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Some people have characterized this election as a sort of zombie war between old Progressive Conservative identities: Peter Lougheed (well-bred ’70s industrial-planning technocrat) and Ralph Klein (unruly populist budget-slasher). This isn’t quite how things worked out. Which makes sense, since Rachel Notley’s father was Peter Lougheed’s greatest domestic adversary and Jason Kenney (as young mouthpiece of the Taxpayers Federation) was arguably one of Klein’s.

The Notley policy of building subsidized oil refining and reprocessing capacity in Alberta to buy homegrown jobs is certainly a Lougheed throwback, but up until the election it remained more ambition than reality. Kenney’s UCP campaign took cuts to core areas of government off the table explicitly. Klein’s style was to apply an axe unapologetically, although public-sector workers suspicious of Kenney and the UCP might recall that the Tories ran to the left of the Alberta Liberals on deficits in 1993.

It was a strange election. The damaged Alberta economy is at the top of everyone's mind, and yet economic management played little explicit role in the campaign

(Klein wasn’t much of a theorist, and when he got elected he found that his smartest caucus members were hawkish, that influential deficit crusaders like Kenney were circling outside government, and that elements of the civil service were surprisingly keen to point out budget fat. If Kenney ends up being the same kind of instinctive, intellectually vulnerable leader as Klein, that would be the biggest surprise of all.)

In any event, the 2019 campaigning ended up being about emotional stances above all — almost as if Alberta politics had been captured by a clique of spin doctors from every corner of Confederation, resulting in a general, unstoppable outbreak of furious tarantism. Kenney put policy in the background and proposed to fight Ottawa with an array of comic-opera methods. (You’ve tried the Marxists, now vote for the Groucho Marxists.) Notley campaigned on her winning personality while overseeing a personally vicious campaign operation, hoping voters would ignore or excuse her economic track record.