To say half the population was jubilant over the results of the Alberta election may be an understatement. As o ne oilfield engineer living in Calgary said , “The nightmare is over.” That summed up a popular feeling.

To say half the population was jubilant over the results of the Alberta election may be an understatement. As one oilfield engineer living in Calgary said, “The nightmare is over.” That summed up a popular feeling.

The vote was a highly emotional reaction to fear and frustration over low oil and gas prices and continued obstruction of new pipelines. The provincial government can do very little about either. Voting for change was a way of blowing off fear and anger.

Will all the people celebrating the return of real Albertans to government be happy a year or two from now? The record suggests not. Frustration and anger form the common thread in Alberta political history.

Many who voted for Jason Kenney and the United Conservative Party had rebelled against old Conservative parties by turning to the Western Canada Concept, then Reform, and then Wildrose.

And every time a federal government has taken a big risk to build the energy industry — the TransCanada pipeline in 1956, the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement in 1988, the revision of the tax regime for the oilsands in 1996 — unhappy Albertans “rewarded” that government by electing more opposition MPs in the next election.

How long will it take for the chronically aggrieved to get fed up with Kenney and the UCP?

We learned a few things from the election.

In 1993, voters fearful about budget deficits were offered a choice between “brutal cuts” and “massive cuts” to provincial spending. This time around voters had a choice between ending deficits in 2023 or 2024. Kenney even felt the need to deny that holding the line on some spending — which means a real cut after adjusting for inflation — would be a cut. Alberta voters have little appetite for austerity.

We also saw the economy trump the usual importance of party leaders.

Rachel Notley outpolled Kenney on favourability ratings. She even drew reluctant praise from some Conservative supporters for honesty and intelligence. Albertans now have a premier whose defining characteristic seems to be sneakiness, who likes to tell others how to live, and who rails against “socialism” while contriving to spend his entire adult life avoiding real jobs in favour of political work, usually with his paycheques funded by taxation.

What can we expect now? Both what was advertised and what was not.

The province has no real say in the Trans Mountain pipeline decision, and Ottawa has amply demonstrated that it wants to go ahead with construction. Kenney accepted that reality by trading in his fiery pipeline rhetoric two days after the election in favour of the patient diplomacy Notley had been practising. She was much criticized for it; he was praised.

The election could, however, strengthen the already considerable calls for drastic amendments to federal Bill C-69, which would create a new framework for assessment of major resource projects.

The UCP plainly signalled lower taxes and less regulation for energy firms and other businesses. Putting more money into the treasuries of energy firms is the one way the Alberta government can directly help them.

The UCP will cut taxes for high-income earners. Its first step will be ending the provincial carbon tax. Because rebates for the carbon tax are directed to low- and middle-income earners, ending the tax in effect puts more money into the hands of high-income earners.

Similarly, any privatization of health, education and infrastructure construction will add private costs that higher-income earners can bear more easily.

Plans are afoot for a new economic diversification push. The Lougheed government released a big paper on science and technology in 1983. Economic diversification strategies followed at the rate of about one every five years after that. We’ll see how it goes.

Ideology will be important. Kenney quickly announced cancellation of the Edmonton public laboratory project in favour of a private lab. Will the entire plan for integrated province-wide lab services now go private?

Parties may draw lessons from the NDP’s strategic failures. The New Democrats froze public-sector salaries but never talked much about that achievement, possibly out of fear that unions might view doing so as gloating at their expense. Notley built a good reputation but became a one-person show.

The government also failed to talk purposefully about its financial and economic policies. Instead, it got bogged down letting itself get pictured for the last two years as the defender of “gay-straight alliances” in schools.

But in the end, the election was a conscious attempt to return to old times.

Scott Fitzgerald wrote a great novel in which Jay Gatsby, yearning to win back a lost love, cries out in a tone of incredulity, “Can’t repeat the past? … Why of course you can.”

He was wrong — unless you take the fatally ironic view that he was right and his mistake lay in expecting a different outcome.