Panic is sweeping through the inner circles of Alberta’s governing Progressive Conservative party, which some critics are suggesting has forgotten how to campaign after 41 years in power.
One of the true democratic dynasties anywhere is faced with defeat on April 23 as the polls start shifting away from rookie Premier Alison Redford to Danielle Smith, leader of the upstart Wildrose Party.
Not quite what was expected of Redford as she entered the four-week campaign with a healthy backing from voters and the respect of Canadians — even some Americans — outside Alberta.
One U.S. delegate to FirstEnergy Capital’s annual conference in Calgary in early March was so impressed by Redford’s energy views he invited her to become Mitt Romney’s running mate in the expected showdown with President Barack Obama.
Tongue in cheek, of course, but evidence of Redford’s command of policy as she outlined her vision of Alberta’s role in supplying crude to the world market and her plans to support the focus on industry earnings, maintaining a social license to operate without sacrificing regulatory integrity and the importance of a national energy strategy for Canada to counter the relentless, time-consuming opposition to major energy projects.
“Energy security will be a defining issue for the 21st Century and the oil sands are critical to world energy supply,” she said, estimating that in New York State alone the resource could contribute up to $1 billion annually to the economy, up to 4,000 jobs and up to $437 million in employee wages every year.
Reframing the debate
Redford, although seen as a liberal-leaning conservative, said it was time for her government to fight back against oil sands’ opponents.
“We have to be committed and know that we can’t be afraid to stand up and make our views known,” she said.
“My government is reframing the debate to focus on exactly the issues that the critics are trying to bring us down with. We will not let them hammer this issue and present facts that are inaccurate. We will continue to talk about our tremendously successful environmental record and we’ll also talk about the fact that people in our province are as concerned about environmental outcomes as anyone else around the world,” Redford said.
More than any Alberta premier since the original leader Peter Lougheed in the 1970s, Redford offered a clear, coherent defense for her province’s petroleum industry, but she appears to be rapidly losing ground to the Wildrose.
Wildrose leads polls
One of the latest polls shows the right-wing Wildrose at 43 percent of decided voters, with the Conservatives at 30 percent, the left-wing New Democrats at 12 percent, the Liberals at 11 percent and 4 percent among fringe parties. Of those sampled, 19 percent were undecided.
ThinkHQ pollster Marc Henry said Redford’s Conservatives have dug “an awfully big hole for themselves.”
The apparent appetite for change is being fed by Smith’s promise of an energy dividend of C$300 for every Albertan as early as 2015 once the province has created a fund of C$750 million.
Redford challenged the pledge, arguing the plan did not fit with Wildrose’s promise to build a C$200 billion Heritage Fund from surplus energy revenues and to hold the line on taxes, accusing Smith of “robbing the next generation to buy today’s vote.”
Although Wildrose, an alliance of libertarians and fiscal conservatives, has only four of 83 members in the Alberta legislature, Smith has attacked Redford in what should be the premier’s energy stronghold.
Smith said she has “no idea what (Redford’s) national energy policy looks like. I think she’s engaging in a lot of bafflegab and double talk.
“Alberta cannot be engaging in some kind of pan-Canadian, multi-jurisdictional national energy policy. We will not end up faring well when Ontario and Quebec (who make up almost half of Canada’s population) are expressing hostility to the oil sands,” she said.
Producing v. consuming
The tensions between Canada’s energy producing and consuming provinces seized the national spotlight earlier this year when Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said Canada’s strengthening “petro-dollar” — his attempt to link a rising currency to increasing global oil prices — had cost his province 300,000 manufacturing jobs since 2002 because of falling exports.
But McGuinty made no concessions to a Canadian Energy Research Institute study that estimated Ontario could reap more than C$63 billion by 2035 from supplying materials such as steel to the petroleum industry.
Redford described McGuinty’s claims as “simplistic,” and McGuinty softened his views, but the damage had been done to Redford’s proposed national energy policy.
In a volatile voting environment, which initially had Redford cruising to an emphatic victory and now, in the eyes of some, has Smith in an unassailable polling lead, the next two weeks shape up as an unprecedented fight in Alberta, which has had only two governing parties in the last 77 years.
