There is a law older than any parliament, and every ruler who forgets it learns it again at the doors of strangers: the machinery built to frighten the opposition can end up oiling the opposition’s wheels. In Calgary-Shaw, a riding in the far south of Calgary with a long habit of electing conservatives, Jessica Fallis discovered the law this autumn. Canvassing for the New Democratic Party during the 2023 general election — the one that handed Danielle Smith’s United Conservative Party its second majority — she had braced for slammed doors. During the recent byelection, she told CBC News, the doors behaved differently.

Some of the [voters at the] doors would be, ‘I’m going to vote for anything but Danielle Smith and the UCP.’

In September the riding fell. New Democrat Kyle Campbell beat the UCP’s Mike Derry by nearly 600 votes, taking a seat that conservative machines once considered theirs by birthright. A single byelection may be an accident of weather; the numbers gathering around it look more like a climate. A CBC News poll conducted by Edmonton-based Trend Research under Janet Brown Opinion Research — 1,200 Albertans surveyed between Sept. 8 and Sept. 21, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20 — suggests impressions of Smith personally, and support for her governing party, have slipped in recent months. The UCP now sits essentially neck-and-neck with the NDP provincewide, and trails the New Democrats by eight points in battleground Calgary, the county ground of every Alberta government.

Only this past spring, the UCP and Smith still enjoyed the longest honeymoon since the era of Ralph Klein. Honeymoons in Alberta, it turns out, can be measured in referendums.

The hot potato

On Oct. 19, Albertans will vote on whether their province should remain a province of Canada. According to one longtime Alberta political watcher quoted by CBC News, Smith may have triggered the independence referendum because she “wanted to prove to her hardcore base she was committed to direct democracy.” Whether that was the design or not, the design has failed in a particular way: the referendum has become what the CBC report calls a political “hot potato” inside her own party, with simmering frustrations among the faithful — and a possible leadership review for Smith in the coming months — while the opposition harvests the discontent.

“The referendum has meant we are attracting people from across the province who want to get involved,” Heth Wilson, the NDP’s executive director, told CBC News. Pollster Janet Brown, who conducted the survey, put the cost to the government plainly.

One of the unintended consequences is that it’s given the NDP increased capacity. It’s given the NDP a chance to get their ground game together one full year ahead of a general election.

Brown stresses that the UCP has usually fielded the stronger ground game. The referendum, likely in concert with the trade war between Canada and the United States and the tensions with U.S. President Donald Trump, has also deepened Albertans’ attachment to Canada in recent months. “For those who are paying close attention,” University of Calgary political scientist Lisa Young told CBC News, “there’s a real intensity of preference here, and that often turns into a desire to do something.” For some, that something is volunteering for the NDP. “It seems to me that the NDP is well positioned to benefit from that,” Young said.

Such a vote carries a price beyond the counting. In Ottawa, federal officials are already tallying what an exit would cost, down to the recurring billions, according to one account of internal documents pricing an Alberta secession. And the fever is not Alberta’s alone: across the country, separatists lately returned to power in Quebec, testing whether any capital can still govern as though the question were settled.

Schools, hospitals, and the cost of a question

The door-knockers in Calgary-Shaw found that the referendum opened a conversation about everything that is not the referendum: affordability, education, health care. “Where’s our elementary school? How are our children being taken care of? How are my parents being taken care of in the health-care system?” Wilson recounted. “The referendum seems to be a distraction and a cost we just can’t afford as a province at this time, is what we heard on the doors when the referendum came up.”

David Cloutier, who door-knocked in the byelection and was the NDP’s candidate in the riding in 2023, said the contrast between the referendum’s ballooning cost and the fact that “shovels are not in the ground to start building schools” proved an effective message. “We talked to a lot of folks who feel like their needs have been ignored for a long time,” he said. Wilson cautions that the referendum was not top of mind when the byelection was called in August; the party’s president says it ramped up through the fall, and breathed momentum into the organization as the vote approached. The NDP intends to carry that momentum into the provincial election expected next October.

The government’s advantages

Veteran watchers of Alberta warn against writing the obituary too early; the UCP has a full year to recover. The treasury is flush — high oil prices have filled it with energy royalties — and a government with surpluses can build schools and repair hospitals with a speed no opposition can match. “I think we’ve already seen the UCP switching into pre-election mode,” Young said, pointing to the province’s recent pause on its fuel tax. “They’re clearly trying to shift the focus away from the issues that matter to their base toward the issues that matter to the electorate.” The UCP, she added, “is well positioned to use its very significant budget surpluses to do things that make it more popular in electoral terms.”

And then there is the subtler weapon: forgetting. “The challenge for the NDP,” Young said, “is going to be that once the referendum is over, it will be easy for Albertans to forget that there was a referendum. These things fade in people’s minds relatively quickly.” The opposition, she argues, will need a razor-sharp focus on reminding voters of their unhappiness, on being the party of Canada — and, to the extent that Trump remains a problem, that may help too. Continued infighting inside the UCP could do some of that work for free.

Redrawing the map

Power has one more structural privilege: it draws the lines. The UCP could use its legislative majority to redraw riding boundaries, creating hybrid “rurban” ridings that fold rural and urban voters together. Data analysis done by CBC News suggests that proposed hybrid ridings in the Calgary area favour the governing party. “The NDP is well positioned under this current seat model,” Brown said — but the new amalgams, given the UCP’s traditional dominance of rural Alberta, would be harder ground for the New Democrats.

So the general has a year, a full treasury, and a pencil with which to reshape the battlefield. The opposition has the autumn wind, and the doorsteps of Calgary-Shaw. “We are hyped and inspired,” Fallis said. “We’re on fire. We want to do this. We need to do this.”