CHAPTER 2: THE HOPE-MONGERS

“My name is Rachel Notley and I’m running to be your premier.”
It was the Alberta NDP leader’s opening line at every forum, rally, and truck stop during the 2015 Alberta election campaign. Much more than a mantra, this was a declaration. Clear, concise, and accessible, Notley seemed to speak directly to each person in the audience. Five months later Justin Trudeau assumed a similar style, with his “sunny ways”shining over the dour aura of Stephen Harper during the federal election. Notley’s optimism placed her directly apart from the pessimism of her main opponent, Progressive Conservative leader and premier Jim Prentice. The campaign pitted a dynamic Notley riding a horse called hope against a gloom-laden Prentice, astride a nag named doom.
The election was supposed to be an easy sprint to the finish for Jim Prentice. Yet it was Notley’s flawless run that energized the province and propelled the NDP to victory. A generation of youth born under an unending PC government, first elected in 1971, suddenly felt empowered. No longer a detour to the past, the voting booth became a door to the future.
“[The PCs] were no good at politics,”Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi told the authors. “They talked about their great ground game, but they didn’t have a great ground game. They didn’t have an air game. They’d gotten a bit sclerotic around this.”At their peak the Tories excelled at both. Identifying their supporters during their door-knocking and canvassing constituted their good ground game. Their mass media advertising, including ads targeting specific groups, plus the leader’s tour and its attendant media coverage, formed the solid air game. As David McLaughlin, a former federal Conservative chief of staff, states in the Globe and Mail: “The air war is to persuade voters. The ground game is to identify voters. The two [get] together in what is known as GOTV — get out the vote.”¹
Nenshi noticed that the PCs had failed to keep their volunteers “excited and engaged on the constituency level. They’d gotten very complacent, even though they still have got a great base. Add to that a leader who couldn’t connect an air game with the majority of Albertans, there was no way they could win that election. It was all a façade by the end.”

A Tory rout had seemed unfathomable only a few months earlier. Going into the election, Prentice was the most popular leader in the province and absolutely, unalterably sure of what he was doing. After easily winning the Progressive Conservative leadership on September 6, 2014, Prentice quickly distanced himself from former premier Alison Redford and her government. Sworn in as the sixteenth premier of Alberta on September 15, 2014, Prentice declared: “As of this moment, Alberta is under new management. This is a new government with new leadership, new voices and a new way of doing things.”
On October 27 the Prentice team appeared invincible, as “new leadership”brought a PC sweep of four by-elections, three in Calgary and one in Edmonton. Looking back at that triumph more than a year later, some senior PCs felt the victories “went to Jim’s head.”He appeared to believe a thirteenth straight PC majority was preordained.
The new premier’s confidence soared again when he engineered the most remarkable mass floor crossing in the history of Canadian politics. On November 24, 2014, Wildrose MLAs Kerry Towle and Ian Donovan joined Prentice and the PCs. Wildrose leader Danielle Smith seemed shocked by the apparent betrayal. “I suspect they’re going to be in for a bit of a rude awakening on the other side,”she said.
Then Smith herself stunned the province — and enraged many conservatives — when on December 17 she crossed to the PCs, taking eight other Wildrose MLAs with her. Only five MLAs were left behind to guard the flame of this right-wing Official Opposition.
“It is my sincere hope that you will join us and encourage your fellow members to come together under Premier Prentice’s leadership,”Smith wrote to the Wildrose executive committee.² She was not only leaving, but counselling the party to vote itself out of existence. Wildrose was supposed to vanish with gratitude after Smith abandoned all her former colleagues. She genuinely admired Prentice, and to her, the floor crossings seemed simply a coalition of like minds — not the traitorous betrayal many Albertans would perceive.
Prentice’s “new way of doing things”was immediately blasted by people at every point on the political spectrum. Never had an Official Opposition been so decimated by a premier and his party without benefit of an election. The MLAs who stayed with the Wildrose caucus bitterly painted the crossings as a personal back-stab and a betrayal of democracy. Their leftover caucus was now equal in number to the Liberals, each with one more seat than the four-member NDP caucus.
The floor crossings suddenly gave the legislature two parties vying to be the Official Opposition. A day after Wildrose appointed Calgary MLA Heather Forsyth as temporary leader, Speaker Gene Zwozdesky ruled that the party would keep its Official Opposition status. Zwozdesky, himself a Progressive Conservative, was unwilling to hand Wildrose its legislative death sentence.
Few were surprised when Liberal leader Raj Sherman stepped down as leader on January 26, 2015. One week later, veteran MLA and former leader David Swann assumed the interim role while Sherman remained an MLA until the election call.
Prentice thought he had folded the right-wing opposition under his wing and decimated Wildrose as a viable opposition party. The Liberals, also-rans in Alberta since the first Liberal government was defeated in 1921, appeared as weak as they’d been since the heady days of Laurence Decore’s leadership in the 1990s. Prentice had every reason to gaze happily at a legislature where his government was utterly dominant.
At that point, however, dangerous perceptions were already taking shape among the voters. Wildrose was momentarily on the ropes, but the gravest political damage would be to the PCs. The floor crossings blurred their identity and infuriated many party loyalists who wanted nothing to do with the more right-wing opposition party. Many other voters simply felt it was undemocratic, as well as ethically wrong, for so many MLAs elected under the banner of one party to join another, especially after negotiations that were kept completely private.

