EDMONTON - After four decades of Conservative rule, Albertans on Tuesday handed a landslide victory to Rachel Notley’s NDP, shattering the Tory dynasty and leading many to wonder: How did this happen? In the days leading up to the election, even the most seasoned political observers refused to call it for the NDP, despite overwhelming public opinion polls, packed NDP political rallies and a sea of orange campaign signs across the province. This was partly because the polls proved so wrong in the 2012 election and partly because it was impossible to guess what voters in key battlegrounds like Calgary would do. Mainly, though, it was because nobody could believe they were about to witness the death of a dynasty. And it was a spectacular demise. The NDP won a solid 53-seat majority. The Wildrose will form the official Opposition with 21 seats. The Conservatives have been reduced to 10 seats. One seat is undecided because of a tie. One is now vacant following the resignation Tuesday of leader and former premier Jim Prentice. The Liberals and Alberta Party have one seat apiece. Alberta has a radically different government. Now, the post-mortem begins. “This was not about 2015,” Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt said. “This was about the last 10 years of Alberta politics all catching up to them.” The stunning collapse can be traced to 2007, when then-Premier Ed Stelmach called a controversial royalty review into the energy sector. The expert panel concluded Albertans weren’t getting their “fair share” from energy development and recommended an increase in royalty rates. Alberta’s oilpatch was outraged. Stelmach ignored the concerns and hiked rates in January 2009, the peak of the global recession. Angry oil companies poured money into the upstart Wildrose. Donations skyrocketed from $230,000 in 2009 to $2.7 million in 2011. The party elected Danielle Smith as leader: A smart, telegenic libertarian with a storied work ethic and a sharp tongue. By late 2010, she had the Wildrose leading the Tories in rural Alberta. With a credible alternative entering from the right, Stelmach’s caucus cracked over a proposed deficit budget and he resigned in early January 2011, making way for Alberta’s fifth consecutive Conservative Premier — Alison Redford. Smith famously lost to Redford in the spring 2012 provincial election, but her extraordinary opposition set the stage for dynastic ruin by creating an unshakable narrative of Tory entitlement and corruption that would ultimately trigger the NDP’s landslide. “They dodged the bullet in 2012, but the root causes were still there, and in fact continued,” Bratt said. “Redford pulled this rabbit out of the hat and it got worse.” Before the 2012 election, Smith hammered the Tories over the so-called “no-meet” committee — which never met but paid MLAs $1,000 a month — and over multimillion-dollar severance payments for politicians. After the election, with 17 seats in the legislature and the research staff that came with them, the Wildrose broke or leveraged scandal after scandal, from plans for a so-called “skypalace” atop Edmonton’s renovated Federal Building, to lavish international travel and high staff salaries.

In the “tobaccogate” affair, Redford was accused of hiring her ex-husband’s law group to fight Alberta’s $10-billion lawsuit against big tobacco — a job that could come with a multibillion-dollar payday. The Tories were accused of hiding the deaths of children in care, of cruelly closing a home for Albertans with disabilities, of using political influence to help friends jump to the top of health-care waiting lists. One Tory MLA pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitutes while on government business. Day after day, year after year, Smith’s Wildrose — aided by the smaller opposition parties — fuelled the corruption narrative with every bit of bad news. Time after time, Tories fumbled the public relations ball, dodging responsibility for multiple news cycles until public pressure forced a reckoning. Both the chief electoral officer and the ethics commissioner investigated alleged illegal donations, including a $430,000 “bulk donation” from a company controlled by Edmonton billionaire and Oilers owner Daryl Katz. There was the billion-dollar sole-source contracts debacle, headlined by Tory-connected communications firm Navigator. (The principal of that firm, Randy Dawson, would go on to run Prentice’s 2015 election campaign.) The Redford government took on the unions, with attempts to restrict the right to strike, force binding arbitration on salary negotiations and reform pensions. Unions took them to court and won. In late 2013, Redford spent $45,000 to fly to Nelson Mandela’s funeral in South Africa, a price tag that included a private $10,000 charter home to swear in her new cabinet — money she only paid back under threat of caucus revolt. Ultimately, her international travel and controversial use of Alberta’s taxpayer-funded