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“I was already a bit tired and a bit grumpy, so when I got back to my hotel room around nine o’clock, I called my husband and told him about the last poll.” While she downloaded her concerns, her fatigue spread through the line as Lou Arab, her husband and closest confidant, quickly absorbed that this election would change history.

Notley continued, “We don’t appear to be doing any transition planning yet,” but Arab quickly stopped her and said, “Call your campaign manager.”

She immediately phoned Gerry Scott with her pressing plea. “This is actually going to happen. And every free moment over the next six to eight days has to be focused on transition. We’ve done nothing and we’re not ready,” she told him forcefully.

Photo by Crystal Schick / Calgary Herald

As Notley looks back, she doesn’t recall ever being frightened. “I was just urgent. If urgency can be a sentiment, it was just urgency.” She knew, as she settled into the notion of an NDP government, that she wasn’t stranded in a political wilderness. “Part of it was sitting down and talking to key people to sort of map out the architecture of this.” After all, they had the brain trust of past NDP governments from across the country.

Brian Topp, now Notley’s chief of staff, recalled how the team was “quite sobered with the implications. We were tackling a big job taking on the government of Alberta basically from a standing start.” The reality for more than 40 years had been that the PCs owned Alberta. But the man who first made that happen, and watched his PCs log 12 straight victories, never expected them to outlast the Roman Empire.