Janet Brown is an independent Alberta pollster with a solid track record for accurate polling, so when a couple of media reports appeared this week saying one of her recent polls showed the United Conservative Party leading the New Democratic Party, political observers paid attention.
For one thing, other recent polls have put the Alberta NDP in the lead – and that has become a desperate problem for Premier Jason Kenney as he prepares to do battle to keep his job at his UCP leadership review on April 9 in Red Deer.
The premier’s predicament grew worse last Tuesday when former Wildrose Party leader and UCP leadership contender Brian Jean was elected as the UCP candidate in a by-election in Fort McMurray-Lac La Biche, vowing to unseat and replace the premier.
In addition, most people who seriously follow politics in Alberta know much of Ms. Brown’s work is done for a syndicated report she prepares for subscribers from across the political spectrum, including political parties, corporations, lobbyists, and unions. The Wild Ride Update is not cheap, and to see it subscribers have to agree to keep the data Ms. Brown collects confidential as a term of their subscription.
So when leaked details from her Wild Ride research showed up on the night of the by-election in a Postmedia political column and a couple of days later in a Toronto Star story, and were also circulated widely on social media by Mr. Kenney’s political staffers, a lot of political commentators, this blogger among them, wondered what was going on.
The results cited indicated that if an election were held immediately, the UCP would take 47 seats, the NDP 40.
A sign something wasn’t right was that the balance for which Ms. Brown’s work is known was missing from both reports. The stories emphasized the UCP lead – a detail that could boost Mr. Kenney’s chances of keeping his job.
Indeed, the Postmedia column by Lorne Gunter made this benefit to Mr. Kenney explicit, asserting “the UCP are beginning to recover under Kenney” (emphasis added). The columnist also implied the low turnout in the Fort Mac by-election weakened Mr. Jean’s case for seeking Mr. Kenney’s removal.
For his part, Mr. Jean rather boldly claimed the poll showed the UCP is doing better because members knew he was coming after Mr. Kenney.
Probably both interpretations should be treated with a grain of salt.
Neither story mentioned other points from Ms. Brown’s report that didn’t play as well for Mr. Kenney.
To wit:
- 60 per cent of Albertans disapprove of the job Mr. Kenney is doing as premier
- 55 per cent find the things he says about Alberta’s economy and future to be not very or not at all trustworthy
I know this is accurate because I got it directly from Ms. Brown yesterday, who after a few days of worrying about what do made up her mind to go public about what happened.
“The United Conservative Party is a subscriber, and earlier this week, they asked me repeatedly if I would release some of the data,” she said. By the sound of it, the bullying got pretty intense.
“They were desperate for some good news ahead of the leadership vote, and they thought they could spin these numbers in a positive light,” she said. “I explained to the UCP that a leak would cause issues for me with the other subscribers.”
“I repeatedly told them no,” she stated. “But they leaked them to the media anyway.”
How does she know it was the property-rights fundamentalists at the UCP who leaked her “stolen data,” you may wonder. After all, Wild Ride has numerous subscribers.
Easy, as it turns out. She marks each subscriber’s copy with a unique footer on every page.
When another Postmedia journalist called to ask questions about the survey that neither of the two who had written stories about the leaked report had bothered to call about and ask, Ms. Brown said, she asked him how many pages there were, and what it said at the bottom of each page.
The footer said UCP and the date. And all the pages were there. That meant it was the UCP’s report that had been copied, and that both journalists had seen the entire report.
“I’m an independent pollster and I’ve always prided myself of the quality and accuracy of my work,” Ms. Brown summed up.
She has argued for years that pollsters – not just in Alberta, but in the rest of Canada and the United States as well – tend to consistently underestimate voter support for conservative parties. Progressive political parties and their supporters, like me, don’t like to hear this, but based on the results of numerous elections after optimistic polling for the more progressive side, her argument is persuasive.
So there’s a lesson here for the NDP and its supporters, too, beyond just another confirmation that ethical conduct is not the Kenney Government’s long suit.
Even when the polls look good for the NDP, it’s foolish to think the Opposition can coast to victory on a campaign without policy or substance, or that their lead is ever so large they don’t have to ensure every possible voter makes it to the polling stations.
