way race in advance of the snap September 4 election.

The two longstanding parties in Québec are essentially tied.  The sovereigntist (and more leftist) Parti québécois (PQ) wins 32% of Québécois voters, while the federalist (and more centrist) Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) of premier Jean Charest wins 31%.  Charest, who has led Québec since 2003, is seeking his fourth consecutive mandate.

But the real surprise is the newly-formed Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ), which got 27% — although the CAQ led polls briefly when it was formed in January 2012, it had steadily lost support.

And, perhaps, for good reason — it’s a relatively aimless group that has been vague about its position on key issues, such as a proposed hike in student tuition fees.  It’s been just as cagey on more fundamental stands: whether its economic program is right or left, or whether it is more sovereigntist or federalist.

Founded by François Legault (pictured above, left), a longtime minister in the PQ governments of the 1990s and a leader of the pro-independence movement in the 1995 sovereignty referendum, the CAQ incorporates some other PQ stragglers and much of the old Action démocratique du Québec, the party led by Mario Dumont that made significant gains in the 2007 Québec election (only to watch those gains evaporate in the subsequent 2008 election).

Yet there’s precedent from recent Québécois elections to indicate that voters are weary of both the Liberals and the PQ:

  • As noted, in 2007, Mario Dumont’s ADQ won 41 seats to Québec’s 125-seat Assemblée nationale, leaving Charest’s Liberals with a 48-seat minority government and pushing the PQ (with just 36 seats) out as the official opposition.
  • In the 2011 general election, the progressive New Democratic Party won 59 of Québec’s 75 ridings for seats in the House of Commons.  The NDP, led by the late Jack Layton, had previously not been a factor in Québec’s federal elections; in 2011, it reduced the PQ’s federal counterpart, the Bloc québécois to just four seats, despite its domination of Québec’s federal delegation since 1993.

Like the ADQ in 2007, the CAQ is leading polls in and around Québec City.  But also like in 2007, anglophone Quebeckers are still overwhelmingly in favor of the Liberals, the PQ has a steady lead among francophone voters, and the CAQ lags behind both parties in and around Montréal.  That result would lead to three-way deadlock that favors a minority Liberal government — unless the CAQ can somehow break through to the core supporters of either the PQ or the Liberals.

Two recent developments indicate that the CAQ could pull off that kind of upset.

Legault has emphasized the recruitment of high-profile candidates, which paid off last week when popular anti-corruption figure and former Montréal police chief Jacques Duchesneau (pictured above, right) announced last week that he would stand as a candidate for the CAQ.  That put Charest on the defensive — his government is under investigation for corruption charges related to tying government construction contracts to political cash.  Meanwhile, prominent anglophone Quebecker Robert Libman gave his support to the CAQ and trashed Charest for using scare tactics against the CAQ.

But the election remains three weeks away and it’s unclear if the CAQ may be surging too soon — to say nothing of whether voters trust Legault and his slippery platform enough to make him premier.

Continue reading Newly-formed third party CAQ rises in Québec →

Canada, Quebec

Sovereigntist PQ leader Marois walks a fine line on tuition fees in Québec

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The day after Jean Charest, Québec’s premier, launched a snap election for September 4, his principal rival, Pauline Marois, came out in clear contrast to Charest on perhaps the most high-profile issues in the election (short of Québec’s sovereignty): tuition hike fees for students.

Marois (pictured above, right), the leader of the leftist, sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ), promised to take a radically different approach to tuition fees in the province: cancel the planned hikes, revoke the controversial emergency protest law (Bill 78) and convene a summit within 100 days of election on the issue of university funding.

While Marois is taking a very understated position on Québécois sovereignty and any future referendum on an independent Québec, she is not shying away from embracing a contrast to Charest on the student tuition issue.  Indeed, one of the most impressive and eloquent of the student leaders from those negotiations, Léo Bureau-Blouin (pictured above, left), at age 20, is among the PQ’s marquee candidates in the upcoming election — he’ll be running against a junior minister in Charest’s government in a riding in Laval, a suburb of Montréal.

Earlier this year, a battle between Charest’s government and student protesters ended in somewhat chaotic protests throughout Montréal.  Students protested the hikes, which amounted to a $1,625 increase over seven years — a 75% increase over what Québec students pay today (although the total would be far less than what students in other Canadian provinces pay).  Ultimately, Charest’s education minister, Line Beauchamp, resigned over the impasse with student leaders in negotiations over the hikes, and Charest’s current education minister is not running for reelection.

