10Redford and Prentice: The End of the PC Dynasty
(2011–2015)

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

—Winston Churchill

2011 PC Leadership: Two-Minute Tories Strike Again

Stelmach announced his intention to resign on January 25. Two weeks later, I was the first to announce that I would be a candidate to replace him. I had high name recognition and was expected to build on my strong showing in the 2006 leadership campaign. I had now served in two senior cabinet positions. Within days I was being labelled as the “front-runner” by media pundits, but with a cautionary title that turned out to be prophetic: “The curse of the Front-runner.” The pundit went on to note that “Alberta leadership races have a history of going sideways at the last minute for the person who has the most support, the most money and media attention.”¹

Gary Mar was also an early favourite. During the Klein era, Mar had been an MLA from Calgary and held numerous cabinet positions. During the Stelmach years, he had served as Alberta’s trade representative in Washington, DC. Mar was the favourite of the PC establishment, who were no more enthusiastic about me in 2011 than they had been in 2006. Mar enjoyed the endorsement of twenty-seven MLAs. By the end of the leadership campaign, he had out-fundraised the rest of us by a two-to-one margin—raising over $2 million, mostly from the same people who had bankrolled the Dinning campaign in 2006.

The other four candidates were:

• Doug Horner: another experienced cabinet minister from the Edmonton area and the son of a former PC cabinet minister. Like Stelmach in 2006, Horner was viewed as a regional candidate. Ten of his fourteen MLA supporters were from Edmonton and northern Alberta. Horner clearly had the support of the Stelmach loyalists.
• Alison Redford: a little-known feminist and human-rights lawyer from Calgary. She had worked for former federal PC Prime Minister Joe Clark and had stuck with the PCs during the 1990s civil war with the upstart Reform Party. With a reputation as a Red Tory, Redford tried unsuccessfully to win a nomination to be the federal Conservative Party’s candidate in Calgary-West in 2004. She then went provincial, was elected as a Calgary MLA in 2008, and was immediately appointed as minister of justice. Redford had the support of only one MLA and initially was seen as running to position herself for future influence.
• Rick Orman: a former MLA from Calgary (1986–93) who had held three different cabinet positions, including minister of energy. He ran for the leadership of the PC Party in 1992 but finished third and retired from elected politics the following year.
• Doug Griffiths: a thirty-four-year-old MLA for Battle River-Wainwright. When I arrived in the PC caucus in 2004, Doug was the only MLA who had previously been active in the federal Reform Party. He also was an ally in pushing out Stelmach.

In 2006, I had only one MLA endorsement: Tony Abbott. This time I was endorsed by ten sitting MLAs. Five were from Edmonton. David Xiao, Doug Elniski, and Tony Vandermeer had all become disillusioned with Stelmach and supported my effort to force him out. Also from Edmonton were Carl Benito and Peter Sandhu, both of whom were influential leaders in their respective immigrant communities, communities that liked my pro-family policy positions. From Calgary I was supported by Jonathan Denis, who shared my Reform Party roots, and Dave Rodney, who had supported my conservation and stewardship policies. Further south I had the support of George Groeneveld and Evan Berger. Both represented rural ridings adjacent to mine and were also early Reformers. We had worked together on overlapping constituency issues and had become friends. Both were early supporters of the Prairie Putsch.

My 2011 leadership campaign could not have been more different from my 2006 campaign. In 2006, I was an outsider, trying to break into the party from its conservative wing. To win, I had to attract new members to the PC Party by challenging the status quo. But now I was an insider, a member of the status quo. We assumed that I could keep my 2006 base supporters and finish in the top three in the first round. But to win in the second round, I would have to attract support from more traditional, mainstream PC members. From the start, we prioritized winning the second preferences of those candidates who did not make the cut-off after the first ballot.

My 2011 leadership campaign made little mention of the Alberta Agenda. Why would it? I was now trying to appeal to a new group of PC supporters who never did like the Firewall Letter. The most my brochures said about Ottawa was that I would be “a strong voice at the table in Ottawa.” I was at least partly right to de-emphasize the Alberta Agenda. To most Albertans, it no longer made much sense for me to be railing against Ottawa when the prime minister—Stephen Harper—was not only from Alberta but also a personal friend.

This strategy might have worked if I’d still had my former base of supporters from 2006. We simply assumed that I did. If we had done a baseline poll of my former supporters list at the outset—which we were advised to do—we would have seen that I didn’t. Not doing this baseline poll turned out to be a fatal mistake. My advice to future leadership candidates: spend this money at the beginning to find out where you have supporters and where you don’t.

Shortly after I declared my candidacy for the PC leadership, I was interviewed by Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid. Braid wrote that a “kinder, gentler Morton” had moved to the centre to prevent vote splitting on the Right.² Being in government, I had told Braid, had been “a moderating experience.” As I told another reporter, “In a parliamentary system, governing is a team sport. Puck hogs aren’t welcome, so you’ve got to play as a team and that’s how I’ve played for the last eight years.”³ I concluded, “I’m criticized by some Red Tories as being too conservative and criticized by Wildrose as being too liberal. … That’s not a bad place to be.”⁴ This assessment turned out to be very wrong. In a general election, vying for the median voters in the middle is usually a good strategy. But in an open primary like the PC leadership election, it is not.

My two primary campaign messages were that as leader I would reunite the Right and bring back the “Alberta Advantage.” On the latter, I pledged no more deficit spending; balanced budgets; low personal and corporate income taxes; and restoring investor confidence. I argued that fiscal responsibility was the successful PC brand—built by Lougheed and Klein, but now destroyed by Stelmach. I claimed that I was the candidate with the experience and determination to bring it back. My refusal to bend to Stelmach’s spend-now, pay-later policies was the proof. In retrospect, I think this was both accurate and true. But telling families that you are going to tighten up funding for programs they care about is hardly a way to win over voters.

My other primary campaign message was that I was a uniter: the only candidate who could prevent vote splitting with the Wildrose. By the time Stelmach announced his resignation, the Wildrose was polling almost even with the PCs.⁵ My message to conservative voters in 2011 was simple and clear: “Remember the lesson of the Federal conservatives: United we stand, divided we fall. The last thing Alberta needs is two conservative parties.”⁶ While this message clearly did not help my leadership campaign in 2011, four years later it proved prophetic.