NDP supporters also need to know this won’t be the last public opinion survey before the next election. And that election won’t be held today. Campaigns matter.
But results like these, if they persist, will make an early election more likely, no matter what happens on April 9.
So NDP supporters shouldn’t dismiss Ms. Brown’s conclusions with disdain, just because they wish for something else.
As she said yesterday, “I’ve been in fashion and out fashion with all the political parties and various media outlets at different times, depending on what my numbers say. That’s just a hazard of the game. But, being accurate has always been more important to me than being popular.”
Why am I not surprised that the UCP’s hacks broke their promise to not release a confidential poll? I’m not.
As for the likelihood that the UCP *could* win an election despite all of Kenney’s nonsense, it could happen if the NDP completely screw themselves up.
But what does this say about Kenney’s chances of surviving his leadership review? Almost nothing, really.
Sure, Kenney and his loyalists can run all over and say, “See! We told you that Jesus is on our side.” but what does that really prove in the end?
Kenney has gone back on everything his base holds dear, but who’s to say that they are willing to support him and put up with more of his abuse? Everyone knows Kenney and his shenanigans too well at this point, so trusting him to do what they think is the right thing may really be that bridge too far.
Which leads me to believe that Kenney is going to take this poll and its optimistic of his government’s future and call a snap election before his leadership review.
Early elections tend to deliver (sometimes) mixed results. Kenney is a gambler and he’s willing to take the position that he has nothing to lose by dropping the writ and going for a Hail Mary.
Good, honest reporting. Yes!
First: desperate or not, the UCP’s continued resort to underhandedness is indeed most newsworthy—not because it’s news (far from it, in fact), but doing it again and again, everything from unsportsmanship to systems-gaming to actual cheating (all of which we may safely assume comes down from the HarperCon school of campaign shenanigans whence former federal cabinet minster and current premier of Alberta found his ‘robo-calling’) is something Albertans need to know in order to make an informed assessment about governance that’s gotten worse and worse despite—and very probably because of—these sleazy tactics. To be sure, many will wonder if nearly obsessive attention to massaging mendacity has been the charlatan’s substitute for good governance —and that, if he really had anything better to offer, why he hasn’t deployed it thus far and in as dire straits as his maiden term has foundered in since embarking only three, long, long years ago.
Second: progressives really need to hear some reality if they want to lose the reputation, fair or not, of being too idealistic to run a candy store. They can bang slogans and criticisms on their bongos or bong utopias on their ideological bingo cards, but there’s a big difference between studying socially correct votives and brushing pizza-pop shrapnel off their TC Douglas T-shirts, getting down to the polling station and actually voting. That’s why campaigns do matter.
The margin cited between UCP and NDP is, I think, encouraging: it stands as stark contrast in both popular-votes and seats won in 2019—and all the Dippers had to do was sit back and watch the UCP stampede themselves through the midway of their own demise, riddling their own feats at every skill-testing shooting gallery and barfing all over themselves from too many loop-de-loops on the shark-o-jump ride. But, as the data show, that’s not enough to expect an easy win whenever the next contest is—and circumstances certainly have tended towards an early election. So the NDP had better be ready, not least with respect simply getting the already-convinced out to vote.
I don’t think for a moment NDP Opposition MLAs have been asleep at the switch, nor that they haven’t developed good policy proposals to campaign upon but, as convincing as those should be in a fair contest, realities must be acknowledged as well as acknowledging, and accommodated as well as accommodating. We here in BC know all too well that good, well-polished policy wasn’t enough by itself to prevent Christy Clark’s BC Liberals from ruining the province for four more years than voters should have allowed: after the shambles of her two-year caretaker government, the election the NDP went into 20 points ahead turned into another term for Christy, despite being roundly estimated as incompetent. It was an absolute disaster which BC will be paying for over the next generation or two. And even then, in 2017, the BC Liberals won more seats than the NDP despite the Dippers new and popular leader, John Horgan.
