CALGARY — As Stephen Harper heads to Ottawa as prime-minister-designate of a minority government, long-suffering Conservatives in Alberta puffed up their chests last night -- some clad in "Tory Glory" T-shirts -- boasting that their province will finally have some clout.
No longer would Albertans, who have long talked about fiscal, democratic and justice reform, be chided for blowing hot air. Rather, as a warm chinook wind blew west over Calgary yesterday, the political shift about to descend on eastern Canada was actually in the air.
"[Alberta] will have significant influence," said Ted Morton, who is a member of Ralph Klein's government in Alberta, but who also belongs to the so-called Calgary school of right-wing thinkers who helped shape Mr. Harper's political views.
"You have a prime minister from Alberta who understands Alberta and Alberta's interests and how they fit in Confederation, and you're going to have several cabinet ministers from here as well and the most experienced core of MPs," Mr. Morton said.
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Calgary -- at least in the Conservative Party campaign headquarters jammed last night with about 2,000 supporters -- hasn't felt this electric, this loved, this much the centre of the country's attention since the Calgary Flames' Stanley Cup run.
Despite the expectations, there was no guarantee that the province would have the power that folks like Mr. Morton would hope.
According to pundits, the party will have to shun its roots to focus on Ontario and Quebec, and the cabinet must reflect all regions of the country. That means a lot of experienced and long-time Alberta MPs are going to be disappointed.
"Many in the party will be saying, this is the first day of the campaign for the next election," said Steve Patten, a political scientist at the University of Alberta.
"There's going to be heightened expectations that Alberta's influence is going to increase, and so I think the potential for disappointment and frustration is equally great as well," added Harold Jansen, a political scientist at the University of Lethbridge.
He pointed to the 1984 federal election when the Progressive Conservatives under Brian Mulroney swept into office, grabbing every seat in Alberta, as evidence that belonging to government isn't enough to address western concerns.
"It was under the Mulroney government with 21 MPs from Alberta that the Reform Party formed, and so I don't think that just because there is solid Alberta representation in the government caucus that we can write the obituary for western alienation," Prof. Jansen said.
Mr. Harper was first elected in 1993 to Parliament under the Reform Party banner, along with 51 other Reformers from the West. Last night, 18 of those politicians were running for re-election, many were expected to win a fifth consecutive term while campaigning on the stuff Albertans -- indeed westerners in general -- have been nagging Ottawa about for years.
Cutting taxes. Getting tough on crime. Electing senators. Weeding patronage from politics.
"I'd be the first to admit we were a bit naive when we first went there," recalled Bob Mills, a Conservative from Red Deer, who was part of that first wave of Reform MPs. "And then pretty soon we realized that we didn't even know where the washrooms were .. . . It was a lot worse than we thought it was going to be."
But the new Conservative Party, which relies on the main tenets of old Reform, has hushed its barking about western alienation to become more palatable to eastern voters to the chagrin of some Albertans.
The Western Standard, a right-wing magazine in Alberta run by former Stockwell Day acolyte Ezra Levant, calls the Conservatives in a recent cover story "an entirely new and entirely mainstream" party that "wants to govern, not merely score ideological points."
It concludes that many arch-conservatives -- after being in opposition for 13 years -- are willing to accept a "lighter-right" approach if it leads to seizing back Parliament.
Monte Solberg of Medicine Hat, who is considered a key candidate for a senior cabinet position in a Harper government, said it's common sense that old ideals needed to be tempered in order to govern.
But what happens to Alberta and its "West Wants In" agenda when the West is in?
"The first mistake we can make is to assume a Harper government will do our work for us, because it won't," said Link Byfield, former publisher of now-defunct Alberta Report magazine.
Five fast facts
1
Number of seats Liberals hold in Alberta: (0 Tories win all 28)
2
Proportion of Albertans who vote Conservative: Two-thirds.
3
Drop in Liberal support in Alberta: 8 percentage points (22 to 14.3)4
4
Spread between Marxist-Leninist and Marijuana parties in Alberta: 29 votes (Marijuana was slightly higher)5
5
Alberta support for Green Party: 6.4 per cent (highest in the country, versus 4.4 per cent nationally.)