From
http://calsun.canoe.ca/News/election/2008/03/02/4888191.html
Sun, March 2, 2008
Alberta votes Monday after campaign that focused on change from Klein era
UPDATED: 2008-03-02 13:42:39 MST
By Dean Bennett, THE CANADIAN PRESS
Undecided voters hold power: analysts NDP leader urges Alberta voters to elect his party as strong opposition Tories show Calgary the love
EDMONTON — Like Monty Python’s fabled Dead Parrot sketch, it started with an argument over what is and what isn’t.
But after 28 days of assertions from all sides about the need for change, Alberta’s election campaign will likely end with something less than completely different.
In Monday’s provincial election voters will decide whether to give Progressive Conservative Premier Ed Stelmach his first mandate as leader and his party its 11th consecutive majority. While the Alberta Liberals are confident they can steal some seats, most observers figure the party in power for nearly 37 years is far from finished.
“There is a reluctant support for the status quo,” said Chaldeans Mensah, a political scientist at Edmonton’s Grant MacEwan College.
“The voters have not been given a credible reason to make a dramatic change.”
It began on a bizarre note, when Stelmach broke the unwritten rule of not using public money to promote partisan political business when he launched his campaign inside the legislature.
As government staffers scurried to organize and record the event, Stelmach strode to the podium: “We’re drawing candidates from different walks of life and cultural backgrounds, and I’m happy to work with them in moving ahead and winning another solid majority.”
This is a party announcement, reporters charged.
No, Stelmach shot back.
“This isn’t the campaign launch,” he insisted as his campaign spokeswoman looked on. For baffled reporters, it was a Pythonesque moment reminiscent of the TV comedy troupe’s signature sketch, in which an intractable shopkeeper insists to an irate customer that his newly purchased parrot — nailed to its perch in rock-hard rigor mortis — is in fact not dead but merely resting.
The campaign itself focused on Alberta’s oilsands bounty, which has brought billions of dollars into the treasury and, since 2001, about a quarter-million more people.
The province is now Canada’s economic engine, but quality of life has suffered. Housing is scarce and pricey; rents are soaring; homelessness, food bank usage and crime are edging up; more doctors and nurses and workers of all stripes are needed; traffic is snarled and parents struggle to find daycare spaces.
The angst was manifested in campaign surveys that suggested as many as one in four voters didn’t know how or even if they’d mark their ballot.
Such ennui would be poison to the Tories. In the 2004 election their vote count fell 34 per cent to just over 400,000, leading to a loss of 12 seats and opposition gains across the board.
The Tories won 62 out of 83 seats in 2004 and had 60 at dissolution last month. The Liberals had 16, the NDP four, the Wildrose Alliance one. There was one Independent and one seat vacant.
Stelmach ran on his record: a multibillion-dollar capital spending program to fix and build roads, schools and hospitals and to increase the government take on oil and gas royalties by $1.4 billion a year starting in 2009.
He was dogged by enviro-critics for refusing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the oilsands for at least a decade and then go slow after that to prevent what he termed industry collapse.
“We took a lot of issues off the back burner and we dealt with them,” said Stelmach. “They were difficult decisions, but necessary.”
The Alberta Liberals, under Kevin Taft, made similar promises to recruit, hire and build to keep the hot economy from breaking down, but said they would start capping greenhouse gas emissions within five years.
Taft also jumped on Elections Alberta’s admission that existing rules had allowed the appointment of people with Tory ties to oversee voting in half of the 83 constituencies. In Edmonton-Castle Downs, where Thomas Lukaszuk beat a Liberal by just three votes last time, the deputy returning officer — the one who will determine spoiled ballots and break a tie — is the Tory incumbent’s former executive assistant.
“Nothing changes unless we change government,” said Taft. “Albertans have a chance to send a message, to change the future.”
The NDP and leader Brian Mason fought a two-front war, challenging Stelmach’s record, but also trying to paint the Liberals — their main opponent in Edmonton — as Corporate Alberta glove puppets for taking business contributions. The New Democrats promised rent controls, public auto insurance, bulk prescription drug purchasing, a new oil royalties system, and a go-slow approach to oilsands growth.
Mason said he was mystified by surveys that suggested voters want a change but will vote the Tories back in anyway: “If people want change, then they have to vote for the change they want.”
Some protest ballots will likely be marked for the Alberta Greens, who have steadily increased their popular vote without winning any seats. But the wild card, says Mensah, is the Wildrose Alliance.
The party, created by a core group of disaffected conservatives after the 2001 election, captured more than 77,000 votes in 2004 — most of them in Calgary and rural areas.
The party promises hands-off, pro-business government with social conservatism, fixed election dates and citizen referendums.
Political observers said Paul Hinman, the leader and lone elected legislature member, gave the party a booster shot of credibility with a polished performance in the campaign’s only television debate.
Mensah said a strong Alliance alternative bleeds votes away from Calgary — the one place that the Tories could always count on.
The Liberals landed a beachhead there in 2004 by winning three of the 23 seats. They took another in a byelection last year last year in Ralph Klein’s old riding — not because they increased their votes by much, but because the Tory vote was down by nearly 3,000 votes from 2004.
And this time, Tory candidates have reported hearing anger at the doorsteps over Stelmach, who defeated favourite local son Jim Dinning for the premier’s job and then picked a cabinet light on Calgary ministers.
Stelmach needs to do well to keep internal rivals at bay; a seat count under 50 is expected to bring out the knives. Anything over 60, though, would be gold — and reinforce the political adage that success is relative.
Sixty-two seats in 2004 put then-premier Ralph Klein on a political slab.
Sixty-two seats in 2008, say party insiders, and the champagne corks will be popping.