I also emphasized the importance of environmental stewardship—especially for water quality and quantity on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. I emphasized the work I had done with the Alberta Land Use Framework and Alberta Land Stewardship Act (ALSA). My message: that just as it is morally wrong to leave unpaid bills and debt to our children, it is wrong to leave them with an environmental mess. I also used these issues as a critique of the Wildrose Party. “The single biggest weakness of Wildrose,” I told Don Braid, “is that they have no environmental policy. In the 21st century, you’d better have one. You need it to protect Albertans’ quality of life, protect our markets, and keep the federal government out of our jurisdiction.”⁷ Again, this was all true, but its political value in the PC leadership race was marginal. Concerns about ALSA’s impact on property rights had alienated many of my former rural supporters.

My campaign brochures also made commitments to:

• Health Care: reducing wait times for elective, non-emergency surgeries by more use of privately delivered but publicly funded surgeries.
• Education: more school choice for parents, and a tuition tax credit program to make post-secondary education more affordable for young Albertans.
• Democratic Reforms: fixed election dates; reducing the size of cabinet from twenty-four to seventeen; holding Senate elections every four years; rolling back Stelmach’s pay increase for ministers and MLAs; and strengthening the auditor general’s office to police government waste.
• New vanity licence plates with a painting of a Canadian bighorn sheep by my new friend Robert Bateman with the inscription “Alberta Strong and Free.”⁸

With the exception of the last (which was my favourite), all of these were mainstream policy initiatives. But the first three did little to distinguish me from the other five candidates. The Bateman vanity licence plates were to cost $60, half of which would go to fund Robert Bateman’s “Get to Know” program, which connects children with nature; the other half to an Alberta conservation group of the plateholder’s choice. This initiative garnered the endorsements of the Alberta Wilderness Association and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. But members of groups like these were not normally PC Party members and were not going to bother to purchase a PC membership to support me.

An early sign of my campaign’s weakness was that I never picked up any additional support from PC MLAs. Ten was a lot more than Redford (one), Griffiths (one), or Orman (zero). But it paled in comparison to Mar’s twenty-seven MLA endorsements, and even Horner had fourteen.

Another negative indicator was the dramatic reduction in the number of volunteers in our Calgary campaign office. In my 2006 leadership campaign we had over thirty unpaid volunteers working non-stop on our phone banks and direct mail operations. This time we had less than a dozen. All of our phone bank operations were run by paid employees—mostly university students looking for some part-time work. They were there for the pay, not for the candidate.

I was blinded to the implications of these ominous differences by the ease with which we were able to raise money. We raised over $100,000 by the end of February. By the end of the campaign, over $1 million. In 2006, we struggled to meet monthly expenses, and in the last month didn’t … until after the first ballot! In 2011, the more we asked for, the more we got. Another difference was the number and size of donations. In 2006, we had thousands of donations in the $25 to $100 range. In 2011, we had far fewer donors, but many writing big cheques: three for $30,000, the legal maximum; twenty-two for between $15,000 and $30,000; and sixty-nine for over $5,000. In other words, close to 90 percent of our funding came from ninety-four donors. So much for grassroots! But I was not aware of these numbers until well after the campaign was over.

In a similar way, I was misled by the co-operation I received from local PC constituency officers as I campaigned across the province. Wherever we went, PC volunteers were there to greet me and to help organize meet and greets. I interpreted this co-operation as a sign of support. This was naive. Patronage and a friendly ear in the premier’s office were the glue that had helped to hold the PC empire together for over four decades. At the end of the day, everyone wants to be on the side of the winner. As I was a high-profile PC cabinet minister and an early favourite to win, it was strategic to help me. I had forgotten what I thought I had learned on my first day in the Alberta legislature. In party politics, people often tell you what they think you want to hear, rather than what they really think.

As the campaign rolled on, I continued to poll well. Mar was usually ahead of me, but not by a significant margin. However, late polling in September predicted Redford as a contender. The two of us actually met privately once in early September to discuss helping one another with second preferences should one of us fail to make the cut-off after the first ballot. Of course, I assumed that would be her, not me.

In July I was endorsed by the Globe and Mail.⁹ Morton, the Globe wrote, “is right wing enough to fend off the Wildrose threat, but moderation is part of his complex character. He would probably govern with considerable fiscal prudence.” My campaign interpreted this a sign that we were succeeding in my rebranding as a moderate conservative. I had forgotten that in 2006, I had joked that the Globe’s endorsement of Jim Dinning was a political kiss of death in Alberta.

My campaign ended on a sour note. Eight days before the first day of voting, the CBC broke what they spun as a “scandal” story that as minister of SRD I had been using two different government emails—the second to avoid FOIP (Freedom of Information) requests for copies of my emails. This information had apparently been leaked by an unhappy bureaucrat in SRD in the hope of damaging my leadership chances.

The first part of the story was absolutely true. I did have two separate emails: Ted.Morton@gov.ab.ca and FLM@gov.ab.ca. The first was my official government email. As it was publicly available from the SRD website, I would often receive hundreds of emails a week from the general public, opining one way or the other on the dozens of issues that were pending decision at SRD. The sheer volume of these emails made it virtually impossible for me to efficiently conduct email correspondence with my office staff and my senior civil servants. So for this purpose, we created the second email for internal communications, and I left it to my office staff to filter and reply to emails from the general public.

As I told the media the day the story broke, “If I was trying to avoid FOIP, I wouldn’t have used my real name [i.e., Frederick Lee Morton].”¹⁰ To their credit, when asked, both Premier Stelmach and rival candidate and fellow cabinet member Doug Horner told the media that they too used a secondary email to conduct government business. And I was more than skeptical when both Mar and Redford said that during their time as ministers, they used only their one official government email address. It was simply a matter of the most efficient use of a minister’s limited time and had nothing to do with avoiding FOIP requests.

After the initial headlines, the story went nowhere. But playing defence is not the way you want to end the last week of a political campaign. As Calgary columnist Don Braid observed, “For Ted Morton … Thursday was a miserable day in politics, one that could hurt his chances of becoming premier.”¹¹ It certainly didn’t help. But neither did it affect the outcome. The die was already cast.

***

None of the six candidates was expected to win the 50 percent-plus-one needed for a first ballot victory, but Mar came close. He took 41 percent and left the rest of us in the dust. His strength was not just wide but deep—winning pluralities in fifty-two of the eighty-three ridings. Redford was a surprise second-place finisher at 19 percent, with strong support in Calgary, while Horner finished third with 14 percent. I finished fourth at only 12 percent, my anticipated support failing to materialize in either my old rural strongholds or in my MLA supporters’ ridings in southeast Edmonton and northeast Calgary.

*Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, “PC Alberta Leadership 2011,” September 22, 2011, archived by the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20110922163053/http://www.albertapc.ab.ca/results.htm.

I was totally unprepared for my poor showing. I had expected to come in second, not far behind Mar, and well positioned to pass him on second preferences. It had never even occurred to me that I would not make the cut-off to the second round. But in retrospect, my demise no longer seems that surprising. My strongest supporters had become disillusioned with the Stelmach government and with me for staying with him as long as I did.

Many of my former ranch and farm supporters were angry with me for the Alberta Land Stewardship Act and its alleged infringement on property rights. During 2010 as the minister of finance, I was preoccupied with my new budgetary responsibilities, and had not paid attention to the Wildrose Party’s attacks on the property rights issue. I thought then—and still do—that this was a bogus claim. As explained in chapter 4, ALSA made Alberta the first province in Canada to compensate landowners for “regulatory takings”—policies or regulations whose effect is to reduce the market value of the land. But it was too late. As I said later, “The toothpaste was out of the tube, and it’s been tough to put it back in.”¹² My 2006 supporters had either switched allegiance to the Wildrose Party or simply stayed home. The collapse of my support—from 41,000 votes in 2006 (second ballot) to 7,000 in 2011 (first ballot)—told the story.

The Red Tories that were left had never forgiven me for blocking the “coronation” of the “Prince in Waiting,” Jim Dinning. And many of the Edmonton and northern Tories disliked me because I had pulled the plug on Stelmach. Finally, as finance minister, I had annoyed almost every other cabinet minister by rejecting their requests for more funding. From this perspective, it’s no wonder I got clobbered.

***

Post–first ballot, I had to make a decision: endorse one of the three candidates advancing to the second round; remain quiet; or leave the party altogether. I met with my advisory group Sunday afternoon—and a very dispirited meeting it was. We discussed each of the three options. Several encouraged me to leave the party to sit as an Independent—or to join the Wildrose. What future was there for Ted Morton in a party that had just chosen the three least conservative candidates to proceed to the second round? If I couldn’t live with my conscience in an Ed Stelmach government, what was it going to be like in a Gary Mar or Alison Redford cabinet?

I was not persuaded. I understood the risks associated with starting new parties. I have never regretted my early involvement in and support for Preston Manning and the Reform Party. But I also never had any illusions about what it cost Alberta and conservative voters during the 1990s. Splitting the conservative vote in federal elections had given a free ride to the Liberals for thirteen years. For the past eight months, I had campaigned on the dangers of vote splitting with two right-of-centre parties. At this point, going over to the Wildrose was no longer an option.

Endorsing no one and remaining neutral was the easiest option. But it also seemed like a one-way ticket to the back bench in the next government. If I wanted to stay in the party and have a good chance to remain in cabinet, I had to endorse one of the three. Horner was clearly not going to win. So, would it be Mar or Redford?

It may shock many of my friends and former supporters that on a personal level, I preferred Redford. She was clearly much more liberal than I was. But many of the problems that cabinet deals with are administrative and non-ideological: basically, just trying to make the trains run on time. And when it came to this, Redford had been better prepared, more articulate and demonstrated better practical judgement than most of the Stelmach ministers I’d had to work with. We had maintained a friendly, professional relationship, and this continued throughout the leadership campaign.

I had reservations about Mar. I had not forgotten that he’d served as the Dinning campaign’s most vocal mudslinger in the anyone-but-Morton campaign in the final week of the 2006 leadership. He also had a reputation for sleazy backroom deals while serving as a minister in the Klein governments.¹³ And I hadn’t forgotten how in December 2006, after Stelmach had become premier and did not appoint Mar to a cabinet position, he threw an ugly temper tantrum in the next caucus meeting.

Notwithstanding all this, I chose to support Mar. At 41 percent of first-round support, no one was going to stop him. If the reason I was staying in the PC caucus was to remain a senior cabinet minister, then Mar was the ticket. At a press conference with Orman on Monday morning, we both endorsed Mar. I then left the province for some much-needed rest. I did not return until the second Saturday of voting and so played no role in that segment of the Mar campaign.

Redford’s second-ballot strategy was the same as mine had been in 2006. She needed to block the front-runner, Mar, from passing the 50 percent threshold, and then take enough of Horner’s second preferences to win. To this end, Redford publicly encouraged her supporters to give their second preferences to Horner. Horner was less direct, but he reciprocated in a widely circulated comment: “When you look at the policies, the platforms, the call for change, where we need to go with this province in the future, I think it’s pretty obvious where you would find my second ballot.”¹⁴ While these remarks may seem obscure, the message got through to his supporters.

When all three of the eliminated candidates—Orman, and Griffiths, and myself—endorsed Mar, he seemed like a shoo-in to win the second ballot outright on first preferences.¹⁵ But this was not to be.

***

On the second ballot, the number of new voters surged again—this time by 31 percent. Mar’s percentage—at 43 percent—hardly budged from the first ballot. By contrast, Redford more than doubled her share of the votes to 37 percent. Horner took only 14 percent, and was thereby eliminated, throwing the outcome to the second preferences of the Horner supporters.

*Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, “PC Alberta Leadership 2011,” October 4, 2011, archived by the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20111004125849/http://www.albertapc.ab.ca/results2.htm.

**Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, “PC Alberta Leadership 2011,” October 4, 2011, archived by the Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20111004153716/http://www.albertapc.ab.ca/results/finaltotal.html.

Then the “curse of the front-runner” struck again. In the second round, 40 percent of Doug Horner’s supporters did not even indicate a second preference—suggesting that they did not much care for Mar or Redford. Of those who did, over three-quarters (10,366) gave their second preference to Redford, allowing her to sneak past Mar with 51 percent, and making her the next premier of Alberta. For the third time in a row, an underdog candidate had burst from the pack to take down the party favourite. While these results surprised both participants and observers, the reasons are not hard to discern.

As in 2006, there was a dramatic surge of support from public sector unions, this time for Redford. Early in the campaign, she had publicly broken from the Stelmach government and promised to “restore” $110 million to the education budget. She then promised to help out the underfunded Alberta policemen’s pension, which garnered an endorsement from the police association. When front-runner Gary Mar refused to rule out more privately delivered (but publicly funded) health care, Redford denounced him and promised “to keep public health care public.” She also promised new “family [health] care clinics” that would accommodate the crowded schedules of working mothers. Redford’s policy focus on education and health care sent the message that she might well be the “least-worst choice” for public sector union members who didn’t normally vote PC.

