Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The Sheeple of Alberta Have Spoken

... and they said "baaaah".

So, voters in Calgary Glenmore sent Paul Hinman of the Wild Rose Party to the legislature.

Frankly, I wouldn't have voted for Hinman ... but then again, I didn't vote for "Special Ed" either. The Wildrose Party has yet to convince me that it's anything more than a provincial version of what we have in Ottawa - and their policies don't exactly encourage me either.

I continue to be disappointed with Alberta voter turnout. Yes, I know that byelections typically have much lower turnout than general elections do - but it's a sad statement when the byelection turnout was 40.5%, and the last provincial general election was 40.8%. To borrow from the wisdom of my grandfather - "If you don't get out and vote, the people you least want in power will win". Since the 1970s we've seen a steady decline in voter turnout, and a single party has consolidated its grip on power to the extent that they didn't think they needed to campaign at all in this byelection. (Yes, I saw a few Colley-Urqhart signs, but very few and residents I know who live in the riding all commented on the near-invisibility of the PC campaign).

The bright side of this vote - from my perspective was that Hinman's win was not a runaway victory - there's only 3% of the popular vote between Hinman and Avalon Roberts of the Liberals - a fairly small margin of victory for a province used to voting PC "because they've always voted that way".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The PC's are exactly the same as the federal counterparts.

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