Yet, as Christy used to smirkingly say (ad nauseam, I always thought), “Here’s the thing: …” That was—and is still true—that old habits are hard to break but, once they are, it’s a whole new ballgame. After the slimmest minority government possible, existing only because three Greens allied with Horgan, after Christy resigned her seat in a snit immediately when her government was toppled in a confidence vote, and after an interesting arrangement regarding which MLA would be Speaker (a BC Liberal volunteered and was promptly kicked out of the party), the NDP kicked ass in an early election in 2020, voters electing a convincing majority and the same NDP leader, back-to-back, in BC history. Last I looked, BC has had one of the best performing economies in the country ever since voters shook an old bad habit.
The lesson was that an incumbent governing party with an irrefutably horrible record of graft, cronyism and corruption could still get re-elected even though everybody knew the NDP were honest, fair and honourable in comparison. And, even then, getting rid of bubble-headedness on top of perfidy was like pulling teeth, and it just barely, barely got done. And that includes extraordinary effort to get that vote out, in addition to much superior campaigning and policies. It was like breaking the sound barrier. A nail-biter. A squeaker. So close, Christy actually tried to convince the governor to call an election rather than let the Green-Dipper alliance govern after it toppled her minority (I did mention she was incompetent, didn’t I?…)
Yes, these Alberta numbers aren’t ideal for progressives, but they should have a pragmatic effect—need to have if Rachel Notley’s NDP is to overcome old habits dying hard and, likely, some dirty pool too. Sure, she has an advantage over BC’s Dippers: it’s only been one term (and possibly a short one, too) since the last NDP government whereas BC’s Dippers had been out of power for 16 years—long enough for BC Liberals to spin a false but scary myth about the “disastrous NDP 90s” which preyed upon voters’ lazy memories befogged by time. Jason Kenney’s government, in contrast, has been so bad that the NDP’s preceding term, only three years ago, seems a golden age for all of voters’ pining. Yet complacency would probably lead to failure for the nominally socialist party. And that would be a real shame. Take a lesson from BC: allowing a bad government to continue just makes it worse—way worse.
Alberta voters are just lucky to learn about this supposedly private poll—and to have a source dedicated to putting it in realistic perspective. Hopefully it will have an effect in the longer term much different than the one K-Boy wants in the shorter.
Like most political “Christians,” Kenney and the rest of his far-right Utterly Contemptible Party don’t even bother to pay lip service to the basic underpinnings of that “religion.” These modern-day Pharisees have no problem lying and stealing if it advances their personal cause, They gladly screw over the poor, the sick and the otherwise vulnerable including women and immigrants in service to their corporate masters and a seemingly insatiable need to fundraise for their personal enrichment. The clumsy theft of commercially protected data, typical handiwork of the nasty little shits who do the bidding of the likes of Kenney, Harper, Poilievre, and yes, Brian Jean, is only the latest unethical act of a corrupt political party as debased as the Greedy White American Jesus they purport to worship.
Robert: My only problem with your comment is I feel you’re perpetrating the undeserved bad rep the Pharisees have borne down through the millennia. The Pharisees, while concerned with Jewish law, were modernizers, trying to make it more relevant to their era. Moreover, not all were opposed to Jesus, there being some Pharisees among his followers, among them Nicodemus and possibly Joseph of Arimathea, a branch from a Canadian scion of the tree that supposedly grew from his staff is near me as I write this, I kid you not. Anyway, I’m rambling. Otherwise, you nailed it. DJC
I read your blog regularly.
I read your posts regularly. This response of yours warmed my heart! Such treasures we consign to the forgetfulness of old age!
Oh, heck. Just drop the writ already, Kenney. What do you have to lose?
Also, she was wrong in 2012. Nobody’s perfect. Que sera…
Binky: That is correct. In Ms. Brown’s defence, wasn’t everybody wrong in 2012, though? DJC
True.
The scariest line: “…both journalists had seen the entire report.”
47 seats with a 60% disapproval rating. How many seats with a new leader?
Money doesn’t care who sits as the UCP leader, as long as they’re holding the strings.
!?: In fairness, they may not have read it all. Pressure of deadlines, ya know. DJC
As I have been saying, ad nauseum, for I don’t know how long; conservatives of all stripes and their party organizations have nothing good to offer citizens. Since at least Mulroney and definitely demonstrated by harper on through to tRump we can see conservatives completly bereft of any productive public policy ideas and only and obviously operating for their own personal benefit.
