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Alberta’s Alison Redford may be the most notorious case of caucus regicide. Never too popular within the upper ranks of the province’s ever-ruling Progressive Conservative party, Ms. Redford’s haughty manner and disregard for the public purse took a simmering dissatisfaction among voters and added a flame. The result not only doomed her but threatened to end the party’s 43-year hold on the legislature. She wasn’t just forcibly retired, but all but run out of town on a rail.

In each of these cases, the ousted leader headed a party that had been in power for a lengthy term – a decade or more in every case, with Alberta, of course, in a class of its own. Ten years is a long time in politics, and each of the parties showed distinct signs of age: sloppiness, complacency, bad decision-making, arrogance. Mr. Campbell thought he could reject the harmonized sales tax before the election, and slip it through afterwards. Ms. Redford assumed she could run a deficit government while fiddling the accounting to make it look prosperous. (She also thought she could treat provincial aircraft as her private fleet.) Mr. McGuinty’s ability to disguise his latent cynicism had eroded through a series of expensive policy boondoggles.

Mr. Selinger is in a similar boat. The NDP has ruled Manitoba since 1999. Mr. Selinger succeeded the still-popular Gary Doer in 2009, and led the party to a record victory in 2011. The start of his downfall began just two years later when he increased the provincial sales tax and widened it to cover more items, breaking a campaign promise. If the resultant grumbling had died down over time, he might have been fine, but it didn’t. By last fall alarm within caucus – over their own jobs, mind – was such that five members of his cabinet resigned and held a press conference denouncing his leadership. The defectors included his ministers of finance, health and justice. They said it was because he’d stopped listening to them, or taking their advice.