This month we mark the 50th anniversary of the election of Alberta's first Conservative government in 1971.
As progressive, enlightened, urban and forward-thinking as it was compared to the previous Social Credit governments of Manning and Strom, Lougheed's success that year still owed more to the foibles of First Past The Post than to any great support by the people of Alberta. Lougheed's victory that year was not as widely hailed or celebrated as might be thought.
The province's electoral system operated in 1971, as it had been doing since 1959, to grant overwhelming dominance to a single party, the one with the most popularity even if it only support from a minority of the voters.
The only difference in 1971 was that the leading party this time - the party that reaped such a windfall of seats without any democratic basis - was Progressive-Conservative. For a change, it was not the Bible-thumping rural-based Social Credit party, which had been getting that unfair windfall since 1956.
The leading party of Alberta - Social Credit, then Conservative - had been getting just such a windfall of seats since 1956.
That was when Alberta switched to First Past The Post from the previous more-balanced electoral system it had been using. From 1924 to 1955 Alberta had used a combination of PR in the cities and Instant-Runoff Voting outside the major cities.
The cities' PR system was Single Transferable Voting, a voter-driven candidate-based flexible system where transferable votes were used not party lists. This ensured that the representation elected in each city in each election reflected the votes cast in the cities.
Reflecting the votes cast, mixed representation was elected each time. Candidates of two, three or even four parties were elected in a city.
But after the change to First Past The Post was made in 1956, the MLAs elected in each city became much less balanced and fair. In 1959 Social Credit candidate took all the Edmonton seats, although the party as a whole took only a minority of the votes cast in the city.
The same un-democratic pattern happened in 1971.
In 1971, Lougheed's team won every seat in Edmonton, two-thirds of the seats in Calgary and three-quarters of the seats north of Red Deer. But this near-unanimity of representation was not reflective of the political reality, of how people actually voted. At no time did the P-C candidates have the support of every voter in Edmonton or Calgary. In fact in many of these districts, the P-C candidate did not have the support of most of the voters.
The local P-C candidate received less than half the votes in Athabasca, Bonnyville, Grande Prairie, Lloydminster, Ponoka, Red Deer, Rocky Mountain House, Smoky River, St. Albert, St. Paul, Stony Plain, Three Hills, Vegreville and Whitecourt. In Edmonton, the local P-C candidate did not receive a majority of the votes in Avonmore, Beverly, Highlands, Norwood, Parkallen and Strathcona.
In Calgary, the local P-C candidate did not receive a majority of the votes in Buffalo, Currie, McKnight and North Hill.
But in each of these districts the local PC candidate took the one seat each district had.
(The local Social Credit candidates who took most of the other seats in some cases did not have majority of the local vote either.
And Grant Notley himself did not have majority of the vote in Spirit River-Fairview, but took the sole NDP seat won in this election. The NDP with one percent of the vote overall deserved to win at least eight seats) Just as the Social Credit government had used its un-represnative disproportional election sweeps as proof of its wide popularity, so now Lougheed and his party/team used the windfall of seat it had reaped to put it across that it was the choice of all Albertans. The election of Grant Notley in 1971 may be held up as proof of the way that Lougheed opened up politics from the stranglehold exerted by Manning;s Social Credit. But actually it proves how a widely-popular but thinly-spread party has an uphill battle under FPTP. Notley succeeded - barely and almost accidentally - to win one seat. This was in a rural district away from the spotlight of the media. While the tens of thousands of NDP voters in Edmonton - and in Calgary - won no seats and had no representation. And Lougheed with his much vaunted popular appeal did nothing to encourage this diversity of opinion in the Legislature, in fact in 1975 the Lougheed team worked to take even the NDP's one seat away from Notley. Through luck, Notley retained his seat in 1975 - and in 1979, and he sat as the sole NDP MLA in the Legislature. Through him the multitude NDP supporters all across the province had at least one single MLA to represent them.
Finally in 1982 Edmonton succeeded despite FPTP, to elect its first CCF or NDP MLA since 1952. This was Ray Martin. And all too soon Martin found himself the sole NDP MLA after Grant's untimely death in 1984.
Lee Richardson, author of the article "Lougheed The Arrival of Modern Alberta" (Alberta Views September 2021) presents the idea that Alberta was a homogeneous society during the Social Credit era He wrote "clearly this was not the monolithic, uniform electorate enjoyed by for decades by the previous administration." But only a scant 15 years earlier Alberta had parted with it partial-PR electoral system.
That alone should tip you off that: A. Alberta is not monolithic if it needs PR, and B. Alberta is not monolithic if it elect four different parties plus other Independents to its Legislature C. the party in power was so irritated by the variety of opinion expressed and embodied by the elected representation that it parted with PR so that it would be able to dis-proportionally take a more-massive majority in the legislature. According to Richardson, Lougheed's election meant that the vitality and variety that was the new Alberta could flourish.
Actually the reality is almost the exact opposite, at least partly!
During most of the UFA era and the Social Credit era, that is, the period from 1924 to 1955, Alberta partly used a proportional representation system. As partial as it was, the representation elected showed variety and balance at least as compared to later elections that used First Past The Post. During the use of PR, the Alberta government was more balanced than during the period after FPTP was re-imposed on Alberta elections.
After FPTP replaced PR-STV, the number of elected Opposition politicians, the variety of representatives in the Legislature, rarely reached the level that was common during the PR period.
During the Lougheed era, the Conservatives dominated the seats of the Legislature and the variety of voters in Alberta had little chance of getting diverse representation.
