Alberta divided

We don’t always get the chance to look at Canadian provincial elections – which, like their Australian counterparts, happen at irregular times rather than all at once – but they’re often interesting. Much of the time they provide object lessons in how bad the Canadian electoral system is, but this week’s, on Monday in Alberta, was something of an exception.

Alberta is the smallest and most conservative of Canada’s four big provinces. Last time we looked, eight years ago, the centre-right Progressive Conservatives had been in power, under seven different premiers, for an unbroken twelve terms – almost 44 years. But they lost that election because the conservative vote was split, giving victory to the centre-left New Democrats (NDP), who won a large majority with only 40.6% of the vote.

That induced the right to overcome its differences, and the Progressive Conservatives merged with the more conservative Wildrose Party to form the United Conservative Party (UCP). At the 2019 election the UCP easily defeated the NDP, winning an actual majority of the vote (54.9%) and 63 of the 87 seats. Most unusually for Canada, only two parties won seats, with the NDP taking the other 24 for its 32.7% of the vote.

This week, more unusually still, it happened again. The UCP, which has been up to some strange things in government, lost some ground but still won a majority of the vote with 52.6%. The NDP recorded its best-ever result, jumping to 44.0%. And they again won all the seats between them, 49 to 38. For once, the electoral system delivered an eminently fair result (a D’Hondt calculation comes out at 47 to 40). “If the system wants a two-party result,” the voters might have thought, “we’ll give it one.”

The result is also a boost for those who see modern politics revolving around a city versus country axis. If you look at a map of the results, the province seems an almost uniform sea of blue: the UCP won nearly every seat outside of the two big cities, Calgary and Edmonton. But the NDP won a clean sweep of Edmonton’s twenty seats and slightly outperformed the UCP in Calgary. Such a stark geographical division can’t be good for fostering political consensus.

Finally, spare a thought for Alberta’s Liberal Party. A few weeks ago I compared the very different fortunes of the Canadian and Australian Liberals, wondering whether the Australian Liberal Party could learn something from the success of its Canadian cousin. One thing it probably should not emulate, however, is the extreme federalism of Canada’s party system: the provincial Liberal and Conservative parties operate as separate entities, generally having no affiliation with the national party and sometimes pursuing a completely different track.

So while Alberta is generally conservative territory, the federal Liberals do at least hold two of its 34 seats (the NDP has another two). But in provincial elections, the Liberal Party of Alberta has had a lean time. It has not formed government for more than a century, and was out of parliament altogether for 15 years, from 1971 to 1986.

From there it staged a recovery, and by 1993 it was back to being the official opposition with 39.7% of the vote, less than five points behind the Progressive Conservatives. But it couldn’t sustain the momentum. In 2012 it crashed to 9.9% and was overtaken by the NDP; in 2015 it lost more than half its remaining vote and was reduced to a single seat, which it duly lost in 2019.

This week, running 13 candidates, it recorded less than 4,300 votes, or about one quarter of a percentage point. John Pesutto may well reflect on how much worse his life could be.