Charest responded to the protests by passing Bill 78, which makes any gathering of over 50 people illegal unless they tell police in advance the start time, finish time and route of such gathering.  Although the bill is just a temporary measure, expiring on July 1, 2013, it brought international condemnation as an unconstitutional restraint on protesters’ rights.

With the protests dying as summer approached, however, the issued faded in both provincial and international headlines.

Polls have shown that Québec’s electorate is essentially even — they may not like the increasingly heavy-handed approach that Charest took with protesters, but nor were they especially keen on protester shutting down schools (not to mention entire neighborhoods) in Montréal.

So it’s not without some risk that Marois has embraced the student movement — by doing so, she is hoping to energize Québec’s young voters and otherwise capitalize on doubts about the Charest government’s effectiveness without alienating other voters who support Charest’s approach and who take a wary view of the student protests.

Charest, who has been premier since 2003, is looking to win a fourth consecutive mandate for his federalist, centrist Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ).  Polls show the PLQ and the PQ tied for first place, with the center-right Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ) polling a strong enough third place to make it likely that Québec’s next government will be a minority government.

Canada, Quebec

Charest makes it official: Québec goes to the polls September 4

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Jean Charest, Québec’s premier since 2003 (pictured above), has dissolved his province’s Assemblée nationale and called a snap election for September 4 — just 33 days away.

His Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) will be seeking its fourth consecutive mandate and Charest will be leading the PLQ for the fifth consecutive time since 1998, when he first left Canadian federal politics for Québecois provincial politics.  He’s been a decade-long fixture of the province’s government, and he starts out the race with even odds at best.

His main opposition is the sovereigntist (and leftist) Parti québécois (PQ), who leader, Pauline Marois, makes Charest look like a star campaigner.

But further to the right is former PQ minister François Legault, whose Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), a new center-right party formed only earlier this year, will attempt to pull votes from both the PQ and the PLQ.  Further to the left, Québec solidaire will also attempt to pull seats from the PQ and, to a lesser extent, the PLQ.

So what are the starting positions for the parties? Continue reading Charest makes it official: Québec goes to the polls September 4 →

Canada, Quebec

As snap election looms in Québec, what accounts for the charmless success of Jean Charest?

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Almost every commentary on Canadian politics seems certain that Québec premier Jean Charest is set to launch a snap election in La belle province in the early autumn — with an announcement as soon as August 1.

Charest, whose Parti libéral du Québec (Liberal Party, or PLQ) has controlled the Québec provincial government since 2003, must call an election before December 2013.  But with Québec’s education minister, Michelle Courchesne and its international relations minister Monique Gagnon-Tremblay both announcing that they will step down at the end of the current term of the Assemblée nationale du Québec, and with a politically-charged Charbonneau Commission set to resume hearings on whether Charest’s government awarded government construction contracts in exchange for political financing, speculation is electric that Charest will call an election for early September.

The predominantly French-speaking Québec is Canada’s second-largest province with almost one-quarter of its population, so an election could well have national consequences.

An autumn election would follow a particularly polarizing spring, when student protesters rocked Montréal over a proposed hike in university tuition fees.  The tumultuous protests, which hit a crescendo back in May, have already resulted in the resignation of a previous education minister, Line Beauchamp.  Although Quebeckers seemed divided fairly equally in sympathy between the government and the student protestors, the battle has essentially cooled off as students depart for the summer.  Nonetheless, the government’s decision to enact Bill 78 — which provides that any gathering of over 50 people is illegal unless reported to police in advance — was less popular, leading many voters (not to mention national and international human rights advocates) to decry Charest.

For all of the stability he may have brought to Canadian federalism in the last decade, on the face of it, it would seem a rather difficult time for Charest to win a fourth consecutive mandate.  Charest’s Parti libéral recently lost a by-election in June in the riding of Argenteuil in southern Québec, a Liberal stronghold since 1966.

And yet — through all of this — Charest and his Parti libéral are, at worst, even odds to win a fourth term, an electoral achievement unprecedented since the era of Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale in the 1940s and 1950s.

Say what you will about Duplessis, his presence is unrivaled in 20th century Québec — he is synonymous with the province’s internal development, a staunch anti-Communist, French Catholic conservative whose rule over Québec was nearly unchallenged for two decades.

Which is to say: Jean Charest is no Maurice Duplessis.

Yet the always-impressive ThreeHundredEight blog’s latest forecast shows Charest’s PLQ with 60 seats to just 55 seats for the more leftist and separatist Parti québécois (PQ).  The newly-formed center-right, vaguely sovereigntist Coalition Avenir Québec, meanwhile, would win just 8 seats, and the radical leftist Québec solidaire would win 2 seats.

