Weekly Writ 6/19: What to watch in Alberta's byelections
Benchmarks for the trio of byelections on Monday. Plus, the PLQ gets a boost with Pablo Rodriguez.
Welcome to the Weekly Writ, a round-up of the latest federal and provincial polls, election news and political history that lands in your inbox every Thursday morning.
Three provincial byelections are being held in Alberta on Monday. In all three of them, a victory by anything other than the incumbent parties would be an upset. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be some things to watch as the results come in.
There are some benchmarks we can set as guide posts for the state of Alberta politics just two years after the last election and two years before the next one (barring an early call, which isn’t out of the realm of possibility). As the province flirts with the notion of a referendum on independence, these byelections come at a key time.
So, let’s set those benchmarks.
We’ll start with Edmonton-Strathcona, the former seat of Rachel Notley and the riding that NDP leader Naheed Nenshi has chosen for his entry into the legislature. This is the safest NDP seat in the province and was won by Notley in 2023 with 80% of the vote.
It’s inevitable that there will be a drop in support for the New Democrats as Nenshi is subbed-in for Notley. The daughter of a former party leader, Notley had been the MLA for this riding since 2008. Her roots were deep and her popularity in Edmonton was wide. Nenshi, the former mayor of Calgary, doesn’t have the same roots. But he is the leader of the Alberta NDP in the party’s safest seat.
I'm setting the benchmark for Nenshi at 72%. That was the number Notley managed in the 2019 election, her worst result in the riding over the last three elections in which the New Democrats were a contender for power. The NDP won just 24 seats in 2019, so a result that is lower than 72% for Nenshi wouldn’t bode well for the party’s future chances. He needs to at least clear the bar of what was the NDP’s worst election since it was elevated from a minor to a major party.
The closest contest of these three byelections is probably Edmonton-Ellerslie, which the NDP nevertheless won by 24.8 points in the 2023. Located in southeastern Edmonton, the NDP has held this seat since 2015. Losing it would be a disaster, but the polls do not suggest that the New Democrats have fallen far enough in Edmonton that this seat would be at risk. Byelections can be odd ducks, though, so the NDP shouldn’t take this seat for granted.
But there are more vulnerable ridings for the NDP in Edmonton, the city the party swept in both 2015 and 2023 (and came one seat shy of sweeping in 2019). The most vulnerable is Edmonton-Decore in the north, which the NDP won by just over 11 points in the last election.
The party needs to sweep Edmonton to have a hope of forming government, so we can use Edmonton-Ellerslie as a barometer of the party’s chances of pulling off another sweep. That makes the benchmark a margin of victory of at least 14 points in Edmonton-Ellerslie. If the NDP wins Edmonton-Ellerslie by more than 14 points, that would suggest they are on pace to sweep Edmonton again. If they win it by less than 14 points, then they might not be in a position to sweep the provincial capital.
Perhaps the most interesting of the three byelections is Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills, a rural riding located just north of Calgary. The United Conservatives won this with 75% of the vote in the last election, so it isn’t exactly a swing seat. But Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills is the historic heartland of the Alberta separatist movement. It is the only riding in all of Western Canada in which a separatist candidate has ever won an election. That happened in a 1982 provincial byelection when the Western Canada Concept scored an upset victory against Peter Lougheed’s PCs.
These days, the Alberta Republicans are trying to be the main standard bearer of the independence movement. The number to watch in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills is the score the Republican Party will put on the board.
We could set a couple of benchmarks for them. The minimum would be to do better than the 4.7% managed by the Independence Party of Alberta in this riding in the 2023 provincial election. If the Republicans can’t beat that number when independence is in the headlines, they have little hope of becoming the standard bearer they want to be.
A more ambitious threshold would be around the 30% support for independence that polls are picking up in Alberta. Simply put, if the Republicans are supposed to be the separatist party in Alberta, they should be able to approach the support for separatism in Alberta.
For the United Conservatives, a benchmark for them in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills should be at least 70% of the vote. While the UCP is not in any real danger of losing its rural strongholds, a score below 70% could signal broader problems for the party. The last time its constituent parts managed less than a combined 70% share of the vote in this part of the province was in 1993, the election in which the Progressive Conservative dynasty came closest to defeat until it finally fell in 2015.
Another thing to watch will be the results for the Liberals. They did not run any candidates in these ridings in the last election (one indication, among many, of how moribund this party has become) but do have names on the ballot in the two Edmonton contests. The Liberals have put up a few points on the board in recent polls, so these byelections can act as a small test of whether that is real support or if it is just an echo of Mark Carney’s Liberals, who just won their highest share of the vote in Alberta since 1968.
These three byelections are not a microcosm of the province as a whole. On average, the NDP took 53% of the vote in these three ridings in 2023, beating the UCP by about 10 percentage points. But we can use that average result as another gauge for where things stand in Alberta. If the UCP closes that gap, then it would suggest they are in a stronger position than they were in 2023, when they won a solid majority. If the NDP widens that gap, then the UCP might be more vulnerable than recent surveys suggest.
The polls will close on Monday at 8 PM local time. I’ll dissect the results in next week’s edition of the newsletter.
Until then, here is what’s in this week’s instalment of the Weekly Writ:
Pablo Rodriguez avoids an upset to win the Quebec Liberal leadership, plus we now know when Pierre Poilievre will face a leadership vote, B.C. has a new party and the Yukon Liberals pick a premier.
We’ve got oodles of provincial polls with new numbers from most provinces. Who’s at the top and who isn’t?
#EveryElectionProject: The Conservatives get wiped out in the 1934 Saskatchewan election.
Upcoming milestone for Claudia Chender.
NEWS AND ANALYSIS
Pablo Rodriguez wins PLQ leadership
Former Liberal MP Pablo Rodriguez won the Quebec Liberal leadership on the weekend, though he was nearly toppled by a political rookie.