Never a bad time for an Alberta election

Let's see... Alberta is expected to enter a recession this year, unemployment is rising, home values are stagnant or dropping, and the provincial government raised 59 different taxes and fees in its budget (none of them really touching our core economy), while projecting a $5 billion deficit.

Good time to call an election.

Of our 87-seat legislature, 25 seats will have no incumbent at election call, either due to retirements, or with the current member running for a different party this time around. According to an article in the Globe and Mail, that's the highest turnover since the Tories took power in 1971.

Political polls suggest the long-ruling Tories are neck-and-neck in popularity with the Wildrose Party — even though most Albertans don't even know the name of the party's leader. (It's Brian Jean, by the way, with a bonus point if you know he's running in Fort McMurray).

But not even Wildrose will agree voter intentions are as close as the pollsters suggest. So let this be one more election to prove polling is an obsolete tool. Really, somebody has to tell the industry that you can't get a representative sample of Albertans anymore, by calling landline telephones.

I suspect the Tories might actually have to work through their campaign to maintain the size of their majority. That will be a change from the days when winning the Tory nomination was the biggest hurdle to being sworn in as an MLA.

But there's an inertia in Alberta that is so hard to overcome. People may be unhappy with our government — we haven't forgotten the excesses of the Redford regime, and we're not gullible enough to believe that's been entirely purged.

We know the Tories have been promising for 43 years to get Alberta off the roller coaster of energy prices, and we know there's not enough in Jim Prentice's 10-year plan to convince us even another 10 years will change that.

But when voters do the gut check in the polling booth, they stick with the devil they know.

Or they don't vote at all.

Above all, Albertans simply don't punish bad government.

That's why there's never a bad time to call an election in Alberta.

How insular or detached from reality does a government have to be in Alberta before it loses the confidence of ordinary voters? Actually, that's the wrong question.

The real question is: what does an opposition candidate have to do in Alberta, to convince ordinary voters that they wouldn't do worse if they became the government?

Such is the state of politics and governance here. However bad the track record is on issues of trust and vision, nobody else seems able to make us believe their vision is better, or more trustworthy.

The leader of the Alberta opposition spent years, hammering the government every day, never missing an opportunity for a headline, never short of damning information detailing government mismanagement or outright malfeasance, never missing a chance to say how they could do better.

And then she led a defection to cross the floor to become part of that same government.

OK, so what's the Wildrose going to do for us today? Or the Liberals? Or the NDP? Or the Alberta Party, or the Greens?

If the best the opposition can do is agree not to run against each other, or split the opposition vote in some few selected ridings, then this election is already in the bag.

That's why I figure this election is not about Prentice's 10-year plan, not directly anyway. This election is about shedding those 25 old members (including the new ones who didn't win a nomination after switching parties).

This is about Prentice assembling a new team that has substantially less to do with the old one. In essence, he's being his own opposition, turfing out the old ideas, and building a new government that the opposition can't convince voters that they could build.

Are you unhappy with how things have gone here in the past few years? Do you suspect the vision of the current leader isn't really that different than the old ones? Then by all means punish the government. That's a good reason to vote.

But I want the opposition parties to give me a better reason to vote than that. I want details, charts, comparisons, projections. Vision, I call it.

Otherwise, even today, there's no bad time to call an election in Alberta.