What can explain Charest’s staying power?

To understand Charest’s career is to understand that his political saga is an “only in Canada” story. Continue reading As snap election looms in Québec, what accounts for the charmless success of Jean Charest? →

Canada

Rae won’t seek Liberal leadership in Canada

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Bob Rae, the interim leader of the beleaguered Liberal Party in Canada and one-time premier of Ontario, will not seek the Liberal Party’s leadership.

It is an unexpected announcement — Rae had received better marks for his performance as interim leader than his predecessors Michael Ignatieff (who defeated Rae in 2009 for the leadership) and Stéphane Dion (who defeated Rae in 2006), and was seen to be the frontrunner in the race.

Attention has already shifted to Justin Trudeau, son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau and the party’s most popular potential leader.

The 40-year-old Trudeau has represented Papineau, a Montreal district, since 2008.  Trudeau had previously ruled out a run at the leadership, but pressure is already mounting on Trudeau as the last hope for the once-great party of Canada’s center-left — and he is already ‘listening’ to that pressure in the wake of Rae’s decision.

Even as the party gears up for the leadership contest expected in early 2013, polls show the Conservative Party and the New Democratic Party currently tied for the lead in national polls, with the Liberals still trailing far behind — ThreeHundredEight‘s May 2012 federal poll average showed the NDP with 35%, the Tories with 34% and the Liberals with just 19%.

Rae’s strong performance since 2011 as interim leader had made him a frontrunner alongside Trudeau for the permanent leadership.  Indeed, he’s seen as a stronger adversary for Harper than even the official opposition leader — Quebec MP Thomas Mulcair, who was elected as the NDP’s new leader only in March 2012.

But a full-fledged Rae leadership candidacy would have been problematic on several levels:

  • In stepping down as interim leader to run in his own right, Rae would have destabilized the Liberals in Parliament at a time when the party can least afford it, with Mulcair now consolidating his position as opposition leader.
  • His interim leadership has not done anything to help the Liberals’ poll numbers, which remain as low as the party’s depressed support in the 2011 general election.
  • It is unclear that Rae, a twice-failed leadership candidate in his mid-60s, would be able to lead the party through the two or three election cycles that it is likely to take for the party to move up from 34 seats to Official Opposition and then back into government.
  • A leadership campaign would have undoubtedly dredged up his controversial record as the NDP premier of Ontario in the 1990s (he failed to win reelection in 1995), and it would also have subjected him to suspicions that he’s keen on engineering a merger with the NDP (which, for what it’s worth, might not be the worst idea for the Liberal Party).

All things considered, his decision seems sound, and it allows Rae to play the elder statesman in the near future as a new generation of Liberals emerge — a generation that seems to begin and end with Trudeau, but includes nearly a dozen of potential leaders: Continue reading Rae won’t seek Liberal leadership in Canada →

Canada, Quebec

Watershed moment for longtime premier Charest amid Québec student protests

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After 100 days of protests from students against a planed tuition fees, and after passing Bill 78, a specific emergency law designed to curb the excesses of the protest (even though polls show that two-thirds of Québec residents are in favor of the government’s position and not the students), with The Globe and Mail quoting signs that read “Québec is becoming a dictatorship,” and with oddsmakers giving military rule in Québec only 5.5:1 odds, well, it might be a sign that Jean Charest’s longtime government may be coming to a denouement.

It’s stunning to think that the leader of a party that was a precursor to Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party has been the premier of the traditionally more progressive, statist Québec for nearly a decade.

Charest was the leader of the Progressive Conservative party from 1993 to 1998, when it held anywhere from two to 20 seats in the House of Commons, and long before its assimilation into the Canadian Alliance, and Harper’s conservative majority.  (Remember that in Canada, provincial parties are not merely extensions of federal parties, even if they share the same name: in the April Albertan election, for example, many federal Conservatives supported not the Progressive Conservatives, but the Wildrose party.)

Yet, Jean Charest has been running Québec’s government since 2003, and he has headed Québec’s Liberal Party since 1998, all without ever becoming terribly popular — and indeed, Charest has spent most of his time as Québec’s premier fairly unpopular — for the better part of a decade, it’s been Québec’s uncannily undead government.

