Watching national coverage of the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership vote, one doesn’t know whether to be outraged or amused.
The Globe and Mail ran a headline declaring Alberta steps into the present. CTV analysts expressed surprise at Alison Redford’s election in “Canada’s most conservative province.”
Amused or outraged is OK, but you shouldn’t be surprised. National news media have been misreading Alberta in much the same way some of the candidates in the Alberta Tory party have done.
This just ain’t Ralph Klein’s Alberta anymore, structurally, socially or politically.
When Klein became premier in 1992, our population was just over 2.5 million, of which 1.7 million lived in the main cities.
Today, the mix is even more urban. Our population has grown by almost 70 per cent since then, while census figures in rural centres have been relatively flat or even in decline.
A huge portion of Alberta’s growth is not from children born here and still too young to vote, it’s adults from other provinces and international migrants, for whom the only votes they can cast are for party leadership races.
We can take it as a given that Alberta’s high rate of immigration is due to economic opportunity, not so much that people longed to live in King Ralph’s domain.
Within Alberta since 2000, just under 43,000 Albertans left rural areas for the cities. In that time, due to migration, Calgary gained 199,000 new residents, and Edmonton 139,000. Red Deer gained 9,684, according to census figures.
If we concede it’s true that Alberta had once been “Canada’s most conservative province,” then the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of new Albertans came here from places where (dare we say it?) “lefty” social values hold sway. Meaning that in our burgeoning cities, perhaps up to half of voters have grown up with, or (gasp!) are in tune with, values that are not those of “true” conservatives like Ted Morton or of many in the Wildrose Party.
While officials were counting the leadership votes over the weekend, commentators noted darkly that the rural vote had not turned out in the numbers that helped Ed Stelmach make his famous come-from-behind win.
A quick glance at that offers two plausible explanations: that many rural voters might have abandoned the party or that the rural vote just ain’t what it used to be.
During of Klein’s long reign as premier, the rural vote was considered to be the backbone of the party’s support. The very makeup of the legislature gives rural ridings prominence far in excess of their weight by population.
In many regards, this is a good thing, as it helps balance legislative power between cities, where wealth is controlled, and rural areas, where wealth (through agriculture, forestry and energy) is produced.
But balance has changed, beyond the ability of any committee that draws riding maps to negate it.
Alberta today has hundreds of thousands of voters who really, really don’t want to see health care privatized. Who wouldn’t mind if support workers employed at non-profits on government contract got something more than half the pay of government workers doing the same work. Who don’t want to worry about labour strife among nurses and teachers.
Not to say that Redford lacks ideas that would appeal to rural voters. Her comments about sending contentious electrical transmission projects back to the drawing board will give her a favourable impression in this region, anyway.
But the Alberta Tory party we once knew simply could not get itself re-elected anymore — even in an internal leadership race.
If Alberta has “stepped into the present” like the headline says, the “present” involves a wider perspective on policy than it used to. And rural Alberta doesn’t call the shots in the same way it did for Klein and Stelmach.
Greg Neiman is an Advocate editor.