You get one time around, one roll of the dice, one walk through the garden, one quick look at life. –Michelle Wright
The words of Michelle Wright's love song apply to the unique pattern of Alberta politics. No political party in the province, once turned out of office, has ever come back for a second time around. The Liberals won the first election in 1905 and governed until defeated by the United Farmers of Alberta in 1921. Then Social Credit defeated the United Farmers in 1935. The Progressive Conservatives, who had completely disappeared before being reborn under Peter Lougheed, defeated Social Credit in 1971. And that's all she wrote – at least until recently, when it's started to look as if the Conservatives may be replaced by the upstart Wildrose Alliance Party.
There has never been alternation in office in Alberta, unlike in several other provinces where the Liberals and Conservatives take turns governing. In Alberta, one party governs for a long stretch (36 years for Social Credit, 39 and counting for the Conservatives), then is obliterated by a new party without governing experience.
Explaining this unusual pattern is a cottage industry in Canadian political science. The redoubtable C.B. Macpherson propounded a Marxist theory, but it didn't work because it failed to explain the differences between Alberta and Saskatchewan. My view is that Alberta's singularity is best explained through reference to settlement patterns and political culture, combined with historical accident and path dependency (political science jargon meaning that “one thing leads to another”).
THE AMERICAN INFLUENCE
From the very first settlement, Alberta has been unique in the extent of American influence, especially in the southern part of the province. The early white settlers were ranchers from Montana. Their numbers were later augmented by Mormon farmers and still later by oil-industry workers from across the western states, an influence that continues to this day.
These American immigrants were numerous enough to create a political culture with no particular reverence for the standard Canadian political brands – Liberal and Conservative – inherited from Britain. On the dry and windy plains of southern Alberta, few cared about Gilbert and Sullivan's theory: That every boy and every gal/ That's born into the world alive/ Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative!
The strong American influence in southern Alberta furnished ideal soil for the growth of new political options, neither Liberal nor Conservative: Progressivism, whose Alberta provincial wing was the United Farmers; the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, founded in Calgary in 1932 as an outgrowth of Progressivism; Alberta Social Credit, established by the Calgary radio evangelist William Aberhart; the various parties of Alberta separatism; Preston Manning's Reform Party of Canada; Mel Hurtig's National Party; the Wildrose Alliance. And that is by no means a complete list.
There was a moment when Alberta almost broke with its past to adopt the more common Canadian norm of Liberal-Conservative competition. That was in the early 1990s, when Don Getty's Conservatives got into deep trouble over spiralling budget deficits. Liberal leader Laurence Decore, a former mayor of Edmonton, repositioned his party to the right of Mr. Getty's Conservatives, promising brutal budget cuts to banish the deficit.
Mr. Decore and the Liberals would have won the 1993 election, had the Conservatives not dumped Mr. Getty and chosen former Calgary mayor Ralph Klein to lead them. As it was, the election was close, and it seemed that a new era of Conservative-Liberal competition had arrived. But the Liberals, disappointed at not winning, forced out Mr. Decore. He was followed by a series of Liberal leaders with no idea of how to win.
