Editorial

Here we go again

Three elections in five months is a lot to endure, for those who aren’t fascinated by such things.
Slave Lakers might be campaigned-out, after leading the province in voter enthusiasm during the recent municipal election. But like it or not, the signs are already going up.
Speeches will be made, babies will be kissed. Who knows, maybe Premier Ralph Klein will even visit Slave Lake, which he does roughly once every four years to give his pal and cabinet colleague Pearl Calahasen a boost.
Ms. Calahasen hasn’t been in trouble in an election for a long time. Her closest races for the Lesser Slave Lake constituency were her early ones. That was back when Albertans in general were skeptical about the continued governance of the Progressive Conservative Party. Recall that the Liberals held as many as 38 seats a dozen or so years ago. They have five now, and the Tory resurgence is reflected in the local results. Calahasen smoked the Liberal challenger by about three to one in the 2001 election.
The Liberals under new leader Kevin Taft are talking big down in Edmonton. But they appear unprepared out here in the boonies. Handing Calahasen a huge head start is not the way to go about winning. No doubt the Libs will find their man or woman in Lesser Slave, but by then Calahasen will have visited half the communities in the riding. Without a credible local organization, the opposition probably doesn’t stand a chance.
Even when a party does have a candidate it’s tough to catch up to the incumbent. In 2001 Liberal Rick Noel bragged at the Slave Lake candidates forum that he’d put something like five or six thousand kilometres on his vehicle during the campaign.
“I put on 25,000,” retorted Calahasen.
That’s how it goes when you campaign against the party in power.
As for the New Democrats, they’ll be doing well if their candidate isn’t a student parachuted in from Edmonton. The ND effort in recent provincial elections has been poor, to say the least. The only way they could mount an effective challenge would be to nominate a popular local person. This they have failed to do again and again.
How about the Alberta Alliance though? The only party besides the Tories to announce a full slate of 83 candidates as of the end of last week, the Alliance might be the latest version of grassroots right-wingism to come out of nowhere to challenge the ruling party. The Tories ended decades of Social Credit rule in the early 1970s and the Socreds did the same thing in the 1930s.
Speaking of Social Credit, they are on the move, but also didn’t have a local candidate as of last week. If they do, he or she will probably only serve to divide the conservative anti-Klein vote (if there is such a thing).
Klein’s Tories will probably win another term, but there is always the possibility they won’t. As noted above, there is a long-standing tradition in this province of the populace deciding (by some mysterious process) that the ruling party has ruled long enough. When that happens, if it happens, it won’t matter how much money or power or how many more signs the Tory candidates have up.
In the meantime, Calahasen remains pretty popular and no one can complain about how hard she works to secure funding for local projects. She got into some hot water with oilpatch contractors in the last term, but that seems to have died down. It’s hard to imagine oilpatch people voting anything but Tory blue, but it could happen.
Calahasen works hard on the campaign trail too. It will be a huge challenge for anyone to keep up with her, let alone topple her from power on election day. But the latter is up to the people.