Voting Behaviour in Alberta: The Quasi-Party System Revisited

Voting Behaviour in Alberta: The Quasi-Party System Revisited PETER McCORMICK It is a journalistic and academic commonplace that in matters of voting behaviour Alberta is a province not like the others. On the one hand, you have most Canadians in most parts of Canada; on the other hand you have - Alberta. Elections in Alberta are different from elections in other parts of the country; Alberta is unique, even aberrant , a strange lotus land where conventional rules and expectations somehow do not apply. There is no tradition of a healthy alternation of governing parties - no party, once defeated, has ever returned to power, and until 1971 no leader of the opposition had ever become premier. There is no tradition of a strong opposition - in only six of nineteen provincial general elections has the opposition held more than a third of the seats in the legislature, while in eight elections it has been reduced to half a dozen seats or less. The one tradition that seems firmly entrenched is hostility to the federal government - for only 16 years since 1905 has the province returned a majority of its MPs to sit on the government side of the House of Commons, and May 22, 1979 marks the first time since 1911 that the Alberta provincial government has been of the same party as the federal government. To some extent, these comments about Alberta's strange political behaviour are a little dated, and must be made with more qualifications than would have been the case a few years ago. It is no longer true that Alberta, alone among the provinces, has never changed its governing party since before World War II, and since 1958 federally (and 1971 provincially) the halfcentury preoccupation with "third parties" seems to have come to an end. Still, such impressions tend to linger after the basis for them begins to fade, and Alberta remains a political curiosity, viewed with amusement, incomprehension, even disdain, by other Canadians; few seem to know Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 15, No.3 (Automne 1980 Fall) quite what to make of the "Alabama of Canada," as it is sometimes called. Perhaps the best-known explanation of Alberta 's unusual political behaviour is C.B. Macpherson 's Democracy in Alberta: Social Credit and the Party System.I To sum up a sophisticated and complex argument in simplest terms, he describes Alberta as possessing a "quasi-party sytem,'' lacking any alternation of parties in power or any consistent support for a strong opposition, and giving one party a monopoly of political power without discarding the traditional apparatus of parliamentary government and opposition rights. Opposing parties are not suppressed, either in election campaigns or in the legislature, but persist on the fringes in electoral impotence. The cause of the voting behaviour that generates this party system, suggests Macpherson, is the class structure of the province. In the 1920s and 1930s, when successively the UFA and Social Credit came to power, Alberta was a colonial (or quasicolonial ) extension of the central Canadian industrial and financial empire, and the numerically dominant class within the province was that of independent commodity producers (that is, farmers ) which was necessarily subject to specific and recurring pressures within the colonial relationship . Responding to these pressures, this class generated patterns of political behaviour, sometimes of a rather radical nature, directed to protecting their perception of their interest. Because the class was uniformly spread across most of the province, and because electoral maldistribution tended to exaggerate their numerical preponderance ,2 the result of concerted class action was a massive majority of seats. The secret of electoral success in Alberta has since 1921 been an ideological formula explaining the plight of this numerically dominant class and suggesting solutions (successively the group government theory of the United Farmers of Alberta, and the economic theories of Social Credit), combined with opposition to the industrial and financial centre as represented by the federal government. The practical implications of these ideological formulae, and their actual influence on governmental policy outputs , are rather more problematic. Although Macpherson's thesis lurks in the 85 background of most subsequent discussions of Alberta's idiosyncratic politics, it has not been accepted without some misgivings. Indeed...