Lougheed's P-Cs again and again took a larger number of seats than its popularity warranted.
Other parties suffered under-representation.
This disproves the myth that Lougheed opened up the political environment in the province, that he provided politics with a breath of fresh air. Or if that myth was true, the change was just enough to allow Conservatives to breath freely, for Conservatives to get out from under the SC crush, but Lougheed's taking of power in the province did little or nothing for supporters of any other parties.
While the Lougheed government might have put more money into arts and culture than the previous SC government had done, later Conservative premiers reversed this a great deal. It is difficult to see how much support Alberta artists had received from the likes of Getty or Klein!
And the stranglehold the Conservative party had on the Legislature was such that artists, working people (and unemployed people) in the cities and the fields, political women, the young and the old, the sick and the lame, had few voices speaking for them in the Legislature.
Lougheed may have done some good things for the province as a while (its embargo on coal mining on the Eastern Slopes was a classic example of a great policy it had), but the Alberta Legislature was just as white- and male-dominated under the P-Cs as it had ever been under the the later Social Credit premiers - after PR was cancelled.
These stats demonstrate that reality:
total Government Parties in the Legislature Labour/CCF/NDP
seats vote p.c. MLAs p.c. number votes MLAs
of seats p.c. seat p.c.
count of seats
PR (STV/AV)
UFA era UFA
1926 61 40% 43 72% 5 8* 5 8%
(UFA, Liberal, Cons., Labour, Ind.)
1930 63 39% 43 62% 5 8* 4 6%
(UFA, Liberal, Cons., Labour, Ind.)
*Labour ran candidates for less than half the seats
Social Credit era Social Credit
1935 63 54% 56 89 3 (SC, Cons., Lib) 2 0 0
1940 57 43% 36 63 2 (SC, Unity League) 11 0 0
1944 60 52% 51 89 4 (SC, CCF, Unity League, Veterans) 25 2 3
1948 57 56% 51 89 4 (SC, CCF, Ind., Liberal) 19 2 3
1952 60 56% 53 85 4 (SC, Liberal, C/P-C, CCF) 14 1 2
1955 60 46% 37 61 7 (SC, Liberal, CCF, P-C/C, Ind., coalitions) 8 2 3
Note: The CCF never ran candidates for all the seats.)
FPTP single-member plurality
Social Credit era Social Credit
1959 65 56% 61 94 5 (SC, Liberal, CCF, Cons., Ind., Coalition ) 4 0 0
1963 63 55% 60 95 3 (SC, Liberal, Coalition) 9 0 0
1967 65 45% 55 85 4 (SC, Liberal, Cons. Ind.) 16 0 0
Conservative era Progressive-Conservative
1971 75 46% 49 65 3 (P-C, SC, NDP) 11 1 1
1975 75 63% 69 92 4 (P-C, SC, NDP, Ind.) 13 1 1
1979 79 57% 74 94 3 (P-C, SC, NDP) 16 1 1
1982 79 62% 75 95 3 (P-C, NDP, Ind.) 19 2 3
1986 83 51% 61 73 4 (P-C, NDP, Rep, Liberal) 29 16 19
1989 83 44% 59 71 3 (P-C, NDP, Liberal) 26 16 19
1993 83 44% 51 61 2 (P-C, Liberal) 11 0 0
1997 83 51% 63 76 3 (P-C, NDP, Liberal) 9 2 2
2001 83 62% 74 89 3 (P-C, NDP, Liberal) 8 2 2
2004 83 47% 62 75 4 (P-C, NDP, Liberal, Alliance) 10 4 4
2008 83 53% 72 87 3 (P-C, NDP, Liberal) 8 2 2
2012 87 44% 61 70 4 (P-C, NDP, Liberal, Wildrose) 10 4 4
NDP era NDP
2015 87 41% 54 62 5 (P-C, NDP, Liberal, Alberta, Wildrose) 41 54 62%
UCP era UCP
2019 87 55% 63 72 2 (UCP, NDP) 33 24 28%
* Independent candidates are considered one party. Independent-Liberal, Independent-SC, etc. are considered a form of Independent.
As we see from this, under FPTP the government party often took 75 percent or more of the seats in the Legislature, Thus the government party had a ratio of three to one of all the others put together.
For all but 7 of the elections held since 1955, that is, in ten of the elections held since 1955, the government took at least 75 percent of the seats, Thus it had three seats to each seat held by an opposition politician. And note that in many of these elections the government had less than a majority of the votes.
And we see that since the end of PR, the CCF and NDP have always been under-represented (with the exception of the 2015 election). (In part this was due to Labour and the CCF, and the NDP in 1963, not running a full slate. The party's vote share generally increased after it began to run a full slate in 1967.)
So if the Legislature was predominantly SC from 1959 to 1971, that was not due to lack of voters voting against the government. And it was not due to the alleged monolithic, homogeneous nature of Alberta in that time.
But instead it was due to a lack of democratic accountability in our election system.
And if Alberta voters voted for a variety of parties since 1971, and they did, the Legislature did not show this. The governing party in the Legislature from 1971 to 2015, the Progressive Conservative, only occasionally took even a majority of the votes cast. Mostly that party's overwhelming dominance in the Legislature was due to the lack of democratic accountability in our election system.
And we see that opposition MLAs, on average, were more numerous before 1956 when even partial PR was in use, than it was after 1956, when disproportional FPTP began to be used to elect Alberta MLAs.
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