Mike Harris, Campbell and Clark and now kkkenney all demonstrate not one whit of care for their provincial citizenry, they were and are in it solely for their own aggrandizement and ideological psychosis. They literally and historically have nothing for the population, they simply allow for and promote corruption. This is the conservative legacy. Ignorant, belligerent and immoral; criminal really.
And why do these low-life scum-bags keep getting elected? I think it’s quite simple actually. As Ms. Brown notes, pollsters and the public “tend to consistently underestimate voter support for conservative parties” because conservative voters are consistently ignorant and belligerent, with very low education and intelligence and with, at best, questionable morals. These people cannot achieve their unrealistic and fantastical desires in this world so if they can’t cheat and lie their way to success they will stick it to the rest of society the best they can.
There have always been these types in every society, usually a pretty small percentage. But as we’ve seen these last few years, this type of ignorant, immoral belligerent is becoming ever more populous. They offer nothing but trouble. If they cannot be eliminated they must be controlled.
Notley doesn’t stand a chance. Not in this province. Conservatives ALWAYS complain about their leaders, yet STILL vote conservative. Your precious NDP voters might vote, they might not, they also might vote Libby, or Greenies. Whatever. I dont care anymore. The NDP are a dying breed in Alberta. All you have is Edmonton, and only as long as the Indian population doesnt continue to grow and vote conservative.
Byebye: We’ll see. Bye bye. DJC
BYEBYECANADA: I wouldn’t assume anything. You know what that does. I’d say based on looking at different things, that the NDP will get back into power. If the UCP were to resume power, for another 4 years, Alberta will be worse off.
Lol, yes and pigs might fly out of my butt. Dippers are going to switch their support to two basically non existent parties in Alberta ? I have to say, I really don’t see much chance of that.
As for Ms. Notley, the only way she’s losing her seat is when she wishes to vacate it, whether or not she leads the government or the opposition.
As folks often say, the future is unwritten, and making lasting political change takes a lot more organization than slapping a F Trudeau sticker on your truck and driving around like a dick.
I definitely find this particular poll to be sketchy, at best. The results of it are very questionable. This is because consistently, since the last quarter of 2020, one poll after another has shown that support for the UCP has been going down, because of what the UCP has been doing, including a very bad management of the Covid-19 pandemic in Alberta, very pricey shenanigans, their poor treatment of doctors, and others in the medical area, and the list goes on. Why then, would the UCP’s popularity suddenly increase, all of a sudden? I highly doubt that Janet Brown is an independent pollster, given these poll results, which now put the UCP ahead of the NDP in support. It’s a weird and strange coincidence when these poll results were taken and given out. This reminds me of a polling company that said that Bill Smith, a member of one of the conservative parties in Alberta, and a strong advocate for Calgary’s new hockey arena, that taxpayers would be paying for, would end up defeating Naheed Nenshi in a municipal election in Calgary. The head of that polling company was absolutely sure that Bill Smith would be Calgary’s new mayor. When it didn’t happen, the head of that particular polling company was embarrassed, and being very defensive. They ended up having to eat crow. Also, the head of that polling company has known conservative party ties, so that poll was already in question, when it favoured Bill Smith to be Calgary’s new mayor. The UCP has screwed up so many times, on so many different fronts, that I would put this latest poll results in question.
Friends who have gotten polled in the past have always said they lied and told them what they wanted to hear. I have never been polled. It’s why Klein beat Decore when the polls said he wouldn’t, why Redford beat Smith, and Trump beat Clinton. They can’t be trusted.
ALAN K. SPILLER: Another thing is that the 2019 provincial election in Alberta was rigged. There is so much evidence that shows that was the case. Postmedia definitely played a role in this. The UCP may try to rig the next provincial election in Alberta.