But in the fight over student tuition fees, as a potentially explosive  corruption inquiry also gets underway this week, Charest may have found his Waterloo. Continue reading Watershed moment for longtime premier Charest amid Québec student protests →

Alberta, Canada

Former Alberta premier Stemlach: Climate change doomed Wildrose

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In the aftermath of the upstart conservative Wildrose Party’s electoral freefall in last month’s Albertan provincial election, former Albertan premier Ed Stemlach earlier this week claimed that Wildrose leader Danielle Smith’s comments on climate change may have been the decisive factor that sent Albertan voters running back to the long-standing Progressive Conservatives:

“These are serious matters,” he told reporters…. “You’re going to go to Europe today and tell them you don’t believe in climate change? And you are going to sell them oil?”

Stemlach said that’s the question he heard at the doors while campaigning for Tory candidates during the election.

“You don’t have to believe in it or disbelieve it. That’s not the issue,” he explained. “Your customer is demanding it, so if you are selling black suits and your customer wants white, what are you going to do? Convince them that black is white?”

 

Although the Wildrose had been tipped to win the election from nearly the moment it was announced, and although prime minister Stephen Harper and the federal Conservative Party was seen as informally backing Smith and Wildrose, it lost badly to the PCs in the April 23 election, winning just 17 seats in the provincial legislature with 34.3%, far behind the PCs with 44.0% and 61 seats.  The Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party languished in third place, with just under 10% each and five and four seats, respectively.  Continue reading Former Alberta premier Stemlach: Climate change doomed Wildrose →

Alberta, Canada

Albertan provincial election results

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Despite polls that showed Alberta’s upstart Wildrose party would win last Tuesday’s election, and with all signs that the national Conservative Party was moving — if informally — to support Wildrose and its leader Danielle Smith, Alberta premier Alison Redford led Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives to yet another victory, prolonging its 41-year reign in Alberta.

The PCs won 61 seats, returning with a staggering majority in Alberta’s provincial assembly just five seats short from the last election, with Wildrose taking just 17 seats. Any pollster prior to Tuesday’s election would have predicted the opposite result — a Wildrose landslide, in fact.

The final result saw the PCs win a 43.95% plurality of the vote (a negative swing of 8.7%) to 34.29% for Wildrose — a 27.51% swing towards the newly enshrined conservative party which, if expectations of victory had not been so high, would have been seen as a massive victory. 

The Liberal Party won just 9.89% and won 5 seats (a net negative swing of 17%) and the New Democratic Party won 9.82% and just four seats.

So what happened!? Continue reading Albertan provincial election results →

Alberta, Canada

Wildrose may be leading among federal Tories

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With the Albertan provincial election just a week away, this latest nugget cannot be good news for the Progressive Conservative party:

A majority of Alberta’s 28 federal MPs are quietly “leaning” in the direction of the Wildrose party, which is seeking next week to end the Progressive Conservative dynasty in the province, says Calgary MP Rob Anders.

“I think I can safely say that the majority of members of Parliament inside the Alberta caucus, that I’m aware of, are leaning Wildrose,” said the MP for Calgary West, according to Monday’s edition of the Hill Times, an Ottawa-based weekly political and public policy newspaper.

“There are still a few stragglers who are supporting the Progressive Conservatives, but they’re more reluctant to make a public admission of that because they see the numbers and where things are heading.”

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has told his MPs in Alberta, B.C. and Quebec to feel free to publicly endorse whichever candidates they choose, since all three provinces have parties on the centre-right competing for voters who back Harper federally, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said last month.

The news breaks as the PC leader and current premier Alison Redford had to deny reports of a rift with former premier Ralph Klein, whose nearly two decades at the helm of the PC lock on Alberta’s government looms over the campaign, which could see the PCs forced out of office for the first time in 41 years. Continue reading Wildrose may be leading among federal Tories →

Alberta, Canada

Wildrose continues to stoke prairie wildfire

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A new poll out in Alberta shows Wildrose taking a 43% lead to the Progressive Conservative’s 30%, with less than three weeks to go until the provincial assembly election — a stronger result even than polls earlier this week that showed Wildrose taking a narrow lead over the PCs, who have governed Alberta since 1971. 

The poll shows Wildrose nearly even with the PCs in the capital city of Edmonton, but with nearly a 20-point lead in Calgary and nearly a 20-point lead everywhere else.  The New Democratic Party and the Liberal Party continue to battle for third place in the low teens (NDP at 12%, Grits at 11%).

Don Baird at the Calgary Herald frames the campaign in stark dynamics, contrasting the tightly controlled Wildrose campaign to the more freewheeling PC campaign, but also in their ideological roots:

Ideologically, the two parties are now so widely separated they can’t possible reunite for many years.