What had happened somewhat spontaneously in the 2006 Stelmach campaign became a conscious strategy for Redford in 2011. Her policy promises on health and education issues resonated well with nurses’ and teachers’ unions. In the last month of the campaign, this “pull” was turned into a “push” by a sophisticated social media campaign that targeted professional working women, a demographic that overlaps strongly with nurses and teachers.¹⁶ In Calgary, the polling stations were filled with “two-minute Tories”—buying their PC memberships on the way in and ripping them up on the way out.

Minister of Energy

I left the Edmonton EXPO Centre in shock. Like everyone else, I had never imagined that Redford could catch and pass Mar on the second ballot. The next morning, I packed up our car and headed to Calgary—and, I assumed, soon to the back bench. Any prospect of a cabinet appointment in a Redford government seemed like a complete impossibility. Then, as we passed by the Edmonton airport, my cellphone rang.

On the other end was Ken Hughes, a former Conservative MP from Calgary back in the 1980s. We had met through our mutual friend Barry Cooper and become friends, even after Ken lost his seat in the Reform Party’s sweep of Alberta in the 1993 federal election. So why was Ken calling me this morning? He quickly explained that he was in Edmonton helping Redford with her transition planning and that she wanted to speak with me ASAP about a possible cabinet appointment.

I was shocked, but fortunately did not drive off the road. I did, however, do a U-turn, and forty-five minutes later walked through a door at the Chateau Lacombe Hotel. There to greet me were Ken and Robert Hawkes, Redford’s ex-husband. They got right to the point: party unity. Redford needed a cabinet that represented all factions of the PC Party. As a Red Tory, she needed a senior Blue Tory in her cabinet. And I was her man. Would I accept an appointment as her minister of energy?

It took me less than a minute to say YES. My year as finance minister had made me acutely aware of how dependent GOA revenues were on a healthy oil and gas sector. In 2011, this meant increased access to global markets and global prices. But the anti-oil sands, anti-pipeline campaign was already underway. The next Alberta minister of energy would be at the centre of this battle. I welcomed the opportunity. As I subsequently joked, being minister of energy in Alberta was like being the minister of wine in France (a job I’d also be willing to accept).

Unfortunately, from the day I became minister of energy, the next provincial election was only five months away. Other than learning my new policy files and meeting with key energy stakeholders, I had little opportunity to do much in terms of new policy. The two exceptions were two new proposed north-south electricity transmission lines and the Teedrum Upgrader.

Earlier, Redford and I had both opposed the new 500 kV transmission project as unnecessary and too expensive. But after reading my minister’s briefing notes and meeting with experts, I was persuaded otherwise. Geographically larger, integrated electric systems are less prone to failures and blackouts than smaller, regional systems. An unexpected loss of electricity in one region can be covered by transmission from a different region. With the new steam-assisted gravity drainage systems (SAGD) that were being installed in the oil sands, we had an abundant new source of electricity. But to get it to where it was needed—central and southern Alberta—required new transmission.

No new north-south transmission had been built since the 1980s, during which time Alberta’s population had increased by 1.4 million, or 40 percent. Policy-wise, it was time. My explanation: “We’re trying to do what’s best for the province, not just for the next four years, but the next four decades.”¹⁷ But my reversal hurt me politically, as segments of the new lines would be built right through parts of my new riding of Rocky View-Chestermere, and nobody wants sky-high transmission towers in their backyard.¹⁸

The proposed Teedrum Upgrader came as a complete surprise the day I walked into my new office. I discovered that during the six months of the leadership campaign, Stelmach had been persuaded to sign off on a second upgrader project in the Edmonton area, this one backed by a consortium of Alberta Aboriginal groups led by Enoch Cree First Nation Chief Ron Morin. It had a $6.6 billion price tag and the same bitumen-royalty-in-kind (BRIK) supply and financing arrangements as the now-approved North West Upgrader. As explained in chapter 7, this meant that all the downside risks were on the Government of Alberta. Having just spent most of 2011 trying—unsuccessfully—to block North West, I was damned if I now was going to endorse an identical fiscal calamity. I went immediately to the premier’s office and told her I would resign rather than sign off on Teedrum.

To her credit, Redford agreed with me. She had served with me on the ministerial subcommittee that had vetted North West and was well aware of its high financial risk. She arranged for me and Stephen Carter, her then chief of staff, to meet with Teedrum’s Aboriginal backers. It was probably the most unpleasant meeting I ever had as a minister. I explained the policy reasons for my refusal to approve the deal. That went nowhere. Its proponents turned to Carter, looking for a save from the premier’s office. To Carter’s credit, he said point blank that Premier Redford supported my decision 100 percent. The meeting adjourned less than three minutes later. Unfortunately, Teedrum’s Aboriginal backers denounced my decision as “racist.”¹⁹ More importantly for Alberta taxpayers, Teedrum never saw the light of day again.

As the April 23 election approached, our caucus became increasingly worried by polls indicating that the Wildrose Party would defeat us. Discussions began about what kinds of voter-friendly new policies we could announce to stem the tide. One suggestion was a price freeze on consumer electricity costs. I’m not sure who came up with this idea, but Ron Liepert, now the new minister of finance, soon became its most vocal supporter. But electricity policy was now in my energy policy portfolio. I spoke strongly against this, declaring that this was something the NDP would do but not Conservatives. Liepert’s response was quick and to the point: “We had to out-NDP the NDP.” I won the argument that day, but Liepert’s exhortation set the tone for the ensuing campaign.

2012 Provincial Election

The PC campaign for the April election picked up where Liepert had left off (perhaps not too surprising, as Liepert was now Redford’s new finance minister). Per her promise during the PC leadership, Redford restored the $107 million for teachers’ salaries that Stelmach (and I) had cut in the 2011 Budget. She promised that there would be no cuts to social services (health, education, and other social programs) and full funding for all planned capital projects—new roads, new schools (50!) and new hospitals.²⁰ In the middle of the campaign, she upped the ante by promising 140 new “family care clinics” with a price tag of $3.4 billion.²¹ Just for good measure, she then promised to bring in full-day kindergarten at a cost of another $200 million. All of this, Redford promised, would be done with a balanced budget in the following year, and a $5.1 billion budget surplus by 2015.

