There are times I suspect that none of the business of elections really matters. None of the polls or advertisements or debates, that when election comes the result will be decided solely by the price of gas.
Certainly I’m not the first person to think this, but an interesting case has developed in Alberta over the past months. Alberta is an oil exporter, and with cheap gas they are having a very bad year. It happens to also be an election year. So this might be an inversion of the usual effect: cheap gas leading to the downfall of the government.
Alberta has been under Conservative rule for a generation. Longer, really, at 44 years. In the election tomorrow there will be lots of new voters whose grandparents were too young to vote the last time the Conservatives were the opposition. The pollsters are saying the Conservatives are out, to be replaced by an NDP minority.
I don’t know how likely this is… Canadian provincial elections have been plagued by inaccurate polling for years, sometimes as a result of people switching from landlines to cell phones, sometimes as a result of overcompensating for that first effect, sometimes due to lack of pollster’s resources, and sometimes it’s just a mystery.
It will be interesting to see what happens tomorrow. Unless a hundred thousand oil workers get their jobs back today, it seems just barely possible.
I don't know if anyone knows what a less conservative Alberta would look like. I guess we should ask some seniors.
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