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Hadn’t he promised to make the sorts of deep cuts in spending that her party — her former party, that is — had always stood for, and that Alberta, in its current fiscal straits, required? Hadn’t he demonstrated, in his short time in office, that he was a different kind of Progressive Conservative leader, that he would make a clean break with the old ways of the 43-year-old governing dynasty, the kind that had brought it into such low repute — so low, in fact, that it had very nearly given way to Ms. Smith’s Wildroseans, in the election just two years before? What was an opposition leader to do in such an unprecedented situation?

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So you see, she hadn’t put power before principle. He’d put principle into power. Not only would it be wrong of her to oppose such a man, with such a plan — to be anywhere but by his side, helping him to implement it: that would be a betrayal. If that meant ditching the party she’d helped to build, abandoning the people who’d helped her to build it, starting all over again as a lowly government backbencher, well, do you think she did all this lightly? For such a trivial thing as personal gain? You think she didn’t know what sorts of unkind things people would say — were saying — about her? But she did it all for the common good.

Well, anyway, I imagine that was the sort of thing she and her fellow expats had told themselves after taking that fateful walk on the unWild side. It wasn’t that they’d been spooked by some bad polls and a few inclement by-election results. They hadn’t panicked in the face of an incoming premier enjoying the inevitable honeymoon with the voters. Not at all. They had merely realized that now was not the time to oppose. Now was the time for all good Albertans, or certainly all conservative Albertans, to come to the aid of the party. Even after her aides reportedly shouted at her, like kids in a movie theatre, “Don’t do it — it’s a trap!” Ms. Smith resolutely went ahead and did it, smiling the smile of the innocent.