This week the Alberta government pivots back to governing, with MLAs returning to the legislature for the first time since a contentious referendum on separation exposed the divide between, among other things, urban and rural Albertans.
Much of the pushback on the 10 referendum questions came from the province’s two largest centres. Calgary collectively voted “no” on all questions except proof of citizenship to vote, while Edmonton was a “no” across the board. Nowhere was the prospect of a second separation vote less popular.
“We all know there’s an urban-rural divide in Alberta politics,” says Lisa Young, a political scientist at the University of Calgary. “But the referendum results make it really stark.”
This presents a quandary for Premier Danielle Smith, who has historically been supported by — and focused her attention on — rural Alberta. Now, she must contend with a sizable group of urban Albertans who appear to have rejected her latest political project, while she publicly spars with councillors over local issues such as zoning.
Meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether her list of priorities for the upcoming sitting, which include public sector hiring based on “merit,” protections for data centre development and the future of bike lanes, will speak to the cities.
“I think a lot of the recent focus on the more performative politics has served the UCP minority base really well,” said Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas on Tuesday.
“But the more we debate … which books should be in a library,” he said, referring to a recent bill to limit sexually explicit material in public libraries, “the more you lose the mainstream Calgarians who actually just want to get things done, want to know that life is safe and affordable.”
Smith herself has talked about the need to refocus on voters in Edmonton and Calgary, telling CBC News last week that her government needed to “identify the issues” that were important to residents of the two urban centres, which together make up just over half of the provincial population.
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Urban voters are focused on issues like education, health care and affordability, which is why her government has (temporarily) paused the gas tax at the pumps and rolled out “complexity teams” in classrooms, Smith said.
“The issues that were of the referendum, I think it’s pretty clear those are … of greater interest to those who are in political parties and punditry circles and in rural Alberta than they were in Calgary or Edmonton.”
Mapping out where Albertans voted to remain (or not) in Canada
It’s a change of script from 2022 when Smith, then a newly-minted party leader, made waves by suggesting she didn’t need much urban support. Instead, she had mapped out a “rural-based” path to electoral victory, telling a columnist that she’d done the math and would only need a relative handful of city seats if she won everywhere else.
Smith delivered, winning a majority the following year. She took a dozen seats in Calgary and a few on the outskirts of Edmonton, but painted most of the map blue everywhere else.
But Calgary has since rejected most of Smith’s referendum questions and, Young points out, flipped the reliably right-leaning riding of Calgary-Shaw to the NDP in a recent byelection.
“It looks like Calgary is in a different place than it was a couple of years ago,” Young said.
It may not help that Smith, a frequent critic of federal overreach, has waded into municipal issues in recent months, essentially overturning the decisions of city councils on issues like infill housing and zoning, and now appears to have her sights set on bike lanes, Young added.
It “doesn’t really signal wanting to have a relationship of respect with these urban governments,” she said.
“It’s going to be really interesting to watch and see whether there’s a softening of the hostility with Edmonton and Calgary city governments.”
Mayor Jeromy Farkas says he’s not surprised most Calgarians rejected the referendum questions, and he will be looking to see how the provincial government prioritizes investment in his city over the next year. (Brendan Coulter/CBC)
But as Farkas points out, a year away from a provincial election, there’s still time for Smith to turn it around. He’s waiting to see what’s in the provincial budget: “I don’t watch what the politicians are saying; I watch what the politicians are doing.”
“We want to see much more substantive investment here locally in Calgary around affordability, public safety and essential infrastructure.”
The idea of Alberta as the land of cowboys and open prairie can clash with its urban reality as, contrary to stereotypes, Alberta is actually one of the country’s most urbanized provinces.
According to Statistics Canada, it had the third smallest proportion of rural residents as of 2021 at roughly 15 per cent. That makes it more urbanized than the national average, and close on the heels of uber-urban provinces like Ontario and British Columbia.
But rural issues play a big role in provincial politics here, Young notes. That’s in part a result of the electoral map, which allows for a smaller number of residents in some rural ridings, in order to ensure remote areas have adequate representation.
Drawing the map to ensure each riding has roughly the same number of people while making sure some don’t become unmanageably large is a longstanding struggle in Alberta. The report from the 2017 electoral boundary commission noted that at the time, the constituency of Lesser Slave Lake had a population of 28,858 people while Calgary-South East had 92,148.
In other words, a vote in Lesser Slave Lake had about three times the punch of a vote in Calgary.
But there’s also the consideration of the economic importance of rural areas, given the extent to which the actual action of key industries like oil and gas take place outside of urban centres, Young said.
History plays a role, too: “There’s a sense, historically, of people in rural communities seeing themselves as the authentic Albertans, the people who are generating value and prosperity for the province,” said Young.
The issues faced by urban and rural communities are actually not that different, but they show up in different ways, said Colin Aitchison, a former United Conservative press secretary who is now a managing director at communications and public affairs firm Enterprise Canada.
Whether it’s pressure from immigration or the need for jobs, the real challenge for governments is tailoring the message to respect the different ways each community is affected, he said.
“The policy solutions are going to be different, but the overarching issues are the same.”
Most of the priorities Smith’s government laid out for the new session were likely put in place before the referendum and do represent issues that are important to conservative voters regardless of where they live, Aitchison said.
But he expects to see Smith start speaking to a more general audience as the election approaches.
Under Jason Kenney, the United Conservative Party made inroads in Calgary, and could do so again, argues Colin Aitchison, a former press secretary who is now a managing director at Enterprise Canada. (Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press)
Aitchison points to the 2019 election as an example of when the United Conservative message was heard loud and clear in the cities. That year, the party under Jason Kenney formed government with the help of most of the seats in Calgary and even a few on the outskirts of Edmonton.
“When [the UCP] made significant gains in Calgary, they focused on jobs, economy, pipelines,” he said. “A very simple message, and issues that resonate for both urban and rural communities.”
In interviews, Smith has pointed out that hers is not the only conservative government to struggle in urban areas. But Aitchison, who was involved with the campaign, said the recent victory of the B.C. Conservatives, in which they picked up seats even in parts of tony downtown Vancouver, shows that the UCP shouldn’t be counted out.
“[B.C. Conservatives] focused on affordability, they focused on pocketbook issues, jobs,” he said. “Those are issues that affect both rural and urban communities.”
For her part, Smith said she’s focused on cracking the urban code, to figuring out which issues are important to voters in Calgary and Edmonton and “prioritizing them in a serious way.”
“That’s what the job of politics is,” she said. “You’ve got to find out what’s bugging people and then you’ve got to focus on solving the problems,” she said. “I’m committed to doing that.”