WHILE THE PCS and Wildrose were already conducting merger talks in deep secrecy in mid-2014, Rachel Notley was running for the leadership of the NDP. She impressed many people from the start with her warmth, humour, and conviction. On October 18 a triumphant Notley was handed the mantle by retiring leader Brian Mason.
“I’d just become leader, and I thought as soon as the leadership is over, I’m going to get a rest. Then, literally three days after I was elected leader, Prentice made this comment,”Notley recalls. He had urged voters to compare his record to that of other premiers — language that sounded suspiciously electoral. “I went back to my office and said, ’Did you hear that comment? It’s suddenly different. The guy is going to call the election in four months, not sixteen months. So we’re not getting our break.’”
Notley notified her election committee and broke the unwelcome news. “We accelerated our candidate search and all our preparation and all that work, which allowed us to be better prepared than the other opposition parties. But how could the Wildrose possibly have been well prepared? How could the Liberals be well prepared? Losing their leaders, it was craziness.”When Prentice dropped the writ, the NDP was as equipped as it could be for a snap election. “We were the only opposition, the only one who announced we were running for government. That was us.”

The PCs had always seen one use only for the provincial NDP: it was a handy tool to split the left-wing vote and keep the Liberals away from power. If the NDP seemed especially weak, the PCs were always happy to pass on some extra legislature funding to keep it viable. The one thing they never imagined was that the New Democrats would threaten their government.
But now the NDP was suddenly the only party that seemed predictable and stable. People began to take a serious look at Notley. Her personal story resonated with many Albertans; her father, Grant Notley, had been leader of the NDP and one of the most respected politicians in Alberta history. He had been killed in a plane crash in 1984, exactly thirty years and one day before his daughter succeeded him as leader of the party he helped create.
Largely oblivious to these factors, Prentice was laying the groundwork for a PC budget and a spring election by preparing the province for hard economic times. He employed the old PC strategy that had worked for every premier since Ralph Klein — essentially, running against the record of his own party and painting his regime as something entirely new, even though the only real shift was in the premier’s office. But this line was wearing thinner with each election. Alison Redford, preaching the same doctrine of internal transformation, had pulled off a victory in 2012 only because mid-campaign “bozo eruptions”tainted Wildrose. It was inevitable that one day the voters would hear all the PCs’ self-criticism as a reason to defeat the government rather than reform it once again. Prentice himself was cultivating the ground for his own defeat.
The danger escalated when Prentice suddenly seemed to blame regular Albertans, not just the government, for the sorry state of provincial finances that had been brought on by escalating deficits even in boom times for the oil and gas industry. “We all want to blame somebody for the circumstance we’re in,”Prentice explained to CBC Radio’s Donna McElligot on March 4, 2015. “In terms of who is responsible, we all need only look in the mirror. Basically, all of us have had the best of everything and have not had to pay for what it costs.”³
Considering that the Tories had been at the helm for forty-three years, the suggestion that the voters were somehow responsible for the government’s fiscal plight ignited a storm of criticism. Within moments Twitter erupted and a new hashtag went viral: #PrenticeBlamesAlbertans.
Opposition leaders blasted Prentice. “That is a profoundly insulting comment to all Albertans,”Notley declared in the legislature. She immediately showed her gift for catching and reflecting exactly what the public was thinking. “I think there is no question that what this has revealed is an incredible level of arrogance. If this is what the premier will say to Albertans now, before an election, heaven forbid what he’ll say after an election.”⁴
Prentice was forced to retreat from that comment, but he continued to preach that economic decay required public sacrifice. Every move he made on this front, however, was an admission that the PCs had failed to deal with the province’s main structural problem, overreliance on oil and gas. When he tabled his document of doom on March 26, 2015, many Albertans reacted as if a skunk had been dumped at the door.
The PC budget contained fifty-nine new taxes and fee hikes. The 10 percent flat tax was gone, replaced with progressive increases for those making more than $50,000 per year. A health levy, linked to income over $50,000, would top out at $1,000 per family. Taxes were to jump for alcohol and gasoline, while fees rose for mortgages, land transfers, and land registry searches. Public-sector jobs would drop by two thousand in addition to cuts in agencies, boards, and commissions. In health care and education, services would be rolled back and positions eliminated. Even with all that, a $5 billion deficit loomed because of the oil price crash. But Prentice promised to balance the budget by 2017.
As often happens when a government makes complex changes, the public focus turned to a detail that was relatively small but symbolically powerful.
Prentice pruned back the tax credit for charitable donations over $200, to 12.75 percent from 21 percent. But he left the credit for donations to political parties untouched at 75 percent, arguing that this was healthy for democracy. The contrast was devastating; the premier appeared to care more about his party than charity. Prentice took more than three weeks to consider his folly. “Today I need to admit that we’ve gotten one very important thing wrong in our budget proposal,”he admitted on April 21, 2015, after meeting leaders from the charity sector at the University of Calgary campus. He restored the 21 percent credit, but it was far too late. The damage to his image and party was palpable. He appeared to be the corporate man through and through.
This impression deepened dangerously with his obdurate refusal to raise corporate taxes by the slightest fraction, even though he was imposing many new levies on individuals. He held his ground despite the fact that 61 percent of Albertans supported an increase in corporate tax, while only 26 percent were opposed, according to a May 1, 2015, Leger poll conducted for the Calgary Herald and Edmonton Journal.
No less a figure than revered former premier Peter Lougheed, who died in 2012, had believed the corporate sector wasn’t paying its fair due. He certainly didn’t want punishing taxes that destroyed jobs; generally speaking, Alberta is a very pro-business province. But Prentice’s hard-line stand created resentment. Voters saw in him a premier who not only thought they were responsible for government errors, but expected them to pay the entire bill while his corporate pals got off free. Yet Prentice still believed his budget would bring him decisive victory.