for the same reason i see people in my local, bc group say ‘we need Danielle Smith here’… they are idiots.
A while ago, someone shared stories that happened during the golden days of Alberta, with the help of the oil sands. While not perfect and under a lot of abuse, able-bodied people could find a job and build a family with a modest life.
This “progress” was happening all over the world, not only in Alberta. But it was enough to cement the position of the conservative parties that hold the power for almost 100 years there, in special PC that hold control of the province for long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Alberta_general_elections There is a nostalgia effect for people that lived there during those times.
Alberta used to be ahead of the curve, in 1920 they had proportional representation, but later the party in power realized they could have even more power if they ended PR. But they shot their foot with that, that is when Social Credit lost to PC. https://fairvoteedmonton.com/2025/06/17/alberta-had-proportional-representation-whyd-we-give-it-up/
PC eventually merged into UCP to make sure they would keep a majority in elections. I remember some people at the time not so happy they were joining the “crazies” but thought it was a necessary evil.
If you check the electorate map, you will see that some districts have almost half of the people than others, but the gerrymandering is not as bad as in USA. From there you will see the major cities rarely vote for conservatives from the past forever. And if you are in lemmy for a while, you might have seen some posts from Fair Vote Canada that while the UCP gets most seats, they do not get the majority of votes.
Back to cities and eroding the electorate. Destroying the education and healthcare is just a way to filter out people that do not vote for them. COVID and other diseases run rampant because they think it will hurt the cities more than their electorate.
If you searched top universities in 2016, Calgary and Edmonton would often appear on top 5 of some fields. We would send people to get training in Edmonton foreseeing the machine learning boom, as they were ahead of the curve and very affordable. In 2019 the province made it hard for many industries that were not oil, what lead to an exodus. It was common to some companies move from AB and BC, but this only got my attention when a friend moved to Montreal. I always heard about Quebec taxes, but I never thought some company would move there from Alberta, but it appears that Quebec offers huge tax rebates and investments if you fit some criteria. So a bunch of young folks, that never witnessed the “golden age” moved to other provinces too.
And of course, there is a lot of propaganda, but at this day and age is very easy to confirm those stuffs. Well, except when that province government makes the access to information harder.
tl;dr: it is not majority, it is a mix of district mapping, poor/unsecure electorate systems, and pushing away dissidents and smart people.
This electorate district shenanigans are not new, they did stuff like that with Toronto not so long ago. That is why more modern democracies have measures to combat this kind of thing. (also one of the reasons people are asking for the back of proportional representation).
Persistent rural over-representation in the legislature. And decades of propaganda from right-wing “think tanks” touting the benefits of the oil and gas sector.
I think it’s that the Alberta oil industry has bought out the government and pushed US Republican style propaganda. It’s tied to some manufactured Alberta exceptionalism, and that makes it easy to sell to young people making loads of money in the oil field.
Because they’ve managed to improve the healthcare in the province after the disastrous mess the other party left it in, and they’ve just started to work on fixing the damage that same government did to the education system. They aren’t perfect, but they are at least trying to fix the damage that the previous government did. They’re also willing to stand up for albertan interests, in the province, at the federal level, and even internationally. Something the other party fought (and continues to fight) hard against.
It doesn’t help any that the other party is led by the person universally known as the 2nd most disastrous mayor Calgary has ever had, only beaten by his successor for that title.
But you aren’t actually asking a sincere question, and don’t want a sincere answer. You want to push your political ideology on everyone else, even when you are in the extreme minority, and when your political ideology has had measurable negative consequences when it was tried.
I actually asked an AI to summarize the situation in neutral terms, and this is what it gave me:
“Both parties in Alberta have left people frustrated for different reasons. The current government has supporters who believe they are repairing damage and standing up for provincial interests, while critics argue they’ve created new problems. The opposition also has supporters who think they would bring stability, and critics who blame them for past decisions. Voters are divided, and each side sees the other through the lens of past grievances.”
Just sharing that because I’m trying to get multiple angles, not push a position.
That response provided zero historical context. Balance isn’t what the question was asking for. The question was roughly, ‘why do Albertans keep voting against their own best interests’ and a number of really good and thoughtful answers were given and when you boil them down to the truth of those answers, saying simply that “both sides see the other through the lens of past grievances” really does absolve one side of this (that bears virtually all of the responsibility for these issues) of their sins.
I asked an AI to read your reply.
Your original question was not in any way just trying to get multiple angles. It was worded specifically with an ideological slant. The AI you have chosen is also not in any way unbiased. Because it is implying that the two sides are equal, when any poll will show you that it is not in any way. But beyond that, the actual damage done by the previous party is measurable. In numbers of jobs lost, in the ratio between bureaucrats and frontline practitioners in healthcare, and in test scores in school. This isn’t a subjective thing that you are trying to make it out to be. The previous government did actual tangible damage to the province, And the current government has made actual tangible progress towards fixing it. I would be quick to argue that the current government has not gone nearly far enough. And one of my biggest complaints with the current government is how they are financial liberals, not financial conservatives, and their solution to most problems has been to throw more money at it. Something that is not in any way sustainable long-term. But at least they have been targeting that money to places where it will do good, as opposed to the previous government that spent even more money, but exclusively on administrators and managers and other bureaucrats, with not a penny getting to the front lines.
