Alberta’s vote will test American-style far-right politics

The news

Voters in Alberta, the epicenter of conservative politics in Canada, will elect a new provincial government on Monday.

Before the pandemic, the ruling United Conservative Party seemed firmly in control. But last year, big and angry demonstrations against pandemic restrictions and against vaccine mandates helped spark a truck convoy across the province.

The convoy spread eastward, paralyzing Canada’s capital, Ottawa, and blocking vital crossings with the United States, including a bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, disrupting billions of dollars in trade.

A small group of social conservatives within the United Conservatives ousted their leader, Jason Kenney, who ended his premiership after the government refused to lift pandemic measures.

The party replaced Mr Kenney with Danielle Smith, a far-right former radio talk show host and columnist prone to inflammatory remarks; she compared people vaccinated against Covid-19 to followers of Hitler.

Ms. Smith also likes to praise right-wing American politicians, for example calling Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican running for president, her hero.

She has also floated ideas that most Canadians would never support, such as charging for public health care.

Ms Smith is now, analysts say, well to the right of many Conservative loyalists, turning what should have been an almost certain victory for her party into a close race that has opened up an opening for their opponents, the New Democratic Party, a leftist party.

“This wouldn’t be an exciting race if someone other than Danielle Smith ran the UCP,” said Janet Brown, who runs a polling station in Calgary, Alberta’s largest city.

The labor-backed New Democrats are led by Rachel Notley, a lawyer, who has been trying to lead the party to a second landslide victory in the province in recent years.

In 2015, she led the New Democrats to power for the first time in Alberta history, helped in part by the breakup of the conservative movement into two feuding factions.

The stunning victory broke a series of conservative governments from the Great Depression era. But her victory coincided with a collapse in oil prices that collapsed the province’s economy. Ms Notley’s approval ratings plummeted and the United Conservatives took over in 2019.

The background

Albertans vote for local representatives in the provincial legislature and the party that wins the most seats forms the government, with the leader becoming prime minister.

Ms. Smith’s support is based largely on the province’s rural areas, surveys show, while Ms. Notley’s road to victory is likely to run through Alberta’s urban centers, including its two largest cities, Edmonton and Calgary.

Edmonton, the county seat and a city with a large union presence, is likely to support the new Democrats.

That could make Calgary, which tends to be more conservative, a deciding factor. Calgary also has a growing ethnic population, particularly immigrants from South Asia, and Ms Smith’s is unpopular with many of those voters because of some of her extreme statements.

Why it matters

If Ms Smith’s conservatism fails to return her party to office in Canada’s most conservative province, Canada’s federal Conservative Party may have to rethink its strategy as it prepares to take on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party in the next national election.

The federal Conservatives also replaced the party’s leader during the pandemic with a belligerent right-wing politician, Pierre Poilièvre, who welcomed truck convoy protesters to Ottawa, the capital, with coffee and doughnuts. Mr. Poilièvre shares Mrs. Smith’s penchant for promoting provocative points of view.

Even a narrow win for Mrs. Smith could actually be a loss, if it means fewer conservative seats in the provincial legislature, said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

In that scenario, Ms Smith could find her position as prime minister and party leader tenuous and many of the policies she promotes could be pushed aside, he said.

“If she loses, she’s gone,” he said. “If she wins, I think she’s still gone.”