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The province spent more than most, paid its employees more — then was shocked to find that it could not sustain itself on this lifestyle at less than $100 a barrel. Jim Prentice may have been wrong about some things, but the furor over his “look in the mirror” comment was quite ludicrous: who was it who voted for all these, if not Albertans? And when it all came crashing down, they turned to a party that would give them even more stuff — as always, to be paid for by someone else: tax oil, tax corporations, tax the rich, just don’t tax us.

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There is no policy sense in which Alberta is more conservative than the other provinces, and there is little in the platform the NDP campaigned on — higher corporate taxes, higher minimum wages, more schemes to diversify the economy into higher “value-added” activities — that a PC government couldn’t have or hasn’t offered at one time or another. They’re bad ideas, all of them, but they’re not so bad that they could not be advocated by all parties, all parties having converged on the same populist ad hockery — this subsidy to cement the loyalty of that interest or demographic group, this tax break for another.

I don’t want to say that Albertans were necessarily motivated by the NDP platform. A lot of the people who ended up voting for the party were telling pollsters they would vote for the Wildrose Party halfway through the campaign; had the personable, thoughtful Brian Jean who showed up on election night been the Wildrose leader in the televised debate, and not the over-coached automaton viewers saw, things might have turned out rather differently.