This was all wildly unrealistic. The premier knew it. Caucus knew it. And so did the Wildrose. They attacked the PC budget promises as “Alison in Wonderland.”²² And they were right. For the record, the Redford government subsequently ran three consecutive budget deficits totalling $5 billion in new debt. But in the context of a four-week campaign, it was impossible to prove this in any politically meaningful way. These promises clearly helped Redford and the PCs win votes from teachers, nurses, and other public sector workers.

The Wildrose policy book endorsed most of the key reforms recommended in the Firewall Letter. This was not surprising, as much of their policy book had been copied and pasted from my 2006 leadership materials. These reforms included:

• Withdrawing from the CPP and creating an Alberta pension plan
• Not renewing the contract with the RCMP and creating an Alberta police force
• Reducing Equalization and other fiscal transfer programs that were taking $20 billion a year net out of Alberta.

Smith pointed out that we now had a prime minister—Stephen Harper—an Albertan who had helped to write the Firewall Letter, and who would be sympathetic to Albertans’ demand for a fair deal. Smith declared that “someone’s got to say the system isn’t working. Someone’s got to tell Quebec and the other provinces they can actually strive for something better.”²³ While this no doubt helped the Wildrose recruit my former supporters, it may have hurt them with centrist voters. Redford herself avoided the issue, but her surrogates did not. Stephen Carter, her campaign manager, declared that such policies “would likely wall us off from the rest of the country at a time when we need the rest of the country more than ever.”²⁴

The PCs also benefited from a series of Wildrose communication blunders in the last weeks of the campaign that raised issues of abortion rights, homophobia, and racism. These remarks were not made by leader Danielle Smith but by several of her candidates. Smith responded by strongly stating that neither she nor her party supported these comments, but the damage was done.²⁵ The PCs, with the help of the media, capitalized on these blunders and launched a last-minute “campaign of fear”: that a Wildrose government would be a dangerous step backward for Alberta.²⁶

This media firestorm, plus the complete collapse of support for the Liberal Party, sealed the deal for Redford. In the last week of the campaign, polling showed the Wildrose went from leading the PCs by ten points to trailing by ten points. It’s hard to say what was more decisive on election day: Wildrose communication blunders or PC promises. But the results were clear: a decisive victory for Alison Redford and the PCs.

The PCs won sixty-one seats with 44 percent of the vote, a loss of five seats but still a strong majority government. The Wildrose won 34 percent of the vote but only seventeen seats: enough to make them the Official Opposition but a major disappointment given earlier expectations. Bringing up the rear were the Liberals (five seats) and the NDP (four seats), with each party getting less than ten percent of the vote. For the NDP, these results were pretty much par for the course. But for the Liberals, this was a disaster. In the two prior elections (2004 and 2008), the Liberal Party was supported by over a quarter of the voters. Now they were down to only ten percent. This collapse can be at least partially attributed to the incompetence and erratic behaviour of the Liberals’ new leader, Raj Sherman.²⁷

Subsequent analysis found that many Albertans who normally voted Liberal chose to vote “strategically” and went over to Redford and the PCs to stop the Wildrose.²⁸ In Edmonton, for example, the PCs won Edmonton-Gold Bar (Liberal since 1982) and Edmonton-Riverview (Liberal since 1997). Both went solidly NDP in 2015. The “campaign of fear” worked. And it helped to replace the thousands of Alberta conservatives who in the past had voted PC, but now, abandoned by Redford, went to the Wildrose. In 2012, this helped Redford win. But it potentially spelled trouble for the future. Historically, the PCs had benefited from vote splitting on the Left—between the Liberals and NDP. But what would happen if there were no longer a viable Liberal Party? We would have to wait until 2015 for the answer to this question.

As for me in Chestermere-Rocky View, I was one of the many PC casualties of the Wildrose sweep of rural southern Alberta. From the start, we knew I was in for a rough ride. Chestermere-Rocky View was new—created by redistricting after the 2008 election. It had the northern half of my old Foothills-Rocky View riding, but then added the Calgary suburb of Chestermere. Chestermere had been part of Rob Anderson’s old riding when he was first elected as a PC. Now he was the second most powerful MLA in the Wildrose caucus—Smith’s deputy leader—and still had a strong political team in Chestermere.

My opponent, Bruce McAllister, was well known and popular in Chestermere. He was a former television broadcaster. His son was the captain of the local hockey team, and his wife ran the only hair salon in the community. They knew almost everyone. I, of course, was a complete outsider.

To overcome this deficit, we made two strategic decisions before the election even began. One was to mount an intense ground game. By the end of the thirty-day campaign, I had door-knocked almost every Chestermere home twice. We also blanketed Chestermere with direct mail and telephone calls.

Second, my campaign brochures and political advertising in the local weekly newspapers—the Airdrie Echo and the Cochrane Times—were completely independent of and different from the Redford/PC party media. I tried to run on issues totally different from the PC Party’s province-wide campaign. The issues I emphasized fit much better with Wildrose than the Redford PCs. But in the end, it made no difference. I was trounced by the Wildrose Candidate Bruce McAllister by almost a two-to-one margin, 10,168 to 6,156.

I was disappointed but not surprised. Like the rest of us, voters in Chestermere-Rocky View voted party, not person. As one media commentator accurately predicted just days before the election, under the headline “WILDROSE GODFATHER TED MORTON MAY END UP ON LOSING SIDE OF ALBERTA’S CONSERVATIVE CIVIL WAR”:

Ted Morton espouses the right politics, but he sits on the wrong side of history. If the current momentum carries until voting day on Monday, he’ll be ousted by a Wildrose Party espousing a political philosophy he helped create.²⁹

Wildrose’s second-place finish with only seventeen MLAs was a major disappointment to its leaders and organizers. But in a broader context, it was still a significant achievement. For the first time, they were now the Official Opposition—not bad for a political party created only three years earlier.³⁰ But would the Wildrose have staying power? Was this divide on the Right just a temporary aberration or more permanent?

Evidence suggested that it would be more permanent because it had a regional foundation. The political science is clear that the best way for a new party to establish itself early is by having a strong regional base.³¹ The early success of the Manning Reformers came from the concentration of our support in Western Canada.³² My success in the 2006 PC leadership was based on the regional concentration of my supporters in southern and central Alberta, where Ralph Klein also did well in 1992.³³ On the first ballot, I carried every rural and small-town constituency south of Edmonton except five, and even won two rural ridings north of Edmonton.

