The long anticipated wait for the upcoming provincial election is finally over.
Rachel Notley, leader of the governing NDP, dropped the writ last week, announcing that Albertans would be going to the polls on April 16.
With an ongoing RCMP investigation dogging UCP Leader Jason Kenney over allegations his leadership campaign collaborated with former candidate Jeff Callaway’s team to undermine and eliminate former Wildrose leader Brian Jean as a contender, we can expect the mudslinging to begin.
But before delving deeper into what I think is the most likely election outcome, let’s consider some historical context.
For more than 40 years, conservative rule left us all but exclusively at the mercy of the volatile boom and bust cycle of the oil and gas industry.
Spending like drunken sailors during the gravy train days of surging prices (remember Ralph bucks?) without ever making a meaningful effort to save for a predictably inevitable crash, placed our province in the precarious position we find ourselves in today.
But despite inheriting a rather unenviably miserable situation in 2015, I think Notley’s NDP has been the UCP’s convenient scapegoat and political punching bag for problems that were decades in the making by successive conservative governments that time and again prioritized corporate profits over average Albertans' insterests.
Unfortunately, I don't think any of that seems to matter to many voters.
While support for Kenney has undoubtedly waned in the face of the mounting police investigation, along with several desertions from his party’s ranks, the UCP leader clearly maintains a substantial lead in the polls.
And if the election of politicians such as Doug Ford are any indication, Alberta is indeed very likely to end up being governed by the UCP.
This, I expect, is at this point all but inevitable.
But should Notley win her riding while the NDP loses the election overall, I certainly hope she won’t pull a Harper or a Prentice, and actually serve out her term in honour of the trust her constituents placed in her rather than resigning and slinking away behind the shadows, humiliated by defeat.
She and the NDP will, after all, undoubtedly have an opportunity to regroup after conservative leadership fails to deliver us from a changing global economy that is increasingly ramping up efforts to reduce dependency on fossil fuels.
Even Norway, accepting the new reality of lower prices of oil and the need to develop cleaner energy, made headlines recently for substantially divesting from the oil and gas industry.
If Kenney is elected -- which barring irreversibly damaging revelations does seem all but written in stone -- the price of oil will not suddenly jump back up to pre-crash levels.
And in the absence of those revenues that past conservative governments overly depended on, the province will continue struggling to climb out of debt while maintaining an adequate level of services.
We’ll basically be stuck in the 20th century falling further behind as the rest of the world continues to transition towards alternatives.
