The Future of Alberta’s Left

With the stage set for a split on the right, the provinces left-wing parties could make big gains – if only they could agree to work together.

Readers of The Mark will recall my two previous reports favouring inter-party cooperation between the centre-left political parties in Alberta. Due to Alberta’s first-past-the-post voting system, provincial opposition parties garnered only 13 per cent of the seats in the 2008 provincial election, even though they received 47.5 per cent of the popular vote. The split of the opposition vote among three or more parties has helped keep the Alberta Conservatives in power for nearly four decades – an unhealthy situation.

Since June, the Democratic Renewal Project – a grassroots’ citizens organization based in Edmonton and Calgary that is pushing for electoral cooperation between the NDP, Greens, and Liberals – has slogged away on two fronts, both of which reached recent milestones.

First, DRP members of the NDP tabled a resolution calling for cooperation with other parties at the Alberta New Democrats’ annual convention held in Edmonton in mid-September. In his speech at the convention opposing the resolution, party leader Brian Mason argued that vote-splitting could be a non-factor if candidates put in hard work over two or three campaigns.

A couple of questions come to mind. Did Mr. Mason mean to imply (wrongly) that under his leadership NDPers have merely not worked long and hard enough to win? Or, after eleven consecutive Conservative majority victories, have Mason and the New Democrat executive not yet learned the obvious lesson that splitting the vote is fatal?

In fairness to Mr. Mason, it must be noted that if the results of the 2008 election were used to decide which riding would be left to the NDP and which to the Liberals in the next election, the NDP would run unopposed in only seven to nine Alberta constituencies – depending on Liberal generosity (in two seats, the Liberals barely topped the NDP vote). The Liberals, on the other hand, would receive the nod nearly everywhere else. Still, given the present NDP caucus of two, most political leaders would be happy at a prospective fourfold increase in their seats.

Nonetheless, Mr. Mason won’t bite. There’s no reason to doubt his sincerity when he argues that democracy requires running an NDP candidate in every constituency so all NDPers can vote their preference, no matter how electorally irrelevant and even if his spoiler candidates ensure a Conservative instead of an opposition win.

More pragmatic observers argue that elections are about winning seats and helping to form a government. A tactical alliance with the Liberals could result in a coalition government’s implementing many NDP policies, including proportional representation. From this point of view, Mr. Mason’s stance is worse than futile – it’s self-defeating. One has to wonder if he and his party would prefer to see another 40 years of Conservative rule instead of a combined NDP-Liberal resurgence.

Supporters of the DRP’s cooperative model were much more effective at lobbying for their cause this year than last when their cooperation resolution was defeated by a 95 per cent majority. This year, several DRP sympathizers were elected delegates from various constituencies, and the DRP display table and DRP members’ arguments in the hall elicited considerable interest.

However, after an hour-long debate opened by a tearful leader who begged the delegates not to “split the party,” a 79 per cent majority (123-27) of delegates once again voted against cooperating with the Liberals. Thus, the NDP plans to run candidates in all Alberta ridings in the next general election. As one DRP observer commented: “You have to appreciate the irony. Here’s Brian Mason pleading his members not to ‘split his party,’ while across the room, we DRP NDPers were pleading with him not to ‘split the entire progressive vote in the province.’”

After this disappointment, what’s next? Since the NDP intends to concentrate resources on a dozen constituencies, perhaps Mr. Mason plans to run mainly cardboard candidates who’ll sit on the ballot but not campaign. This seems to have been the party’s strategy in the Calgary-Glenmore by-election, where the candidate did not even rouse himself to attend the only all-candidates’ forum in that campaign. If so, Mason would remain faithful to his non-cooperation pledge, but at the cost of surrendering the rest of the province to other parties without receiving exclusive candidacies and the almost certain wins that the DRP’s cooperation strategy envisions for his party. In the DRP’s opinion, any new strategy that doesn’t include cooperation, will, in the end, fail at the polls.