In the 2011 leadership contest, this support disappeared. At the time, pundits speculated that this was because my supporters had already gone over to the Wildrose.³⁴ The subsequent results of the 2012 general election seemed to confirm this.³⁵ In the April 2012 provincial election, the Wildrose Party won twelve of the twenty-one ridings I had won in the first round of the 2006 leadership vote. Of the seventeen Wildrose MLAs elected, twelve came from ridings I had won in 2006. In some—such as Drumheller-Stettler, Airdrie, and Lac La Biche-St. Paul-Two Hills—the same volunteers who ran my 2006 leadership campaign ran the Wildrose campaigns in 2012.

So if geography matters—and in first-past-the-post electoral systems, it does—then the Wildrose Party was not going to evaporate anytime soon. It now had a beachhead in southern and central Alberta from which to mount future assaults on the Tory dynasty. Add this to the collapse of support for the Liberals and thus the end of vote splitting on the Left, and you might have begun to worry about its implications for Alison Redford and the party she now led.

The forty-year-old Alberta Tory dynasty was founded on a coalition of urban and rural interests, an unlikely marriage between the oil and gas industry and the ranch-farm sector. This unspoken coalition had helped them win twelve consecutive victories. But this coalition was now unravelling. The collapse of my support—from 41,000 votes on the 2006 second ballot to 7,000 in 2011—confirmed that many Blue Tories / federal Conservatives had already left the PC Party for the Wildrose Party.³⁶

Would this mean the end of the Tory dynasty? Not necessarily. But it meant that the PCs would have to cobble together a different coalition of interests and groups—a more urban coalition— to continue to win majority governments. One of Redford’s campaign ads in the 2012 Alberta general election boasted, “Not Your Father’s PC Party.” She turned out to be right, but she soon discovered that managing the consequences was not so easy. 

The Redford Debacle

From the outside, the rise and fall of Alison Redford has been told elsewhere by others.³⁷ As I was no longer in caucus or cabinet, I have no inside story to tell. The most remarkable aspect was how quickly it happened. Less than two years into her four-year mandate—after two stunning, come-from-behind victories—she was literally chased out of the Alberta Legislative Assembly by her own caucus. It will go down in Canadian history as one of the most humiliating and unpleasant endings for any Canadian first minister. What happened?

Officially, it was a growing list of publicly reported incidents that soured Albertans’ view of Redford. These culminated in the disclosure that she had billed the government $45,000 to attend Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa, including $10,000 for a private jet to return to Alberta. While none of these incidents by themselves might have been fatal, their cumulative effect was. New polling showed that her approval rating plummeted to only 18 percent—a far cry from the 58 percent she had enjoyed only eighteen months earlier.³⁸ It created a perception of a premier with a sense of hubris and entitlement.

While the perceived abuse of taxpayer-funded perks helps to explain how Redford lost the support of Albertans, low public opinion ratings halfway through a mandate do not force a premier to resign. With two more years left in her mandate and the support of her caucus, Redford had more than enough time to recover from her poor start.

So why did Alison Redford leave so quickly? It was not just because of the alleged misuse of government aircraft and other perceived abuse of taxpayer-funded perks. Yes, that was the fuse, but it ignited three deeper, more dangerous political landmines.

First, Redford never had the support of the PC party—top, middle, or base. She won the 2011 leadership race not by engaging the PC faithful, but by going around them.³⁹ She won by promising $500 million of new spending on teachers, nurses, and other public sector workers—people who normally don’t vote PC, but who became “two-minute Tories” just by buying memberships on the last day of voting. The night Redford won the leadership, she suddenly found herself in the penthouse of the PC chateau, but the rest of the hotel was empty.

So, job number one was—or should have been—winning over caucus members and the PC rank and file. It never happened. This was landmine number two. Rather than engaging with her new team, she never gave them the time and respect needed to gain their confidence and support. Whether it was cabinet ministers, backbenchers, or party volunteers, they never warmed up to her. It started immediately. While I was still in caucus, she rammed through her “new idea”—never even discussed during the campaign—of lowering the impaired driving limit from .08 to .05, over strenuous caucus opposition. This all but guaranteed the defeat of most rural PC MLAs in the next election. FYI: There are no taxis to take you home in rural Alberta. This lack of communication and consultation with caucus and even ministers continued after I departed.

Next was Budget 2012. Already badly in the red for the fifth year in a row, the province was driven deeper into deficit as Redford added $500 million of new program spending to pay for her leadership campaign promises. Objections were ignored. She made it clear that it was her call, and that she did not appreciate being challenged in caucus. Those who did soon regretted it. This pattern was set early, and on it went.

By summer 2013, disillusioned PC staffers at the legislature were cracking dark jokes about the Stelmach era as “the golden age.” There were allegations of bullying and intimidation by the premier’s office. In the fall, Redford survived the mandatory leadership review. But her team’s aggressive full-court press—and thousands of PC Party dollars used to round up 77 percent of the votes—left a bitter taste for many members.

As the fallout from the $45,000 South Africa trip and other alleged misuses of government aircraft began to swirl around her, Redford retreated into her premier’s office, an office now staffed almost entirely with people imported from her old Joe Clark, Red Tory networks in Toronto and Ottawa. Most of them knew little about Alberta or Albertans. Several had hardly been anywhere outside the legislature. The revelation that her chief of staff was living in a $200-a-night room at the Fairmont Hotel Macdonald did not help matters. While the Ontarification of the premier’s office was not widely reported, it did not escape the notice of MLAs and PC volunteers, who saw it as yet another sign of her being out of touch.

The third and final strike was the new accounting rules introduced in the 2013 provincial budget. The new three-pronged accounting system—operational spending, capital spending, and savings—just didn’t wash. The budget proposed to borrow $4.3 billion to pay to build new schools, hospitals, and roads. According to Doug Horner, her new finance minister, this $4.3 billion expenditure was not counted as part of the deficit since it would create new public assets.

