Colby Cosh: What Alberta conservatives can learn from their B.C. brethren

EDMONTON — It was certainly a busy week in Western politics, between Alberta’s consultative provincial referendum and B.C.’s general election. Saturday’s landslide victory for B.C.’s ad-hoc Conservative coalition will provide a powerful beacon of hope for small-c conservative politicians across Canada, after a difficult year, and the engineers of Lorne Doerkson’s campaign will be in high demand. 

People who know more about B.C. will have a lot to say about that result in all the newspapers, and they’re well represented in the Post’s pages. So indulge me by letting me talk about what the Alberta pro-federalist vote and the B.C. vote mean as a combined phenomenon. 

Alberta is governed by a United Conservative party that is threatened with mirror-universe versions of the same cultural and political divisions that had B.C.’s political right in total disarray for two years. In 2024, the B.C. right pulled together at the last minute under a Conservative banner; Kevin Falcon surrendering on behalf of “B.C. United” to John Rustad already seems like a story from the Golden Legend or the Quixote, but the sources all assure me that this event happened in August 2024. 

Since that time, Rustad came within a whisper of winning a provincial election and becoming premier; survived a Conservative party leadership review; was nevertheless forced to resign as leader; was thrown altogether out of the Conservative caucus; was readmitted to it; and retired from politics, because who the hell wouldn’t after all that. 

Rustad’s Conservatives lost by a whisper, blew themselves up, got rid of Rustad and his successor, and then won David Eby’s snap election. At this hour, with ballot-counting not quite complete, they have close to 50 per cent of the vote in an election they technically contested without a permanent leader. 

I don’t think the lesson from this is that parties shouldn’t have leaders between elections, but the merits of such an experiment do seem unusually obvious at the moment. The warning to all Canadian first ministers who might be tempted to call early elections needs no articulation. 

It’s just funny that Eby’s snap election came less than a week after Alberta’s great experiment in direct democracy. Eby’s timing left just enough space for the Alberta vote on secession to be counted, with a few days left over for the leading Alberta separatists to degenerate into hilarious chaos, with a public struggle over control of the “Alberta Prosperity Project” branch of the movement and lots of finger-pointing from everyone else. 

None of these people seem to know whether to s–t or go blind, as we say in Alberta. Separatist A says the heavy “Question 10” defeat is actually a victory, while blaming Separatist B for the loss. A, B and C blame Albertans for allowing themselves to be lulled into a patriotic stupor by Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier Danielle Smith, who is widely supposed to be conspiring to lose her own job. Some think the separatists should start their own party (a strategy that’s flopped dozens of times), while others stick to the UCP and argue amongst themselves about whether a leadership coup is necessary. 

Thanks to David Eby, the correct position for an ordinary Albertan who doesn’t want an NDP government has become obvious. Stop all the self-absorbed hillbilly intrigue, run on economic policy (against the NDP, any policy that accepts the existence of economics will do the trick) and pull together. Sure, it may be possible for evangelical radicals to overthrow the Conservative leader and put their own person in place. Kerry-Lynne Findlay may literally be available for the job! 

And who can say Findlay served her party poorly during her brief and erratic career as leader? For conservative parties facing a left-wing government, the B.C. result offers the promise of screwing things up so bad that you tempt the premier into calling a self-destructive early election and then making 10 or 15 embarrassing mistakes in a month-long campaign. (Let the historical record blaze with the albedo of Eby’s most amazing political accomplishment: he picked a popularity contest with a billionaire grocer and lost.) Unfortunately, that’s not something you can safely count on. 

B.C. politics is of course very different from Alberta’s, but Albertans will certainly not overlook B.C.’s election, for the very good reason that a B.C. election might be more important to the economy of Alberta than Alberta’s own elections are. I’m only kidding a little about this. Doerkson started talking positively about pipelines on Day 1 of his government, or what one presumes will be his government once the Lieutenant Governor sorts everything out. Global oil prices are still high, but the discount on Alberta oil has widened alarmingly, and that means Canada is missing out on some of the benefits it might otherwise receive from Putin-Trump geopolitical chaos. And we have a prime minister who, whatever else you think of him, understands this.

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