[Premier] Alison Redford has whittled her PCs down to their origins as traditional Peter Lougheed progressives, firm believers in the state’s power to shape  economics and behaviour.

Danielle Smith’s Wildrosers are latter-day Preston Manning Reformers, suspicious even of the governments they run themselves, but trusting of individuals.

That characterization is definitely not a good sign for the long-governing PCs in what constitutes the most conservative province in Canada — the tea-party-like Wildrose has been able to claim a mantle of the “true” conservative party with its emphasis on budget-cutting and smaller government.

The PCs are starting to respond with vigour, emphasizing Wednesday that Wildrose would endanger ‘conscience rights’ by allowing officials to refuse health care or other governmental services on the basis of personal opposition to same-sex marriages, contraception or abortion.

Baird — if you are reading just one person on Albertan politics, by the way, it should be him — agrees that the PC campaign has no choice but to launch a “bogeywoman” attack on Wildrose and on the prospect of Smith as Alberta’s premier:

The stakes aren’t just power. They’re history, too. Redford is on the brink  of becoming the last Alberta PC premier, forever filed with Kim Campbell as a female leader who suffered for the sins of men before her.

Anybody who thinks the PCs will just accept this fate is deluded. Their real campaign begins now. It will bring 20 days of bogeywoman politics aimed at [Smith].

Alberta, Canada

Wildrose takes clear polling lead in Alberta

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From ThreeHundredEight, which now projects Wildrose in majority territory in advance of Alberta’s April 23 provincial assembly elections.

If Wildrose — think of it as an Albertan answer to the U.S. tea party movement — holds on, it could knock the Progressive Conservative Party out of power for the first time in four decades.

Canada

Friday eye candy, Canada version

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So here’s the oft-hailed future savior of Canada’s Liberal Party Justin Trudeau (son of that Pierre Trudeau, the 1970s and 1980s Canadian prime minister).

He’s shown here at a charity boxing match with Conservative Senator Patrick Brazeau from Thursday.  Apparently, Defence Minister Peter MacKay (the leader of the Progressive Conservative party at the time of its merger with Stephen Harper’s western Canada-based Canadian Alliance) totally wimped out of Trudeau’s challenge.

Stats: 40 years old, 6’2″ and 175 pounds.  Not bad for someone who places top among voters in the 2013 Liberal leadership race, even though he ruled out a run six months ago.

Certainly a better bod than Bob Rae, Stephen Harper or Thomas Mulcair (but let’s see what André Boisclair is up to these days).

 

 

Alberta, Canada

Alberta’s Tea Party makes a run at power

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As the federal Canadian political scene solidified with the New Democratic Party’s selection of a leader last Saturday, attention this week has turned west to Alberta, where Premier Alison Redford (above, top) has called a long-awaited general election for April 23.

Alberta, Canada’s fourth-largest by population and its richest by GDP per capital, is an odd province politically — it has been governed by a conservative party for over a century, going back to 1917, when the United Farmers of Alberta entered electoral politics and swept the Liberal Party out of office.  In 1935, the more radical Social Credit took power — and stayed there until 1971, largely under the premiership of Ernest Manning, who served from 1943 to 1968, governing Alberta with a strongly Christian and prairie populist political power base that had little do with the “social credit” theories from which the party’s name originated.  Thereafter, the Progressive Conservatives took power, where they’ve remained ever since; under the premiership of Ralph Klein from 1992 to 2006, Alberta generally prospered with a strong economy buoyed by oil wealth as well.

Klein’s successor, Ed Stelmach, continued the streak in the 2008 elections, in which the Progressive Conservatives won 72 of the 83 seats in Alberta’s legislative assembly (the Liberals took 9 and the NDP the other 2).

But times being rough with a financial crisis, and with 41 consecutive years in power tricky for any party to navigate (let alone in a society with open elections), Stelmach’s popularity waned and Redford succeeded him last October.

With the Liberals and NDP terminally unpopular in Canada’s most reliably conservative — culturally and economically — province, it seems unbelievable that it took so long for a new conservative alternative to emerge.

That alternative — the Wildrose Party, so named for the wild roses that grow in the prairie province, burst onto the scene in 2008 and started to lead polls for the first time in 2010 (at the same time a little certain conservative movement in the United States was making trouble on the far right as well).  Its popularity waned as the economy seemed to improve and as Redford emerged, but it has now gradually clawed back into an essential tie for first place under leader Danielle Smith (above, bottom). Continue reading Alberta’s Tea Party makes a run at power →