April Government Relations Update
As Alberta prepares for a provincial election, we await what each party says regarding co-operatives. In the last election, no direct reference to co-operatives was made in the platforms of any major Alberta party, even though Alberta has over 680 co-operatives across the province.
Our team has reached out to both major parties providing them with simple suggestions to incorporate the co-operative message into their platforms.
Platforms from parties are usually released in the first week of the election. But, there are rare cases like in the 2022 Ontario provincial election in which the PC party released its complete platform in the last week.
While we wait for the platforms to be released, let’s examine some of the current statistics related to the upcoming election.
As of April 20th, the UCP has nominated 86/87 candidates. They were at 87 but have removed the Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo candidate recently. The NDP has nominated 80/87 candidates and has promised to have a full slate by the end of April. There are six other political parties that have nominated candidates with the Green party having the highest amount at 30 total.
Reading electoral polling can be tricky as it is often seen as what will happen. In actuality, it should be seen as what has happened. Polls are a snapshot in time and are always a week or so behind the date in which you read them. Polls are very useful for campaigns to see where the battleground ridings are so they know where they need to focus their efforts.
As of April 20th, the UCP has a 63% chance of forming a majority according to the most accurate aggregate polling site, 338canada.com. In 2022, the NDP was predicted to have an over 70% chance of forming a majority government. Public opinion drastically changed after Jason Kenney was no longer the leader of the UCP. The seat projection for right now is as close as you could get with the UCP predicted to get 44 seats and the NDP predicted to get 43 seats. The reason that the UCP is precited to win the election is that they have a higher seat cap of how many seats they can win. The NDP is capped at winning 50 seats based on 338canada’s predictions. Meanwhile, the UCP has 57 seats available for them to hold.
For the NDP to win in the upcoming election, they will need to sweep Edmonton (the most likely outcome), pick up a few smaller city seats, and sweep 19/26 of Calgary’s seats to form the government.
With less than 40 days to go before we find out which party leads the province, it will come down to the wire with an unpredictable outcome.
Our Government Relations team will do a further breakdown of how to read and examine polls on May 11th for those who want to attend the free webinar. Stay tuned for more details.