These new accounting rules were missed by most normal Albertans, who are too busy to pay attention to arguments over such technical matters. But it didn’t escape the notice of those who follow government finance. As the Canadian Taxpayers Federation commented, the new accounting rules were “an attempt to sow confusion and ‘cook the books.’”⁴⁰ Or, as the National Post reported, “Alberta budget 2013 marked by billions in deficit spending, service cuts.”⁴¹ I publicly criticized the new rules the month they were released. Two years later, I joined five other former PC finance ministers in a public letter that challenged all candidates seeking to become the next PC leader to repeal the Redford accounting rules.⁴²

The 2013 Redford-Horner budget sent a bitter message to the thousands of PC activists and supporters who remembered the pain and pride of the Klein years—the pain of the spending cuts needed to end the deficits; and pride of balancing the GOA budgets and eventually paying off Alberta’s $22 billion debt. For many, myself included, this was one more reason not to come to the rescue of Alison Redford, when or if she ever needed it.

And she needed it soon. By March 2014, Redford’s personal approval rating had dropped to 18 percent. Public support for the PC Party was at 19 percent, while the Wildrose was polling at 46 percent. On Thursday, March 13, MLA Len Webber left the PC Caucus to sit as an Independent. On the following Monday, a second MLA, Donna Kennedy-Glans, did the same. A caucus revolt seemed imminent. Redford held an emergency meeting with PC Party executives, but this failed to stem the tide. Ten MLAs publicly announced their intention to meet on March 16 to debate whether to follow Webber and Kennedy-Glans. A group of PC riding association presidents announced that they were meeting later that week to vote on a non-confidence motion in Redford’s leadership of the party.

At a hastily called end-of-day news conference on Wednesday, March 19, Redford announced that she would resign as premier on Sunday. She did, but then did not return to the legislature until May 5, creating more controversy, as she was still collecting her MLA salary. This came to an end on August 6, when she resigned as the MLA for Calgary-Elbow and went into political exile, never to be seen again at a PC function.

Prentice to the Rescue … Not

Redford’s sudden departure in March left the PCs leaderless in the middle of the spring session of the legislature. The PC caucus chose Dave Hancock to take the role of interim party leader and premier, but neither he nor the party wanted him to stay for long. He was too closely tied to Redford and way too Red Tory to stem the exodus of PC voters to the Wildrose.

A new leadership election was scheduled for early September, but there were no obvious candidates. The PC coalition was blown apart, and polling now showed them trailing the Wildrose in public support. Who wants to lead a party like this? Nature abhors a vacuum and so do political parties. So several sitting MLAs stepped forward: Thomas Lukaszuk from Edmonton; and Ric McIver and Ken Hughes from Calgary. Hughes was the only one of the three who had any realistic chance of reuniting the party, but he withdrew his name only a month after launching his leadership campaign. Why?

Into this vacuum swooped Jim Prentice, the former federal MP from Calgary. Prentice had been a Joe Clark Tory dating back into the 1970s. Like Redford, Prentice had refused to join the Reform Party during its ascendency in the 1990s. But after the 2004 merger, Prentice joined Stephen Harper’s new Conservative Party of Canada. Prentice held three different cabinet positions in Harper governments, before he retired in 2010 to take a well-paid position as a vice-chairman at CIBC Bank in Calgary.

It was no secret that Prentice had always aspired to political leadership. He had run unsuccessfully in both the 2003 federal PC leadership race and then in 2004 for the leadership of the newly created Conservative Party of Canada. Now, suddenly, a new window opened. Handsome, articulate, and well known to the Calgary business community—with connections in both the Blue and Red wings of the fractured PC party—Prentice appeared as a “dream candidate,”⁴³ a deus ex machina that could rescue the PCs from self-destruction.

The leadership race itself was almost an afterthought. On September 6, Prentice swept to victory with over 76 percent of the votes. McIver and Lukaszuk, never serious contenders, were left far behind.⁴⁴ Prentice had won a landslide victory. But there was a problem. Who cared? Only 23,386 Albertans even bothered to vote. Compare this to the vote totals for 2006 (144,279) or even 2012 (72,592). What was left of the once-mighty PC machine?

The challenge facing Prentice was clear. Somehow, he had to win back the thousands of conservatives who had migrated over to the Wildrose. To his credit, he came pretty damn close. Over the next three months, his party won four by-elections, and then achieved something unprecedented in Canadian political history: the leader of the Official Opposition, Danielle Smith, crossed the floor with over half of her caucus to join the government.⁴⁵

Publicly, Prentice and Danielle Smith declared that, policy-wise, they agreed with each other more than they disagreed, and that they wanted to end vote splitting on the Right. Privately, Prentice had cemented the deal with the promise of immediate cabinet positions for both Smith and her deputy leader, Rob Anderson. While this has never been publicly confirmed, the offer to Smith is said to have been appointment as the new finance minister. Together, they now held seventy-two of the eighty-seven seats in the Legislative Assembly. From the outside, it seemed like a brilliant move.

But party politics is played from the inside. And there were some serious miscalculations on both sides of the deal. Smith did not consult party members before agreeing to the deal. This backfired big time. The Wildrose Party had been built from the ground up at the constituency level. Thousands of volunteers had worked their hearts out just two years earlier to defeat the PCs. Nor had they forgotten the PCs’ “fear campaign” that stigmatized Wildrose supporters.

Now, with no notice or consultation, they were expected to fold their tents and join the PCs? The situation was further aggravated by the fact that many if not most of its volunteers were ex-Reformers who had not forgotten that Prentice was a Joe Clark loyalist who had never joined the Reform Party wave in the 1990s. Many were furious, and never forgave Smith. For them, the new call to “unite the Right” fell on deaf ears.

On the other side, Prentice ran into an analogous backlash for the same reason: little to no prior consultation with his cabinet or caucus.⁴⁶ Given that his preordained mission was to rescue the forty-year-old PC dynasty from losing the election, Prentice naively assumed that his caucus would embrace his new “unite the Right” initiative. He had scheduled only one hour for a meeting with his caucus, and he had already instructed his justice minister, Jonathan Denis, to have the Lieutenant Governor available to officiate the swearing in of new cabinet ministers the next day.

Instead, all hell broke loose. For two years, the PC caucus had sat though question periods watching the Wildrose opposition destroy their leader. Redford’s two principal antagonists were Smith and Anderson. They were adept at pushing the QP buttons that would send Premier Redford into (televised) fits of exasperation and anger. The idea that these two might now not only join the PC caucus but immediately assume senior cabinet positions was too much.

Led by Hancock and Horner, Redford’s two staunchest defenders, a substantial portion of the caucus let Prentice know that they would not accept this. The planned one-hour caucus meeting stretched on to two and then three hours. While there was no explicit discussion of new cabinet appointments, Prentice got the message. The next day, nine Wildrose MLAs joined the PC caucus, but there were no new cabinet positions for any of them.

