Unpacking Alberta’s Century of Alienation

The Dawn of Competitive Party Politics in Alberta: An End to Solitude
Anthony M. Sayers, Royce Koop and David K. Stewart
UBC Press (2026)

To understand the current flavour of politics in Alberta, it’s helpful to delve into its past. For most of Alberta’s century of existence, political success was guaranteed to those who managed to keep Albertans united against a common enemy: Ottawa.

Alberta’s disaffection with Ottawa has been an important driver, if not the driver, of the Prairie province’s penchant for single-party politics.

In 1935, 16 years after the United Farmers of Alberta defeated the province’s Liberal party, William Aberhart’s new Social Credit party formed its first government, and it stayed in power for close to four decades. The party modelled an ideological flexibility that was then emulated by Alberta’s Progressive Conservative party.

The Progressive Conservative party leadership successfully navigated Alberta’s shifting character from 1971 until 2015, the year the Alberta NDP’s unlikely victory put an end to a long-standing Progressive Conservative administration.

The loyalty of Albertans towards a single party over prolonged periods has fostered a unique power struggle in provincial politics. Competition has tended to take place within the confines of a party striving to stay in power, rather than on the campaign trail.

In their new book, The Dawn of Competitive Party Politics in Alberta, political scientists Anthony M. Sayers, Royce Koop and David K. Stewart give a comprehensive account of what shapes Alberta’s unique political culture.

“In addition to standard economic and social dimensions,” the authors argue, “provincial politics is often driven by a cultural sense of Alberta exceptionalism manifest in both the alienation from Ottawa and a populist hue. This exceptionalism is rooted in the prairie west as the periphery of a developing Canada struggling to maintain national unity, radically antagonized by its exclusion while reshaped and emboldened by its phenomenal economic and social growth.”

Identifying five distinct phases of partisan competition, the authors bring to the fore another critical feature of Alberta’s politics: the rural-urban divide.

The grassroots, rural United Farmers of Alberta took over an urban elite represented by the Liberal party.

Meanwhile the Social Credit party had its start among religious, rural folk. Although the Socreds gradually adapted to Alberta’s growing urban population, former Progressive Conservative premier Peter Lougheed’s urban appeal earned his party its first government in 1971.

In 2008, the Wildrose party emerged as a far-right alternative with a rural base. It split the conservative vote and delivered Rachel Notley’s NDP victory in 2015.

Notably, ideology has seldom played a prominent role in Alberta politics. Regardless of their position in the political spectrum, Albertans found solace in having a premier fight for their interests in the wider federal context.

Meanwhile, ideological flexibility and resource revenues enabled governments to implement socially progressive programs alongside fiscally conservative policies that favoured private interests.

“Albertans as a group have chosen to support long-running dominant governments to press the same issues of concern within the federation and enhance provincial fiscal power and capacity to resist Ottawa,” write the authors of The Dawn of Competitive Party Politics in Alberta — but they have reasons to believe that change is afoot.

“Although Danielle Smith often emphasizes cultural themes that unify Albertans, the UCP seems to have broken from the PC Party dynasty in fixing itself to a clear ideological position,” they write.

Like her predecessors, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is leveraging populism and western alienation to gain votes. Smith led her government into a divisive referendum that will take place in October, which includes a question on carrying out a binding referendum on Alberta’s secession from Canada.

She’s moving through treacherous terrain, however.

In its 121 years of existence, Alberta has shifted from being a scarcely populated “quasi colony” of Ottawa to the third-largest economy of Canada’s provinces.

The province’s political culture has evolved too, and western alienation may no longer be the key to electoral success.

“As Calgary and Edmonton, along with other cities in the province, grow and diversify, federal-provincial conflict over resources may have less grip on local politics,” Sayers, Koop and Stewart write. “Younger urban voters with a weak connection to the resource sector may not be so susceptible to the politics of alienation and more accepting of various federal social policies.”

Because most Albertans aren’t the socially conservative, individualistic, anti-government group comprising Smith’s base, according to the authors’ analysis, her biggest hurdle come the 2027 general election will be to maintain a united right.

If she succeeds, Alberta’s century of alienation is likely to continue, but if she fails and the United Conservative Party survives, the emergence of a two-party system could very well deliver what Albertans have sought all along.

“The end of the provincial Tory dynasty and the development of competitive party politics at the provincial level,” the authors write, “might be the first step in a longer process of normalizing Alberta’s place in the federation.”

In a recent video call, The Dawn of Competitive Party Politics in Alberta co-author Sayers, a professor at the University of Calgary’s school of public policy, discussed the evolution of Alberta’s distinct political culture, and the factors shaping the Prairie province’s future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Tyee: Unlike other Canadian provinces, Alberta’s relationship with Ottawa has been fraught from the get-go. Why?

Anthony M. Sayers: The core starting point of the book is that Alberta was treated as an internal colony. When Canada purchased Rupert’s Land from the British, they treated the Northwest Territories as an internal colony. It didn’t have a central government for its own particular economic and political purposes, which created a bit of resentment.

So when Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba were constructed, they weren't given all that the other provinces had at the time.

They didn’t have control over their natural resources, their land, nor did they have income taxes, so they relied on the federal government to give them money to do things.

Of course, that created a lot of resentment just in itself, having to go through somebody, but it also meant that any local idea couldn't take off.

