Looking back to Alberta’s first PC Premier, Peter Lougheed, is inevitable. Both Lougheed and Notley undermined an established but aging party with a lacklustre leader. Both were themselves charismatic leaders who led their parties to their first victory by virtue of their face and name. Both the PCs and the NDP offered fresh, young new MLAs with little experience in government. Yet some today wonder if the NDP MPs are a bit too inexperienced. Certainly, Lougheed’s party was not quite as untested as the current NDP government under Rachel Notley.

But taken as two moments in time, the comparison between 1971 and 2015 is a compelling one. “Everyone takes for granted that Social Credit is doing well,” Peter Lougheed declared in 1965 after winning the PC leadership, “nobody knows, however, how well they are really doing.” Lougheed took a moribund provincial party that had withered on the vine next to Alberta’s Social Credit government, and created the longest-serving government in Canadian history. On August 23 2014, the PCs had been in power for 15,688 days and surpassed the previous record holder, Nova Scotia Liberals who had governed from 1882 to 1925 (followed closely by Ontario’s PCs with 15,289 days from 1943 to 1985). In fourth place was the party that Lougheed destroyed, the Social Credit Party who governed Alberta from 1935 to 1971 for 13,156 days. From 1943 to 1968, they were led by Ernest Manning (father of Preston) and were as popular as ever.

Today, many causally remember the reason for the SoCreds’ 1971 loss: a diversifying population that was increasingly urban and upper middle class, not rural and lower middle class. The Social Credit Party just didn’t change enough for a new generation of Albertans that did not remember the Great Depression of the 1930s and grew up in a city, not on the farm. Yet, none predicted the Peter Lougheed’s majority government in 1971 despite how “obvious” it seems to us today. Understated is Lougheed’s own role in forging a new PC party and winning over Albertans.

In 1965, no one knew that the lawyer Peter Lougheed would become one of the best Premiers in Canadian history. Then, he was a young lawyer and grandson of Albertan politician James Lougheed and faced with revitalizing a dead party. The Alberta PCs had never been in government, and their best showing had been in 1917 when they won 19 out of 58 seats. Since then they had languished and didn’t even have candidates in some ridings for the half-century until Lougheed became Party Leader. Lougheed immediately set out on the path to power. He established “guideposts” for the PCs, outlining exactly what policies and positions a PC government would take and distinguishing themselves (but not too much) from the ruling SoCreds. The Lougheed PCs were still conservative, he reminded Albertans, but they were also progressive. Change was not a bad thing.

Lougheed gathered the reins of power in the party around himself, pushing out older uninspired members to make way for new and ambitious ones (including briefly a young Joe Clark). His first and only campaign against Ernest Manning in the 1967 election was not meant to be a breakthrough – Lougheed wanted to win in his own riding of Calgary West (the first time a Conservative leader had won their own seat since 1917), and emphasize that the PCs were a reasonable alternative to the Social Credit Party. It worked. Lougheed secured his seat while the PCs won 26% of the popular vote, and though that translated to only six seats in the 65-seat legislature, but it made them the Official Opposition.