This fuelled the anger in the Wildrose base. What policy concessions were Wildrosers receiving in return for Smith’s floor crossing? Nothing! In retrospect, Prentice’s caving in to the Hancock-Horner protests hurt the PCs in the next election. He could have—and should have—told his caucus critics to shut up or leave. They were the ones responsible for the Redford fiasco. Prentice had come in to rescue the PC Party. He owed them nothing. Had he done this—and given Smith and Anderson important cabinet positions—the subsequent vote splitting with the Wildrose would not have been so devastating. But he didn’t, and it was.

Initially, the floor crossing was celebrated as a triumph for Prentice in the run-up to the fast-approaching May election: “Progressive Conservative Premier Jim Prentice crushed Alberta’s official opposition and consolidated his hold on power Wednesday,” crowed the front page of the Edmonton Journal.⁴⁷ As mentioned above, Prentice and the PCs now held seventy-two of the eighty-seven seats in the Alberta legislature. The remaining fifteen MLAs were evenly split between three different parties—what was left of the Wildrose, plus five Liberals and five NDP. What could possibly go wrong now? Plenty! Prentice was about to relearn the adage that in politics, a week is a long time.

In less than three months, Jim Prentice’s approval ratings went from 60 percent positive to 60 percent negative. His March budget, combined with an early election call, delivered a lethal one-two punch. The pay-more, receive-less budget angered both the Right and the Left. In my opinion, it was the first honest provincial budget presented to Albertans since the 2008 recession. I wrote a column for the Calgary Herald that said just this:

Premier Jim Prentice and Finance Minister Robin Campbell are to be congratulated for Budget 2015. They have told Albertans the truth about our public finance. They have ditched the misleading Alison Redford–Doug Horner accounting rules. They have made it clear that it is time that we live within our means and pay for the services we consume—not leave unpaid bills to our children.⁴⁸

But there is no political reward for telling voters the hard truth about public finances. The PC budget had too many program cuts for liberals; too much spending for the conservatives; and too many tax hikes for everyone except corporations.

Prentice exacerbated the negative reactions to his budget with his offhand comment that if Albertans wanted to understand who was responsible for a decade of government overspending, “we need only look in the mirror.” This sparked a viral social media backlash— “Prentice blames Albertans”—that further soured voters’ perception of their new premier.⁴⁹ His well-publicized purchase of a vintage 1956 Thunderbird convertible for $71,000 during an impromptu vacation stop in Arizona didn’t help matters.⁵⁰

Another blow was Prentice’s early election call. The next provincial election was not scheduled until April 2016. So, when Prentice announced on April 7, 2015, that he was calling an election in less than a month, he looked cynical and power hungry. Two of the three opposition parties did not even have permanent leaders. It smacked of opportunism and winning cheap. Albertans didn’t like it.⁵¹

Until then, Prentice looked different from the old, take-no-prisoners PC war machine. The “under new management” narrative was working. The early election call killed this. PC MLAs who went door-knocking got an earful. Prentice no longer looked different. Many Albertans were not willing to tolerate their votes being taken for granted. And that’s what the spring 2015 election now looked like. When the dust settled, protest votes, and now a badly divided right-of-centre, resulted in what no one could have imagined a year earlier: a majority NDP government led by Rachel Notley.

2015: The End of the PC Dynasty

On May 5, the NDP won fifty-four seats and a majority government. The Wildrose, with twenty-one seats, continued as the Official Opposition. The PCs trailed with only nine seats. Shocked and demoralized, Prentice resigned as PC leader and as the MLA for Calgary-Foothills that very night.⁵²

The 44-year-old PC dynasty had come to a crashing end. But May 5 did not mean that Alberta had experienced a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation from right-wing conservatism to the labour-union left. The NDP victory was not so much an “Orange Wave” as the splintering of the right-of-centre vote. Of the fifty-four seats won by the NDP, twenty-one were won with less than 40 percent of the votes. Combined, the PCs and Wildrose won 54 percent of the votes, but only 35 percent of the seats. Contrary to what some have argued, 2015 did not mark the beginning of “the New Alberta”⁵³—a fact confirmed by the subsequent election of UCP majority governments in 2019 and 2023.

Yes, Alberta’s demographics had changed. Since the Stelmach victory in 2008, Alberta’s population had grown by 430,000. There was now a higher percentage of younger Albertans; more with university educations; more urban; and a 50 percent increase in public sector union membership.⁵⁴ None of these changes are usually positive for small-c conservative parties.

But by themselves, these changes don’t explain the 2015 Alberta election. Alberta’s demographics had been changing every decade since 1971. As the late David Taras and others have pointed out, many immigrants choose Alberta precisely because it has had more conservative, business-friendly governments for the past fifty years.⁵⁵ This “self-selection” is especially true for the tens of thousands of Canadians who came to Alberta in the 1980s from Saskatchewan and BC in the 1990s—refugees from economies that NDP governments had destroyed. It is hardly surprising that many or most of them chose to elect PC governments in their new home province. In 2015, almost two out of three Albertans still voted against the NDP. Most Albertans were and remain non-ideological. Many who supported NDP candidates were voting against Prentice and the PCs, not for the NDP.

There was also a deeper flaw in the Prentice team’s pre-election strategy. They assumed that the floor-crossing had removed the threat of vote splitting with the Wildrose. Their leader, Danielle Smith, was now in the PC caucus. With both the Liberals and Wildrose parties without leaders, the PCs called an early election, and then focused their campaign on the New Democrats and winning over centre-left voters—the classic “median-voter” strategy. The problem is that this strategy does not work when there is a viable third party on your flank.⁵⁶ The PCs assumed there was not, but there was. So, they ended up fighting a war on two fronts—never a good strategy. Like earlier PC leaders, Prentice ignored the cross-cutting issue of Western alienation, which remained a priority for many Wildrose supporters.

After forty-four years of PC rule, a decade of Stelmach-Redford melodramas, and five different PC premiers in less than a decade, many Albertans were simply tired of the PC brand. And there wasn’t much left of the brand. As Colby Cosh perceptively observed, “Redford did for the PCs’ ethical reputation what Stelmach had done to its managerial bona fides.”⁵⁷ Albertans were ready for change. And Prentice no longer looked like change. The door was open, and an articulate, intelligent, and affable woman—Rachel Notley—walked through it.