fleet of airplanes triggered an auditor’s investigation that condemned both Redford and her administration. He blamed it on the Tory premier’s “aura of power.” By the time Redford stepped down in March 2014, the script for the party’s downfall was largely written. Through sheer force of repetition, Albertans had begun to believe that Peter Lougheed’s natural governing party was corrupt, entitled and in need of a good, clean sweep. Jim Prentice knew this when he inherited the mantle on Sept. 6, 2014. That’s why he immediately shuttered the provincial airline and sold off the fleet, reopened the home for the disabled and passed a Government Accountability Act, proclaiming all the while that Alberta was under “new management.” He swept the four byelections, installing two hand-picked allies into key cabinet posts. Then, things started to unravel. Prentice wildly misjudged Albertans by introducing Bill 10, which would have forced high school kids to fight school boards in court for the right to form gay-straight alliances, or be segregated in meetings off school property. He welcomed 11 Wildrose floor-crossers into his caucus, including leader Danielle Smith, routing his opposition and consolidating his hold on power. It would be months before political observers would fully understand the implications of this political checkmate, but it was immediately apparent that Albertans, newly accustomed to a vigorous opposition, were not too pleased at its dismantling. “Prentice failed to understand the significance of Wildrose to Albertans,” Bratt said. “To voters, that opposition represented the only real check on the PCs’ ancient, entrenched and far-reaching power base.

The Wildrose “defection was seen as opportunistic and underhanded. Further, the move alienated the left-leaning coalition that came together to vote PC in 2012 to keep Wildrose out of power.” Prentice went on to unilaterally overturn a funding decision by an independent legislative committee and cut the budget for investigating deaths of children in care. A Calgary Herald investigation revealed the Tories inked a secret, multimillion-dollar deal to fix a mountain golf course operated by party insiders. As oil prices continued their precipitous slide, Prentice started warning Albertans that tough times were coming. On March 4, he told CBC radio host Donna McElligot that: “In terms of who is responsible, we need only look in the mirror. “Basically, all of us have had the best of everything and have not had to pay for what it costs.” Infuriated Albertans ravaged the new premier, pointing out the Tories had governed for four decades and set nothing aside from our energy wealth for a rainy day. The spring budget, tabled March 26, would become Prentice’s election platform and his undoing. The plan, which wasn’t passed before the election was called, collected $1.5 billion in additional taxes from Albertans’ wallets with a new and unpopular health-care premium, 59 tax and fee hikes on everything from cigarettes to birth certificates, and a new progressive income tax on the wealthy. Still, it forecast a record $5-billion deficit. Crucially, Prentice refused to raise corporate tax rates, despite a government survey that showed the vast majority of Albertans wanted corporations taxed at a higher rate, too. Then he called an election a year early. While he did not break the letter of the law the government had passed a short time before, he certainly broke the spirit of it. It was a decision Prentice stood by, even after the party suffered a massive defeat Tuesday. “Neither I nor the government I led were elected to make the tough choices and tough decisions that were required by our current circumstances,” he said. The Tory nomination process that followed was blighted by scandal. One candidate was accused of offering a $10,000 bribe, launched a million-dollar defamation law suit and is now the subject of a criminal investigation. Another would-be nominee launched a separate defamation suit after he was punted from a nomination race. Text messages released in the final week of the campaign revealed the sitting justice minister knew a third candidate was being “set up” for failure. The candidate, Jamie Lall, was ousted from the race. There were recounts, parachuted candidates and high-profile resignations of the former party president and veteran volunteers during the nomination process. The campaign did not go well. The Wildrose, with newly minted Leader Brian Jean at the helm, was supposed to be decimated, but polls immediately showed the party remained strong in rural Alberta and the south. So too Rachel Notley’s NDP, which appeared to have Edmonton sewn up as early as the first week of the campaign. Boxed in by the pledge to run on the budget, the Tories had little flexibility. Much of their plan had already been announced. Prentice’s early message — that both Jean and Notley were extremists — was quickly shelved in favour of an attack on the NDP.