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…