So, about that “spine”….

“Our members have now seen that some of our policies were rejected by Albertans, quite frankly. We will be revisiting some of those. You can’t run a government if you don’t get sanction from the people…There may also be a stronger statement to make about climate change and our policy around greenhouse gas emissions.”

h/t Davenport
EBD;

The “story” of this election – that Wildrose failed, and that the PCs’ leftward-drifting policies have been validated and vindicated — is based entirely on false and inflated expectations created by a few highly anomalous and transitory poll results. It’s disappointing, and a bit disheartening, that Danielle Smith would overreact to the mistaken perception that Wildrose’s historic breakthrough is a rejection by wrenching the bone from the mouth of her supporters and tossing it to her detractors who have absolutely no interest in it.
It had to have been a stressful campaign; maybe she should get off the hamster wheel for a week or two and look at the larger picture, and try to re-understand what side her bread is buttered on. The lions share of the 2008 Liberal vote, which went from 26 percent to less than 10 percent, obviously went to the PCs, yet the PCs still received the lowest percentage of the popular vote since 1967. In other words, the PCs *clearly* lost a huge number of conservative-minded voters to Wildrose (who went from 7 percent four years ago to 35 percent), and made their gains on the prog-left. The Wildrose party is now the de facto conservative option in a traditionally conservative province, and they didn’t achieve his breakthrough by courting progressives and public sector unions and warmists, or by being too conservative by the standards of the prog media like the Edmonton Journal’s Graham Thompson, who wrote: “And then there was Smith’s own bozo eruption when she insisted the jury was still out on the science of human-induced climate change. That got her loudly booed from the audience at a leaders’ debate hosted by CBC and no doubt had Albertans imagining with some alarm the prospect of a Wildrose premier embarrassing the province on the world stage by denying global warming.”, or the Journal’s editorialists: “We can look forward to a government less prone to circling the wagons against outsiders with talk of firewalls, and one much better able to defend our resource industry by being willing to speak the same scientific language as the rest of the world.”
If Danielle Smith thinks that such twee, left-leaning urbanite media are the spokespeople for her swelling constituency she’s making a serious mistake. I was talking to some of my neighbours yesterday (I live in a traditionally very conservative, rural area), all of whom voted PC. Small sample, obviously, and anecdotal, but in each case their choice had absolutely *nothing* — nada, zip – to do with global warming, or conscience rights, or scary, homophobic Christians, or anything else the media’s post-mortem, which Smith seems to have taken to heart, has focused on. Instead, they were simply unsure about Wildrose – not unsure in the active sense of being distrustful for any particular reason, they just didn’t know a single thing about the local candidate.
It’s good to have a likeable and smart party leader, but in a province chock full of multi-term incumbents from the dynastic juggernaut party, the upstart party HAS to give people a reason to vote for the local candidate; a brief website bio saying that he’s a husband and father who has bought and sold five businesses just doesn’t cut it.
In Alberta, the center is right wing by progressive standards. Wildrose needs to stay the course by chipping away at — courting — this right-leaning center rather than trying to curry favour with the prog/warmist left.

Postscript: Today the same media who commissioned polls with a 100% failure rate are busy explaining the motivations of 952,000 Alberta voters without asking so much as a single one.

“The room the PC’s rented isn’t big enough for an Italian wedding reception.”*

The polls have closed, let the results commence!
9pm Update – with early results suggesting that polls were upside down, and Redford is heading for a possible Progressive majority, Alberta politics remain a good news story for Saskatchewan.