The $64,000 Question, as they used to say, is whether urban voters in Alberta are growing disaffected with Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government because of Danielle Smith’s divisive separation referendum or with Danielle Smith herself.
I say it’s the referendum and predict that if the Remain side wins decisively on Oct. 19, many of Premier Smith’s troubles in Calgary will quickly go away. Some things that ought to bother voters in Alberta’s largest city – and for that matter the UCP’s currently rock solid base in rural Alberta – don’t seem to trouble them that much.
For example, the UCP’s sustained effort to dismantle and privatize public health care and its cavalier attitude about human rights when it comes to whomever the party considers the wrong kind of humans – i.e., unionized schoolteachers.
Now, it’s important to note that the evidence that the UCP has slipped so for that it’s tied with the NDP province wide and the Opposition party has a bigger lead in voter preference in the city of Calgary is one poll, albeit by an Alberta pollster with a solid record of getting these things right. The polling industry is in agreement that the NDP holds a strong lead in the Orange redoubt of Edmonton.
Every pollster, as even the estimable Janet Brown sometimes admits, gets it wrong occasionally, so angry supporters of the separatist-dominated UCP should wait along with the rest of us to see if anyone else can confirm the findings of Ms. Brown’s latest poll that the Opposition party is now ahead in Calgary at 46 per cent to the UCP’s 38 per cent.
The Janet Brown Opinion Research poll thus put the two parties in a dead heat at 41 per cent each province wide, with the NDP leading 44 per cent to 37 per cent in Edmonton and the UCP ahead 48 per cent to 31 per cent outside the two major cities.
Anyway, what the secessionist crowd really had its collective knickers in a twist about was another finding of Ms. Smith’s poll, which was done for the CBC with detailed information about it found only through the medium of CBC news stories, which showed support for the separation side of the Smith-Government-composed separation question slipping.
In this most recent Janet Brown poll, 23 per cent of the 1,200 respondents said they supported commencing the legal process to bring about a binding separation referendum, as the UCP’s deceptive referendum wording put it, down from 27 per cent in a survey by the same pollster in April. Seventy-two per cent of the respondents said they would vote to remain in Canada.
That was enough to unleash a huge swarm of infuriated bots on the Internet attacking Ms. Brown, her poll, anyone who talked about its results, and of course the CBC. Realistically, though, that was always likely to happen as soon as secession-curious voters began to think about the costs of leaving Canada and cotton on to the deceptive nature of the pitch by some of the movement’s rather unsavoury leaders, who claim that Albertans voting to break up Canada merely “sends a message” to Ottawa.
Just sayin’, but operators of the separatist bot farms in the United States would be better off not asking who the hell Ms. Brown is in their posts, since that’s an excellent way to tell folks that you’re not from Alberta without telling them that you’re not from Alberta.
Another interesting finding of the poll was that Mark Carney’s popularity in Alberta continues to rise, with voters “very impressed” with the prime minister up six points to 52 per cent since Ms. Brown’s previous poll in April. That compares to 30 per cent for Premier Smith and 25 per cent for Opposition Leader Naheed Nenshi. Mr. Carney also towered over federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre in the poll, at 26 per cent in the same category.
So, the memorandum of agreement between Ottawa and Alberta seems to be “working well for Mark Carney and his popularity, but Danielle Smith doesn’t seem to be benefitting from her part in creating the MoU,” Ms. Brown told the CBC.
This is probably because Mr. Carney is delivering essentially the kind of Progressive Conservative government that Albertans chose in their own province 12 times between 1971 to 2015, when Rachel Notley’s NDP finally broke their hold on power. It was the longest uninterrupted dynasty in Canadian political history. So it’s quite possibly less likely that he will lose popularity in Alberta any time soon than in other parts of Canada.
Other than that, Ms. Brown’s poll also shows that the UCP’s mad rush to make Alberta North America’s dumping ground for AI data centres does not seem to be paying dividends for the premier or her party.
Over-enthusiastic NDP supporters need to remember that Premier Smith’s effective strategy has been and will continue to be that all the UCP really needs to do to remain in power is to hold onto a few Calgary seats and keep its rural Alberta base happy.
So despite the NDP’s favourable numbers and encouraging recent win in the traditionally Conservative-voting Calgary-Shaw riding, overcoming the UCP’s structural edge in Alberta is always going to be an uphill fight for the party that requires an engaged, energetic and popular NDP leader. The UCP’s planned Texas-style gerrymandering will make the road even steeper.