Despite history, Trudeaus Liberals see promise in Alberta
Their provincial cousins are barely an afterthought in the election called this week, seemingly destined for fourth-place status as they just try to hold on to a couple of seats.
But that is not stopping top members of Justin Trudeaus campaign team from insisting that Alberta could be fertile ground for Liberals in next falls federal race. Never mind just winning their first seat there in a decade; they claim they could win as many as four, equalling their best showing in the province since the Second World War.
For many veterans of their party, that sounds a little too quixotic. And so Mr. Trudeaus Liberals find themselves in an ongoing internal debate about how much resources time, money and human capital to invest in a province where their brand has long been toxic.
That debate will say much about how the party is being rebuilt, because it pits against each other two competing visions of the Liberals path to victory.
Among one crowd, whose members tend to have played leading roles in the Jean Chrtien and Paul Martin eras, a common view is that if the Liberals are to compete for power, it will be by unapologetically focusing on regions that have previously been kind to them and have large blocs of winnable ridings. First and foremost, that means Ontario (especially the Greater Toronto Area) and Quebec; to a lesser extent, the Vancouver area and Winnipeg; Atlantic Canada is an essential part of the mix, although success there is taken as a given in the coming campaign.
Worrying too much about Alberta would be the antithesis of that approach. There is reasonable doubt whether the son of the prime minister who brought in the National Energy Policy is capable of getting Albertans to see his party in a different light. In the provincial campaign, the Liberals do not even have candidates in more than half the ridings, demonstrating there is neither brand strength nor organizational support to draw on. And unless the election is extremely close, the number of seats open to the federal Liberals there which skeptics would peg at more like one or two would not make or break their bid for government.
To the newer group around Mr. Trudeau, the electoral map is evolving in a different way. They believe that, with increasingly young and diverse populations, Calgary and Edmonton are starting to look much like the sorts of urban centres in which their party prospers. Their future coalition, some of them argue, will be more about targeting urban and suburban ridings than certain provinces over others an attractive formula, given population migration patterns.
If that is more of a long-term project, any sort of beachhead in Alberta at all could still have an immediate post-election benefit. In the minority-parliament scenarios in which the Liberals could seek to form government, having representation in a province pivotal to the national economy could bolster their legitimacy.
Until closer to the official campaign period, when resources will become more finite, the Liberals do not really have to make a binary choice between targeting or not targeting Alberta. But by late summer or early fall, there will be a few tests of which viewpoint is prevailing.
One will be the use of Mr. Trudeaus time. As a symbol of speaking to all Canadians, the Liberal Leader will almost certainly visit Alberta within a day or two of the writ drop. But many of his predecessors have done that albeit sometimes with a quick stop near an airport, not the sort of showy downtown Calgary or Edmonton event for which Mr. Trudeau will probably opt and the question is how often he goes back.
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Despite history, Trudeaus Liberals see promise in Alberta