Ernest Manning Got His Two-Party System
The most important story in Alberta for the next four years will be the effort to develop a united opposition party that can threaten the United Conservative government in a two-party election.
“Right populism will always beat left populism,” tweeted Yascha Mounk after Boris Johnson’s massive 2019 electoral victory in the United Kingdom. Monday’s election in Alberta seems to fit this pattern, or at least the pattern the late Premier Ernest Manning predicted in his 1967 book Political Realignment. Manning predicted that the centrist Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties would vanish in time and be replaced by the New Democratic Party on the left and his own Social Credit Party on the right. He argued that one could safely assume that voters would flock to the more conservative party in an extremely polarized system. Social Credit has withered in Alberta, though in fact it lives on as the Pro-Life Alberta Political Association, whi9ch fielded one candidate in the 2023 election, but “SoCred’s” political space now belongs to the United Conservative Party, which won its second consecutive majority government.
To tis we must add Alberta's history of uncompetitive politics. Since Alberta became a province in 1905, it has had six governments by six parties (Liberal, United Farmers of Alberta, Social Credit, Progressive Conservative, New Democratic, United Conservative), none of which returned to office after losing power. The provincial legislature has historically had lopsided standings, such as the 75-4 majority won by Peter Lougheed’s Conservatives in 1982. It has only been since 2012 that governments have seemed vulnerable to electoral defeat, with three parties and seven premiers holding office over the period.
Prior to the 2012 election, Alberta’s political system was what political scientists call a one-party dominant system, where a single broad tent, or catch all, party reliably wins each election with a large majority, facing scattered and often divided opposition that does not win significant votes or seats. Examples would include the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan or the People’s Action Party in Singapore. The dominant party does not need to be authoritarian. In Alberta’s case, the Progressive Conservatives, in power from 1971-2015, were right-leaning centrists who drew support from across the political spectrum, including from social conservatives and centrists. While there were splinter parties to the right, like the pro-independence Western Canada Concept Party, the most serious opposition came from the left, vis the Liberal and New Democratic Parties. Significantly, neither one established it solidly as the second party in the system, and neither was a threat to replace the Progressive Conservative government.
The reformulation of Alberta’s party system began in 2008, when two small right-wing groups merged to form the Wildrose Political Association. In the runup to the 2012 election, it acquired several legislative seats through byelection victories and defections by sitting members from other parties. In 2012, it posed a serious threat to the Progressive Conservatives, and seemed poised to form a government before it fell short on election night, forming the official opposition while dividing the right-wing part of the political spectrum. Between 2012 and 2015, the one-party dominant system fell into open decay. The Progressive Conservatives had gone through four premiers between 2006 and 2015, though they appeared to defuse the Wildrose Party by absorbing the party leader (Danielle Smith, the current United Conservative premier) and most of its elected members. However, a core of Wildrose members remained in the legislature, and Wildrose remained the official opposition when the Progressive Conservative government lost office in 2015.
The decline of the Progressive Conservatives happened as the New Democratic Party became the dominant party of the center-left. The Liberal Party went into decline after 2000, a decline which became pronounced after 2012, when it lost all but one seat in the legislature. The New Democrats, by then led by Edmonton MLA Rachel Notley, consolidated the votes of the left, along with some centrist votes seeking a change from the Progressive Conservatives. With conservative parties divided and the NDP leading a united left, the NDP formed a majority government after the 2015 election, though it only won a little under 41% of the vote, a far cry from the 60% that the Lougheed and Getty governments received in the 1980s. The two conservative parties evenly split 52% of the vote, and a single party combining their vote would have won the election. The stage for a two-party system was set, when the Progressive Conservatives and Wildrose merged into the United Conservative Party in 2017. The merged party formed the government after the 2019 election.
The reformulation of the conservative side of Alberta politics, which generated a new party and shifted overall political discourse to the right, took more than a decade to play out, but created the competitive two-party system (which Duverger’s Law would predict) that we saw at play in the 2023 election. One-party dominance is gone, in that neither party comes close to winning 60% of the vote and all but a few seats, Nevertheless, keeping with the history of Alberta politics leaning to the right, the United Conservatives are at an advantage, as the party associated with the energy industry, the high-spending, low-tax fiscal policy that energy makes possible, and the social conservative elements of Alberta allows the party to stand for a traditional Alberta identity. Even the weakest possible iteration of the party, struggling with internal divisions stemming from the 2017 merger and with a leader, Danielle Smith, whose leadership skills and disposition are open to questioning, still won 56% of the vote and a legislative majority.
Smith’s victory may well remain the primary story of the 2023 election, especially if she pursues more divisive legislation similar to the Sovereignty Act, provokes new conflict with the federal government, and opens herself to leadership challenges. Conversely, if the new government had a more stable term in office, the election will be remembered for the consolidation of a single center-left opposition party that controls over 40% of both the popular vote and legislative seats. The sting of this loss, combined with the memory of forming government, will lead the New Democrats to consider a new strategy for returning to office. The coalition the New Democrats need to win a two-party election is incomplete. The NDP need to consolidate the votes going to the Alberta Party, the Liberal Party, and the Green Party, but to become a majority party, the NDP needs to siphon votes from the United Conservatives. Evan Scrimshaw has written on this site that the NDP needs to bring much of the former Progressive Conservative Party into its tent, to the extent that it would be helpful to have a former PC figure as its leader (though others suggest former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, considered closest to the Liberals). He even hints at the desirability of a name change to drop association with the left-wing of the federal New Democrats, similar to the way the Progressive Conservatives became the Saskatchewan Party one province over. The party also needs to minimize its association with downtown Edmonton, which has provided the core of party administration dating to before the 2015 electoral victory. More painfully for certain New Democrats, the party will need to reconsider policies that are popular in Edmonton but less so in the rest of the province, especially willingness to consider higher levels of taxation and skepticism about oil and gas that comes across as cultural hostility to the energy industry (consider unsuccessful NDP candidate Kevin van Tighem’s recent book in which he wrote that he did not like what the exploitation of oil and gas does to the character of those who work in the industry). Too many voters either make their living from energy or see oil and gas as the ultimate source of the province’s wealth, even if they only partake in that wealth indirectly.
The Danielle Smith soap opera could easily continue to be the central issue in Alberta politics after the election. But underneath that, the other important story in Alberta for the next four years will be the continued effort to develop a united opposition party that can threaten the United Conservative government in a two-party election.
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