More than 1.7 million voters cast ballots in this week’s Alberta Provincial election. That’s 62% of eligible voters. So roughly one million Albertans who were eligible to vote, didn’t. Despite all the publicity generated by stupid stuff said on video by Danielle Smith, mostly from her days as a podcaster, a million Albertans were not stirred to vote. You have to think that, of the 1.7 million who voted, many didn’t care about the things she said, whether it was nonsense about cancer, Covid, health care in general, the Constitution and or justice.

It’s fair to say that it did not register or it did not matter to a significant swath of voters. It probably did not matter to her voters that a member of her party had compared trans kids to feces on a cookie. She said that person would not find her way into the caucus. A day later she said the cookie monster might find her way back into the conservative caucus. It’s easy to come away from an election like this and declare that Alberta is filled with voters who don’t think, lack empathy and must be phobic. But in my opinion, that declaration would have as little foundation as the stupid stuff the Premier of Alberta is known to spout on video.

The truth is most voters are not making the same value judgments at the ballot box that we are making on social media right now. Most people are without any enthusiasm for any of their parties, their leaders or their candidates. Most people are voting against something. Over the years we called this voting for the lesser of evils. In small-town Alberta, the NDP got wiped out, as they always do. I’m not going to waste your time telling you why the NDP doesn’t do well down on the farm or any town or city that isn’t called Edmonton and Calgary, with the exception of Lethbridge, where 106,000 people live. There is a candidate there called Shannon Phillips and she is popular. But in Red Deer with a population of 100,000 people, the NDP can’t get a sniff.

The NDP in Alberta and elsewhere are generally led and supported by urban progressives. They generally view traditional values and tradition itself as something people need to get over. They generally view the bible as a deeply offensive thick binder of hate speech. The NDP is not seen as a legitimate option down on the farm and in small-town Canada. And Canada includes Alberta, much to the chagrin of the many separatists in Danielle Smith’s UCP. Is Danielle Smith a separatist herself?

At the core of who she is, she probably is. But separatism wasn’t on the ballot this past Monday and neither was Transphobia cancer, or Covid. The unwritten ballot question this year was, If you don’t want Danielle Smith to win, are you prepared to vote NDP. In the history of Alberta, the NDP always gets the back of the hand. Yes, they won government eight years ago. But that was only because there were two teams vying for blue voters. The combination of the two conservative parties beat the NDP like a drum. Supporters of the Orange team can say they did much better this time than they usually do. And they did. But statistics don’t govern. Parties do. In hockey, the Stanley Cup does not care how close the games were. Neither does first-past-the-post democracy. The UCP won 49 seats, the NDP, 38. That’s 14 seats better than the result four years ago. In 2019, the UCP won 63 seats. They now have 14 fewer seats. You could say the NDP had a very big night and the UCP got clobbered. And that statement might feel good to the coalition of union leaders, academics, and other urban progressives and moderates who supported the Rachel Notley team. But on this day, the UCP premier is still standing and she has a majority, and she does not have to share power with anyone except herself, and that can mean a lot of very different moods and impulses. The former mayor of Calgary, Naheed Nenshi, said a few days ago that you never know on any given day when Danielle Smith will show up for work. So maybe it’s not fair to say the election produced only one winner. The Nenshi Doctrine indicates there were many winners. But all of them are named Danielle Smith.

Charles Adler

@charlesadler
[email protected]