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Now, the odds of Notley sticking around if she loses have got to be low. Almost no leader who once held power lingers afterward to try for it again, and when they do, they almost never succeed. John Diefenbaker and John Turner tried it federally, and never won power again. Robert Bourassa had to wander in the wilderness for seven years after his Liberal party lost the 1976 provincial election to the Parti Québécois before he returned to lead his party again to victory in 1985. And as Pierre Trudeau biographer Bob Plamondon notes, PET was just lucky that his resignation from the federal Liberals was still fresh enough, with no leader yet to replace him, when Joe Clark’s PC government unexpectedly fell, that Trudeau was able to return to lead the Liberals again to victory.

Notley may just end up being the best opposition leader the province has had in a generation

For Notley, there have got to be better alternatives than returning to the leadership of Alberta’s opposition. Polls do suggest that with her NDP poised to hang on to perhaps two dozen or so seats out of 87 it would be the most potent opposition that Albertans have seen since 1993, save for the current United Conservative Party opposition, which was able to combine most of the Wildrose and PC seats, totalling 25. In between, opposition parties in Alberta usually amounted to not much more than a handful of MLAs.

As of Wednesday, Alberta could be a rather lively two-party democracy, and Notley, as one of the NDP’s strongest performers even before she became premier, would be just the kind of Opposition leader that could effectively hold government to account. One senior member of the Kenney team even confided that it would be better for them if someone did. Without an effective opposition, he said, governments lose their hunger and grow complacent, while the government ends up bedevilled by internal intrigues like infiltration and leadership rivals. These things led to the eventual collapse of the hegemonic Alberta Progressive Conservative dynasty.