Yet Saskatchewan and Manitoba don’t seem to be as mad at Ottawa today as Alberta is.

You find this in Saskatchewan, too. The difference between Saskatchewan and Alberta is very informative. Saskatchewan is not yet powerful enough on the national scene for people to notice, whereas Alberta is. Ottawa can’t ignore Alberta because it has this big oil and gas industry.

Alberta went from a marginal province, with the smallest population and the smallest economy in Canada, to becoming the third-biggest economy, fourth-largest by population. That’s created a lot of friction with Ottawa as it’s moved up the ranks.

But friction is normal in every federation. We make the point in the book that what’s very interesting about federations in general, and Canada in particular, is that all the provinces disagree on everything. The civilizing effect of federation is to say, “We disagree, but we still get enough out of it that we think there’s a common project worth pursuing.”

Canada is also an unusual federation. It’s pretty much the only federation that still doesn’t have a fully common market. Because the provinces are so far apart and are very different, their economies are more connected to the United States than to one another; that allows for freedom to be jealous and resentful of each other, but that’s been the Canadian way.

In other federations, the impulse of negotiating the character of the federation can go into the central parliament. But in Canada, premiers do nearly all of the regional negotiation because the Senate isn’t a representative body.

Provinces have fundamentally different objectives, and what is great about Canada is that we learn to manage it, find a way to work together. Conflict is the first step to co-operation, and I think that’s Canada’s magic sauce.

We accept we’re all different and we’re not going to try and create artificial unity. What we’re going to do is agree that there are real differences, but we can negotiate past them together.

In the book you describe how Alberta’s vision of Canada is one based on regional distinctiveness, rather than an overarching English-French division. How did this affect Alberta’s sense of alienation?

Many people believe that the differences between Alberta and Liberal Ottawa are because it’s Liberal Ottawa, but it’s a division that has deep cultural and political roots we’ve forgotten about.

By looking at the 1910, 1911 census, you can see how different Alberta was from other provinces. Neither French nor English were the dominant cultural groups. So in a sense, Albertans grew up in a different country.

Because there was no dominant cultural group, there was a sort of egalitarianism, and that comes out in different ways. For example, Alberta elected the first women politicians; the first Black lawyer in Canada was from Calgary; Alberta had the first female judge in the British Empire.

On the other side of the ledger was Ottawa, dominated by the Liberal party, which decided that the way to unite Canada was to create bicultural, binational policies. The problem is that the West was never a bicultural, binational country — it was a multicultural country.

Alberta’s resistance to the binational, bicultural vision of Canada is not that they didn’t like Quebec, but that it excluded this other multicultural vision, which later became the way we think of Canada.

Pierre Trudeau in the ’70s realized that the way to join these two visions together was to talk about binationalism within a multicultural framework, adopting the language that was given to him by westerners.

If western provinces did eventually get the recognition they wanted, why have the tensions between Alberta and Ottawa prevailed?

Federalism has this dynamic where units resist the centre. That’s true in all federations.

In Alberta, it became a populist impulse to resist the centre, and that gets repeatedly revived by these battles between Alberta and Ottawa. That impulse sits behind western alienation.

Populism is often a response to what is perceived as outside forces, particularly outside enemy forces. So federalism basically provides that sort of discourse where you can say, “Look, the federal government is not our friend, we have to group together to resist it.”

If you look at the literature on populism, it makes the point that populism nearly always attaches to a stronger ideology. Alberta is populist first and conservative second, but it’s conservative because the conservatives disagree with the Liberal party.

Politicians who want to win find these issues and wind them up to get people to vote for them, and that’s what Alberta politicians did for much of the 20th century — they used Ottawa as a thing to resist and get Albertans to vote for them. Peter Lougheed, Ralph Klein, [William] Aberhart, [Preston] Manning, they were all experts at making the East look evil.

Having a common enemy allowed the Progressive Conservative party to reduce conflict and become a very broad party. They were left and right, rural and urban, north and south. But there are costs to grouping together and pretending that you’re just one thing when obviously we’re not one or two things, but many things. Any complex society has lots of elements.

The cost was a sense of fatalism about the power of the PCs. People who didn’t vote for it believed that their vote would never count, and even people who voted for them assumed the party would always keep winning, so they didn’t worry too much about it.

In most cases, when you get changes in government, you get people saying, “Our term will come, so I can join a party that’s not the government and eventually it will win.” But that wasn’t the case here.

How does the rise of competitive politics, of an ‘alternative route to power,’ as you call it in the book, change these dynamics?

One of the deep stories in the book is that, as Alberta has become important enough that it can’t be ignored anymore, perhaps we can throw off the cloak of one-partyism and allow ourselves to have differences of opinion within the province, and start voting on other dimensions that had been suppressed by populism and alienation.

When we can have disagreements on economic or social policy, parties are incentivized to start populating different policy positions. One party is less able to move across the full terrain of policy and respond to challenges. Two parties give you the maximum increase in the capacity to navigate and negotiate a complex world, creating a system that’s more resilient to change and allows voters to pick different responses to challenges.

We’re not certain this is happening, we don’t have a crystal ball, but if the NDP were to win an election, that would be proof we’ve definitely moved to a new party system. If the UCP stayed around after that, and then won another election, that would be further proof. In some ways, how responsive the federal government will be to Alberta is another test of whether things are moving.