In Danielle Smith era, Premier Notley’s tenure now looks peachy

EDITOR’S NOTE: CBC News and The Road Ahead commissioned this public opinion research in mid-October, starting six days after Danielle Smith won the leadership of the United Conservative Party.

As with all polls, this one is a snapshot in time. 

It’s a surefire applause line, at least at a United Conservative Party function: “Alberta cannot afford Rachel Notley and her gang of socialists and ideologues who want to take us back to the past.” It came from Brian Jean, the UCP leadership candidate turned jobs minister, as he introduced to last month’s party convention Danielle Smith, who’d defeated Jean and then rewarded him.

Smith’s keynote speech took its own swipes at the “socialist NDP” and pumped her own party’s performance “after the train wreck of an economy handed to them by Rachel Notley.”

Voters have already rendered judgment once on how much of a wreck Notley was as premier, and in 2019 it wasn’t kind. For the first time, Albertans dumped a government after one term.

Notley is giving Albertans an unusual chance. Never before has an Alberta premier been punted, but then dusted themselves off and tried again.

And guess what? Albertans now think highly of the Premier Notley they had from 2015 to 2019. A clear majority — 55 per cent — approve of her performance, while only 42 per cent disapprove in retrospect, according to the latest Janet Brown Opinion Research poll done for CBC News.

Perhaps the greater clarity of hindsight improves the view of the NDP premier among Albertans, of whom fewer than one-third voted NDP last election. Or perhaps it’s the benefit of knowing what the alternatives are like — especially if they leave a more acrid taste in the mouth.

Compare this to Albertans’ rear-view of Notley’s successor, Jason Kenney: 38 per cent approve of his tenure, and 60 per cent don’t.

While that’s below the approval of Notley’s premiership, it’s still a bump over Kenney’s approval rating throughout the final year of his reign, according to the Angus Reid Institute’s tracking.

There could be a couple reasons for that. One, is that UCP supporters may be less miffed at him now that he’s powerless; 64 per cent of them now think well of Kenney’s job as premier, which compares to the anemic 51 per cent leadership review score that spelled his doom. (Or, it highlights a gap between what the card-carrying party activists want versus the party’s wider voter base.)

It may also signal that, now that Albertans are out of the restriction and order phase of the COVID pandemic, they are more likely to believe Kenney’s argument that he was faced with only terrible choices — between imposing business closures and vaccine rules, or letting a province’s intensive care units collapse under pandemic waves turned tsunamis.

Albertans may apply that sober reconsideration to the Notley years, when tanking oil prices drove a generationally-bad recession — which in the heat of the moment is easier to blame on the sitting premier.

But from 2022’s vantage, we can see more of the picture. That includes oil price charts that show West Texas Intermediate below $75 US per barrel throughout Notley’s tenure. It’s been much higher over the last year as the provincial economy has been humming, surpassing $100 US for a while.

Political watchers could consider these generous memories of Notley’s premiership as indication there’s a considerable pool of people who are willing to vote for Notley in next spring’s election, or at least consider it. If you liked her last time as premier, logic suggests you might like the idea of her returning to that job.

With that in mind, consider the data’s other encouraging signs for the NDP. The majority approval of 2015-2019 Notley spans across both men and women, and all age brackets. Past Notley has 54 per cent approval in electorally-pivotal Calgary, and 45 per cent in Otherland (Alberta outside the two largest cities). In both cases, that’s higher than Kenney.

Of course, he won’t be on the ballot; Danielle Smith will be. CBC has already reported that the Janet Brown poll shows that 54 per cent of Albertans are unimpressed with her, compared to only 35 per cent who feel that way about Notley.

Let’s carve up these numbers in a different way. The survey asked people to rank their impression of the premier and the official opposition leader on a scale of zero to 10.

Thirty-four percent of those respondents gave Smith a zero — in other words, she’s politically dead to them. Another 35 per cent ranked her between one and five, making that a 69 per cent disapproval rating.

Notley, by comparison, scores a zero from 20 per cent — one-fifth of the public, compared to Smith’s one-third. She gets an impression between one and five from 30 per cent.

In Otherland, where Smith cannot afford to lose political favour, the new premier got a zero from more respondents than Notley, and a score between six and 10 from 30 per cent, compared to Notley’s 40 per cent.

You may find the term Otherland dumb or grating, or to be “othering” Albertans outside Calgary and Edmonton. But we got a stark reminder this week that we need a better umbrella term than “rural.” It came in the byelection that Smith won in Brooks–Medicine Hat.

Smith won comfortably overall, but a geographical breakdown shows that she rocked the small towns and county bits of the riding, while NDP candidate Gwendoline Dirk prevailed in the vast majority of polls within Medicine Hat.

Alberta’s reality is more urban than rural. More of the province’s population lives in the cul-de-sacs and crescents and old avenues and streets that look like Medicine Hat, than along the regional highways and township roads.

Extrapolate the byelection results to other urban, suburban and rural areas in Alberta, and Notley becomes premier again. Which, Albertans believe, wasn’t such a bad thing last time.

The CBC News random survey of 1,200 Albertans was conducted using a hybrid method between Oct. 12 and 30, 2022, by Edmonton-based Trend Research under the direction of Janet Brown Opinion Research. The sample is representative of regional, age and gender factors. The margin of error is +/- 2.8 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. For subsets, the margin of error is larger.

The survey used a hybrid methodology that involved contacting survey respondents by telephone and giving them the option of completing the survey at that time, at another more convenient time, or receiving an email link and completing the survey online. Trend Research contacted people using a random list of numbers, consisting of half landlines and half cellphone numbers. Telephone numbers were dialed up to five times at five different times of day before another telephone number was added to the sample. The response rate among valid numbers (i.e. residential and personal) was 16.3 per cent.