Anonymous: Can you provide examples, please? DJC
DAVID CLIMENHAGA: First off, is the head honcho of the UCP still not under investigation by the R.C.M.P for how he arrived at his present political posting? Why else would the head honcho of the UCP want the R.C.M.P replaced in Alberta, with a provincial police force? Why did the head honcho of the UCP get the Alberta Elections Commissioner, Lorne Gibson fired, who had been investigating the Kamikaze affair? The head honcho of the UCP went away to Texas, for who knows what purpose, and fired Lorne Gibson from there. Elections Alberta has also made public, people in the UCP camp, including MLA, Devinder Toor, being slapped with fines for breaching election laws. Prior to the 2019 provincial election in Alberta, Postmedia newspapers had full cover ads with the head honcho of the UCP on them. An MP named Rosa Ambrose was throwing her support behind the head honcho of the UCP. These things seem a little more than suspect to me. Elections can be rigged. Another issue of this nature, goes back to the June, 1993 provincial election in Alberta where busloads of people (seniors, if I recall), were arriving at polling stations, on the election day. The Alberta PCs won. That doesn’t seem right. There was also a provincial election in 2005, where a Liberal MLA actually won the seat, and the Alberta PC MLA was defeated. The Alberta PC MLA kept on demanding a recount, and even ballots that weren’t marked properly, were counted as legitimate. The Alberta PC MLA won back his seat. The provincial judge involved in settling this matter had ties to the Alberta PCs. The 2019 provincial election in Alberta does have controversies surrounding it.
Anonymous: I agree these things suggest Mr. Kenney would be willing to bend the rules if he could. However, they all have to do with an internal party election, in which it would be relatively easy to cheat. It remains to be seen if the RCMP investigation will bear fruit – it’s taking an inexplicably long time – but it is suggestive. Nevertheless, notwithstanding incidents in 1993 and 2005, I am aware of no evidence of cheating during the 2019 general election. I will be delighted to report it, of course, should any turn up. DJC
Examples of how the last election was rigged? You could start with the redistribution of riding boundaries nominally done by an impartial body whose membership and staff have been appointed by the Cons over the years. The whole state apparatus of Alberta is riddled with these types and they will protect their own interests using any methods they can get away with.
Pollsters have their work cut out for them. With the advent of voicemail and call display, the decline of land lines, the rise of cellphones with call screening and call decline, it has become harder to reach potential contributors. The people who are motivated to answer polls answer polls. Others don’t pick up. I’m not sure how anyone can get a true reading of public opinion now, unless they have some way to interpret data accurately from social media. That would be a proprietary trade secret.
I have to say there’s something here. While it is true that hard-core conservatives are less likely to answer phones (or have them, computers, etc.) and will always show up with a bang on election day–and Conservative/Trump support (see Clinton) is often gotten wrong……………………………………… I find it very hard to believe that Janet Brown suddenly found that Jason Kenney was suddenly on a tremendous upswing, or at least faring far better than he had in the past. ?? What changed people’s minds? So I join in the skepticism the writer of the post I’m responding to expressed. There’s money in this, like the “justice” minister Schweitzer doing the ole ‘in-n’-out’ trick around campaign finance laws, so JB’s days of fretting then whimpering weakly if one wee teensy weensy one got away. . . . . Well.
When David first wrote that each page has a unique footer, the mental image I got was some obscure alpha-numeric gibber, similar to a lot number on a package, which most people don’t even tend to notice. My assumption was that Ms Brown would then have to look up the ‘lot number’ in order to determine who leaked the poll.
But was the unique lot number ‘UCP’, and no one thought to white it out before leaking it? If so, it would appear these guys are even too stupid to be thieves. This really feels like one of those stupid criminal stories we read about occasionally, where a thief shows his ID to enter a premises, then robs it and wonders why he got caught.
JUST ME I completely agree with you. I thought the NDP shot themselves in the foot last election when they didn’t brag about what they were trying to do and what they had accomplished to date. After spending 32 years in the world of finance I know you can’t fix the mess she inherited without spending money, but she should have shown where it was spent and why. You can’t fix in only 4 years what it took these fools 25 years to create.
