"What this is is a shift in pain"

By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - 4 Comments

A once rural, rabidly right-wing party makes a grab for urban Alberta

Last night, Paul Hinman, the interim leader of Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance Party, surprised many by trouncing Tory Diane Colley-Urquhart, a well-known alderman, in a Calgary by-election. Hinman took 37 per cent of the vote to Liberal Avalon Roberts’s 34 per cent. Colley-Urquhart eked out a mere 26 per cent of the vote.

The Progressive Conservatives had held Calgary-Glenmore, an affluent riding that’s home to many well-heeled oil and gas types, since 1969. The by-election has been widely billed as a referendum on the policies of Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, whose government has wracked up a sizable deficit since projecting, only last August, an enormous surplus, and antagonized Calgary’s business community with unpopular changes to the province’s royalty regime.

Hastily put together just prior to Alberta’s 2008 election, the Wildrose Alliance remains an unknown quantity (Hinman sat in the legislature for four years as leader of the Alberta Alliance Party, but lost the seat last year), though it is decidedly right of the Alberta Tories, their weakest flank. Hinman’s victory last night could signal Alberta politics is changing and adds to the momentum of a party already energized by an ongoing leadership race.

Maclean’s spoke to Hinman the morning after his win. Continue…

Sending Ed a message

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 1 Comment

Dissatisfaction with Stelmach could cost the big-spending Tories a key by-election

Not long after Alberta’s former deputy premier, Ron Stevens, resigned from his seat in May to accept a judgeship, the lightning-rod issue in the riding of Calgary-Glenmore was a high-speed ring road—the kind of thing, in other words, that proves the old adage that all politics are local. Since then—with a by-election to replace Stevens now just days away—the ballot question in Calgary-Glenmore has morphed into the little matter of Alberta’s ballooning deficit. Suddenly, Alberta finds itself with something unusual on its hands: a political dogfight, one that is no less than a referendum on the Tory government.

A Tory stronghold since the party first swept to power in 1971, Calgary-Glenmore is, according to Diane Colley-Urquhart, a well-known alderman and the Tories’ feisty by-election candidate, “a microcosm of what we’re hearing in Calgary—sort of a focus group for the whole city.” The real shift in the by-election arrived last week, when Finance Minister Iris Evans announced that once-booming Alberta, debt-free for five years, now faces a $6.9-billion deficit. Flanked by charts depicting plummeting commodity prices on the one side and collapsed provincial revenues on the other, Evans called the predicament a “real kick in the head,” and blamed the shortfall on declining natural gas prices. (Natural gas, rather than oil, is normally Alberta’s major source of revenue, and even Evans’s most recent numbers presume an increase in natural gas prices that is by no means certain.) Keeping the deficit to just $6.9 billion, meanwhile, will still force the government to find $430 million in further budget cuts. Continue…