There are a bunch of signals that it’s the former, which means provincial conservatives, Jason Kenney chief among them, and United Conservatives here in Alberta are all in for the fight of their lives.
For the first two weeks of the federal campaign, Kenney went into hiding… I mean, on holidays. And for good reason. Federal polling numbers prior to the campaign suggested that Erin O’Toole was suffering in Alberta from a problem not of his own making, and that will make it difficult for him to repeat past sweeps of our province.
But the much more interesting question is how these problems — from a conservative perspective — will play out on the provincial side. For while the federal campaign is on, there is a much more interesting battle going on provincially.
The first signal is the polling numbers, where Jason Kenney’s UCP is seriously behind.
Going into this past summer, Kenney had the lowest approval rating of any premier at 31 per cent, half of what he had following the 2019 provincial election, according to the Angus Reid Institute.
Perhaps this is just unhappiness at his handling of the pandemic, with the right end of his coalition upset at too many restrictions and the left end of that coalition upset at too few. Perhaps a strong economic recovery will bring the bounce
The second signal was the shocker coming from the fundraising numbers for the first half of this year that revealed the NDP more than doubled the UCP cash haul. In the second quarter of 2021 alone, the NDP raised more money than they spent to win the 2015 election.
A third signal was, for me, a simply astounding Abacus Data poll on Alberta’s vote intentions going into the current federal election.
It had Erin O’Toole’s federal Conservative Party of Canada polling a full 30 points below what former leader Andrew Scheer posted in the 2019 election.
While that was surprising enough, the bigger surprise was the beneficiaries of that drop.
The Liberals in Alberta were up 10 points from their showing in the last election, but in line with their Alberta results in the 2015 federal election. But look at the federal NDP!
They were up a full 20 points from both their 2019 and 2015 results.
