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New to the leader’s job, Notley was doing well. People liked her. She vowed to spread the party’s support beyond its Edmonton base.

But NDP was still struck in the high teens, traditional NDP placement in the polls. Premier Jim Prentice’s PCs were well ahead.

Wildrose was supposed to be worse off, virtually abolished by the massive floor-crossing of 11 MLAs to the Conservatives last December.

The decimated party chose Brian Jean, the former Fort McMurray Conservative MP, as the new leader only days before Prentice called the election.

A couple of hundred people came to the leadership announcement. They cheered Jean’s victory politely, but went berserk with glee at word that Danielle Smith, their former leader, had just lost her PC nomination.

Jean was utterly unfamiliar to the vast majority of Albertans. Few people imagined Wildrose could put up more than a token fight.

Then came the PC campaign; and what a godawful mess it is.

Called a year early, despite the province’s four year-election law, the mere fact of it made people angry right at the start.

Prentice decided to run on a budget that would raise taxes and cut services, without collecting a penny more in tax from corporate Alberta, at the exact moment when companies were laying off thousands of employees due to low oil prices.

That is one strange platform to throw at voters already worried about jobs, mortgages, education and health care, and deeply mistrustful of PC promises.



Prentice has been surprisingly clumsy for a politician so experienced and apparently smooth. Even before the campaign, he told Albertans to “look in the mirror,” implying that everyone — not just the government — was responsible for decades of wild overspending.