Conservatives’ hard-right turn is forcing Canadians to rethink choices

Sitting on a café terrace overlooking a park commemorating the birthplace of the sprawling oil industry in the western Canadian province of Alberta, Audrey Cerkvenac and Ernestine Dumont grappled with a political dilemma.

In a province that had long been the epicenter of Canada’s conservative politics, the two older women had been staunch conservative supporters.

But as Monday’s provincial election approached, they said they were turned off by the sharp right-wing turn the province’s Conservative Party had taken as it ruled Alberta during the pandemic, sparked by extremist protests against Covid restrictions and baseless claims about vaccines.

The United Conservative Party’s far-right turn has left a province that was once a sure win for Canada’s Conservatives up for grabs in Monday’s election. In addition to a referendum on the party’s ideological shift, the vote could also serve as a gauge of conservative standing across the country.

Led by someone who compared people vaccinated against Covid-19 to Nazi supporters, Alberta’s Conservative Party has moved so far to the right since the pandemic that it has created an opening for the left-wing New Democratic Party to take control of the province to acquire. A Conservative loss in Alberta would be a blow to the political viability of Canada’s far right.

“The pandemic has allowed a radical, right-wing group to develop,” said Ms Cerkvenac, a retired health care administrator who, like Ms Dumont, said she would likely damage her ballot to invalidate it. “I have to do what I can to stop this.”

Anger over pandemic regulations, particularly vaccine mandates for cross-border travel, led to truck convoys in Alberta spreading eastward, eventually paralyzing Canada’s capital for nearly a month and closing border crossings.

The anger also upended the political landscape, paving the way for a small, socially conservative faction of the United Conservative Party to install the current prime minister and party leader, Danielle Smith, 52, a far-right former newspaper columnist and radio presenter.

After becoming prime minister last October, she stated that the unvaccinated were the “most discriminated against group” she had seen in her lifetime and in May a video surfaced comparing her to people who chose to get vaccinated followers of Hitler.

In a province with a large and long-standing Ukrainian community, she suggested that some parts of Ukraine could “feel more affinity with Russiaand should divorce. One of her first legislative acts was to sign a law that she claimed she would sign allows Alberta to ignore federal laws.

And Ms. Smith broke ethical laws by intervening on behalf of a prominent protester facing persecution. Last week, the county’s ethics commissioner found she had violated conflict of interest laws when she spoke to her attorney general on behalf of a pastor facing criminal charges for inciting a border blockade as part of the protests.

“If you look at the public opinion data from pre-Covid, during Covid and whatever this period is right now; there is something different in the water in Alberta from a cultural-political perspective,” said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, the province’s largest city.

That difference could also surface in the next federal election.

Canada’s Conservatives will challenge Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party in elections due to be held by October 2025.

The federal Conservative Party also replaced its leader during the pandemic with a belligerent right-wing politician, Pierre Poilièvre, who welcomed truck convoy protesters to Ottawa, the capital, with coffee and donuts and who shares Mrs. Smith’s penchant for provocative rhetoric.

On Monday, Alberta voters will have a stark choice between the United Conservatives and the New Democrats, or NDP, who ruled Alberta from 2015 to 2019.

The NDP then gained power from Conservatives, who had led Alberta from 1935 to 2015, using divisions among Conservatives to narrowly win a stunning victory. They installed Rachel Notley, a union lawyer, but her approval ratings plummeted as oil prices plummeted, decimating the county’s budget. In 2019, the party lost power.

Ms Notley, 59, is again representing the NDP in this election. During campaign stops, she portrays Ms. Smith as unpredictable and promotes ideas that most voters would reject, such as selling public hospitals to a for-profit company or making patients pay for public hospitals – both of which are considered politically toxic in Canada.

“This election is about leadership and confidence,” Ms. Notley said at a campaign rally in Calgary. “Albertans don’t have much confidence that they can count on her to protect our healthcare system. ”

Ms Notley said she plans to expand transit lines and build new schools and hospitals.

For her part, Ms Smith is warning voters that Ms Notley’s party is determined to spend money that will inevitably lead to higher taxes.

Mrs. Smith promises crime reduction and tax cuts. She also looks to the United States to define her conservative values, calling Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has just announced his entry into the Republican presidential primary, “my hero.”

During a debate between the leaders of the two parties, Mrs Smith tried to focus on Mrs Notley’s performance as Prime Minister.

“Mrs. Notley likes to show grainy videos of things I said while I was on the radio and the reason she does that is she doesn’t want to play on her record,” Ms. Smith said. wants to run her record is that it was an absolute disaster.”

To become prime minister again, Ms Notley would need to see her party win the most seats on Monday. Her hopes depend largely on how well her party will perform in Calgary, which has historically been a fickle base of support for the left, according to Janet Brown, the head of a Calgary-based polling firm. The New Democrats are already firmly in the lead in Edmonton, the province’s capital, and one of their traditional bases, according to surveys.

“I’m not ruling out any possible outcome,” she said.

A decisive factor, she said, may be Calgary’s large and rapidly growing ethnic communities.

In a sprawling community center in a Calgary neighborhood home to many South Asian immigrants, Rishi Nagar, the host of a local Punjabi morning radio show, said the United Conservatives had already alienated many South Asian voters before Ms Smith became leader.

Her predecessor, Jason Kenney, appeared on his program and suggested that the high numbers of Covid infections in South Asian communities were a result of their non-compliance with public health restrictions, even as Mr Nagar and others pointed out community leaders insisted they worked jobs that exposed them to the virus.

“We are the people who sit at the supermarket checkouts,” he said. “We are the people who drive taxis. We are the people who drive buses. Don’t you think this is the reason for the spread?”

He said many South Asian voters trust Ms Notley to spend more money on schools and health care, even though her party is more left-wing than many of them. Voters may not embrace her party, “but people like Rachel Notley,” he said. “People don’t like Danielle Smith.”

Mrs. Smith still has support in rural Alberta.

At a junior high school event at the rodeo grounds in High River, Alberta, Mrs. Smith’s hometown, Frank McInenly, a retired auctioneer, said he had little need for public health measures and was only vaccinated so he could vacation in the United States .

“The whole Covid thing with these people walking around with these masks on, how stupid was that?” he said.

While Mr. McInenly will go on for a long time about what he considers Mrs. Notley’s shortcomings, he isn’t particularly enthusiastic about Mrs. Smith.

“She’s fine,” he said.

More than anything, Mr. McInenly’s vote reflects his desire to keep the New Democrats out of power. “It’s really scary,” he said. “Because if the NDP comes in again, we’re done.”