But as a beef producer said to me during the BSE crisis “I can’t believe how stupid some of friends and relatives are. It doesn’t matter how much damage Ralph Klein does to us they still support him. I’ve got fenceposts that are smarter than them”. I felt the same way about some of my friends and relatives. Klein could do anything he wanted to us and they thought he was God. I had known him personally since 1961 and knew what a jerk he was. He was a friend of one of my cousins. His mother Flo was a friend of my mother.
ALAN K. SPILLER: I remember that very well. Around $400 million in aid money was supposed to be given to farmers and ranchers in Alberta, during the BSE crisis. Alas, but it never went to them. Instead, the aid money went to Cargill and Lakeside Packers, who are American owned. These farmers and ranchers still supported Ralph Klein. I have a rural background, and come from a family of farmers. I really thought these people weren’t very smart for supporting Ralph Klein, after what he did to them. Ralph Klein never treated rural Albertans very well, let alone urban Albertans, yet they blindly supported him. Where was the sense in that?
Anonymous. You nailed it. The relatives in my family who supported Klein were rural Albertans. One lost his farm thanks to the BSE crisis. It was clever how Klein deliberately created a nightmare for the beef producers and put $400 million into the pockets of the packing plants. A lawyer told me that they had a good reason to believe that Klein owned shares in these plants but couldn’t prove it in court.
Prior to the 2018 Ontario election a major NDP strategist in our area told me their polling indicted they would win Government. Their research skills did not approach Ms. Brown’s: 76 PCs elected, 40 NDP, Liberals decimated. The latest figures for the upcoming June 2 election show 39% Tory, NDP and Liberals tied at 27%.
The blogger’s warning to the Alberta NDP rings true, “It’s foolish to expect the Opposition can coast to victory on a campaign without policy or substance or that their lead is ever so large they don’t have to ensure every possible voter makes it to the polling stations.”
How hard would it have been to remove or alter the footer from the document? The desperation by Kenney to keep his grip on power is really showing. Brian Jean may be partially right that UCP numbers are raising but it isn’t because of him. The end of Kenney is near and there are far better candidates out there than Jean.
Jim: Next time they will, I suppose. The UCP brain trust doesn’t strike me as a group of people with a lot of scruples about property rights, except their own, of course. DJC
This: http://www.338canada.com/alberta/
A big change since October and January…since the budget, >oil prices, the Jean win?
What of any right wing fringe party votes, the folks who actually believe the gaffe-prone Jean would be any better, the glaring split within the UCP?
A snap election? A minority? Could be very interesting…..
Whoever wins will likely have a majority, if only a narrow one. After all, there are only two political parties in contention in Alberta at this time. DJC
Does anybody know why Janet Brown didn’t want the numbers released? My understanding, from Twitter mind you, is that she was not confident in the findings? Any support for this?
Expat: Ms. Brown never releases the numbers from her Wild Ride Update. Exclusivity for paying customers is her business model. In my conversation with her, she made it clear she believes her findings are accurate. DJC
Ms Brown gives a fairly comprehensive explanation of how this all went down on CBC Calgary’s West of Centre podcast, hosted by Kathleen Patty, where she is a panellist along with former UCP staffer Blaise Boehmer and Red FM morning man Rishi Nagar. It’s a fairly illuminating explanation. https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/west-of-centre/id1496639620?i=1000554523666
It’s telling, isn’t it, that the party of “free enterprise”, a party that’s all about “entrepreneurs” and so-called “job creators”, would so blatantly breach the terms and conditions of a contract they signed in good faith with Janet Brown Opinion Research, her polling and analysis firm. Her clients pay her for her work, and releasing it without her authorization undermines her business model. I hope she sues the party for breach of contract.
By the way, West of Centre isn’t the most balanced of podcasts; IMHO it tends to lean a bit to the conservative side of public debate. It’s also very Calgary- & southern Alberta-centric. But it’s rational and well produced, and for those of us trying to avoid a progressive “echo chamber”, and seek out the opposing point of view, it’s not as nauseating as some other options out there.
I thought I read ( but I cannot now find it) that the poll question was only between the NDP and the UCP. If so, then the numbers might reflect Conservative voters who chose UCP but might vote another right leaning party but never the NDP?
