Lessons from Alta. election

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2023 (528 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As many of you know, the Alberta provincial election was held this past Monday, resulting in Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party being re-elected with a reduced majority. In the aftermath of that contest, a few Manitoba political pundits have argued that what occurred in Alberta this week is irrelevant for the purposes of the provincial election campaign that is just beginning here in Manitoba.

They say the situation was so unique in Alberta, and that Alberta politics are so unlike Manitoba politics, that there is nothing of value to be learned. I disagree. There are always lessons to be found in every election, and this week’s Alberta election is no different.

For starters, there is the issue of voter turnout. All across Canada, fewer and fewer citizens are making the effort to vote, whether it is at the federal, provincial, local or even the school board level. For example, more than one million fewer Canadians voted in the 2021 federal election than voted in the 2019 federal election. And the overall voter turnout percentage in 2021 was lower than in the three previous federal elections.

In Alberta this week, 1,763,441 eligible voters cast ballots, but more than one million eligible voters didn’t vote at all. The UCP ended up with 49 seats and the NDP won the remaining 38 seats, but the contest was really much closer than that. The UCP won (and the NDP lost) six riding contests by a total of 1,300 votes. In other words, there could have been a completely different outcome on Monday night — and a completely different government in Edmonton — if the NDP had been able to convince just a few more Albertans in those six ridings to get off their couches and vote.

With Manitoba’s general election just four months away (as of today), what happened in Alberta is a loud reminder to both the Manitoba Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats that identifying supporters and convincing them to vote (even if you have to drive them to their voting location) can easily make the difference between forming government or languishing in opposition for four years.

Closely related to that point, the Alberta results remind us yet again of the danger of misinterpreting polling data. In the final days of that campaign, many polls were showing a tight race between the UCP and NDP, with some having the NDP in the lead. When all the votes were counted, however, the UCP received almost 53 per cent of the total votes cast, while the NDP received just 44 per cent.

If the polls were so tight, how did the UCP beat the NDP in popular vote by almost nine per cent? The answer is that polling data is irrelevant unless it is linked to the likelihood a person responding to the pollster will actually vote.

Years of election data shows that older voters are far more likely to vote than younger voters. And that same data shows that older voters typically support conservative candidates, while younger voters typically support left-of-centre parties like the NDP.

When you combine those two realities, you can see how the UCP thrashed the NDP in popular vote. A higher percentage of UCP supporters took the time to vote than the percentage of NDP supporters.

Again, if the Alberta NDP had done a better job of convincing their supporters to take the time to vote, the election’s result may have been very different.

Finally, the Alberta election results point to the extreme polarization that is occurring in our politics, and the impact it is having on other political parties. Combined, the UCP and NDP received a whopping 96.61 per cent of votes cast. No other party received more than 0.8 per cent. That was the Green Party. The Alberta Liberal Party received a miserable 0.24 per cent.

If that’s the degree of left-right, “us-versus-them” polarization that is occurring in Canada right now, it should be terrifying for supporters of the Manitoba Liberal Party and Green Party. That’s because it could signal a complete wipeout for those parties four months from now in our provincial election.

On the other hand, the crushing of the Liberals and Greens would be enthusiastically welcomed by the Manitoba New Democrats because it would eliminate the vote-splitting that often occurs between the NDP, Liberals and Greens. It would virtually guarantee an NDP majority win, and maybe a big one.

Those are just a few lessons from what happened in Alberta this week. With the Manitoba election campaign having now begun, at least unofficially, it will be interesting to see the extent to which the Alberta trends take root here in Manitoba.