In this birds opinion the NDP needs to stop flirting with the middle and offer a real platform for real working people in this province. If it looks like we are going to have a windfall from our stolen oil, we should return heritage fund savings rates to at least what it was originally.
Build more schools and hospitals and laboratories and brick and mortar things that can’t just be ticked off a balance sheet.
Invest in something other than oil and gas for folks that live in those centres of that incredibly toxic industry. Every time there is a boom and bust oil cycle it’s like a bomb is detonated in those communities. It sucks all the air out of the economy for anything else and it drives folks who aren’t making it into depression and addiction. Then, when the bust comes, it’s like a blast wave that just ripples out through the population detonating families, lives and entire communities. We can’t continue like this, we have to present an alternative, and opportunities for folks in rural Alberta other than fly outs to oil and gas operations.
Fund addiction and recovery and supervised consumption, really fund it, again brick and mortar, make it difficult to shut it down.
Show the folks that live in this province that you care about them and you have the well being of their families in mind and they will pitch this disgusting gang of evangelical criminals on the rubbish heap faster than you can say royalty rates.
But for the love of god stop trying to implement this centre right vision of what social democracy is supposed to be, present an actual viable people’s alternative and you may see you get the actual viable support of the population.
People hate austerity, they know it’s a lie. This spoonful of sugar approach has got to go, we need real medicine.
I learned a good lesson from a lawyer years ago and have used it many times over the years. When someone was praising Ralph Klein ask them to give you list of all the wonderful things he had done for them to make them support him and watch what a stunned look you get.
It is hilarious they have never had anyone do it to them. Their answer was almost always “He did lots of things”. These fools supporting Jason Kenney are no different they can’t give you an intelligent answer because there are none.
ALAN K. SPILLER: I know people who are of different ages, some are seniors, and others aren’t seniors, and they thought Ralph Klein was great. I asked them what did he do that was so good? I’ve heard responses like he got Alberta out of debt. I told them Ralph Klein never got Alberta out of debt. We know that Ralph Klein never got Alberta out of debt. Look at what he did to hospitals, schools, nurses, doctors, teachers, general infrastructure repair, the needy, and senior citizens. Ed Stelmach was left with a whopping infrastructure debt from Ralph Klein, that was $30 billion to $40 billion, or even more. I told a friend of mine, who also isn’t a senior, about all the very pricey shenanigans Ralph Klein did, that cost Alberta even billions of dollars. My friend, who thought Ralph Klein was great, told me those things would have happened anyways. He couldn’t prove that those pricey shenanigans would have happened if Ralph Klein wasn’t premier of Alberta.
Well Kenney sure is desperate for any good news right now, so not surprising he grabbed that poll result like a drowning person might grab a tree branch.
Of course, any agreement with Ms. Brown was just disregarded as a political inconvenience. This is just how Kenney operates, always looking out for number 1, and its not his party, Alberta voters or pollsters. He generally leaves disaster in his wake ever since he quickly signed and then quickly repudiated the grassroots guarantee.
A more decent person could have easily come up with a more amicable solution – pay Ms. Brown or someone else to do another poll to, hopefully for Kenney, to confirm the desired result. Of course, there is the risk the result might not be replicated and it would take some time to do. However polls can be done fairly quickly.
I don’t know how seriously to take this poll that seems at odds with others. I get the sense the result rests on assumptions about turn out that may or may not be correct. In 2019, I suspect the UCP was more motivated and had better turn out than the NDP. I am not sure that still holds.
Lastly, even the UCP doesn’t want a leader who is total snake and can’t be trusted. Over the last few years, he has let Albertans down and his own party too. I am not sure one good poll result will change how they feel about him at this point very much.
Very interesting post. One aspect here is that Albertans seem willing to back any conservative party that can reasonnably be assumed to carry on with oil exploitation, hoping for prosperity and a few dollars in their pocket (from profits taken very far away).
They do not seem to care much about oil being put aside in the near future.
In another jurisdiction, a few decades ago, asbestos was also put aside. And you know what? People refused to accept the situation and told themselves lies about a nationalization that could transform asbestos into an acceptable product. Anybody saying that is was to no avail was literally hunted down.
So Albertans follow a well known path. And they too will awake with a severe hangover.