And If I Am Elected, I Promise the Formation of a New Party, a Third Party, a Wild Party!

Yes, it's an election-related entry.  From the CBC: Albertans frustrated by lack of attention.

According to the article, Albertans are angry over the fact that since November 29th (the official start of the election campaign), only one party leader (Jim Harris, of the Green Party of Canada) has bothered to make a campaign stop in Alberta.  While I understand that they're feeling neglected and upset, I also think that the party leaders do have better things to do than visit Alberta.

("Better things to do"?  Are you putting down Alberta, Andrew?)

Of course not.  It's just that, given that most commentators are once again predicting a minority government, the leaders' time would be better devoted to campaigning in areas where one party isn't consistently polled as winning between 92 and 100 percent of the seats.  This did, however, get me interested in something:  just how many seats, historically, have parties like the Liberals and the NDP (and the CCF before them) won in Alberta?

You know what that means: history lesson time.  And not just any sort of history lesson, but the best kind: a history lesson dealing with regional politics in Canada.  (I can hear the snores already.)

For this I'll be using the historical election results as posted on Wikipedia.  Wins for the Liberal Party, the NDP, and the CCF go into one tally.  Wins for the Conservative Party (both pre-1943 and post-2002), the Progressive Conservative Party, the Reform Party, the Canadian Alliance, the Social Credit Party, and the New Democracy Party go in another tally.

(As a note: Social Credit is going in that tally for the fact that, upon dissolution, the Western SoCred members joined the PCs under Mulroney, and later the Reform Party.  New Democracy was an umbrella group under which some (but not all) of the SoCred members ran in the 1940 election.)

So, what's the results?  Well, going back to 1935, we find that there were a total of 421 seats in 21 elections.  Of these seats, only 36 (or approximately 8.55%) were won by the Liberals or NDP.  (Of which, 35 were Liberals, 1 was NDP.  The CCF never won any seats in Alberta.)  The remaining 385 seats having been won by the various other parties listed above.

The next question is "Why 1935?  Why not 1908 (the first election in which Alberta was a province)?"  Well, the reason is that, while the 1908 and 1911 elections are easy, it just gets too confusing for the five elections between 1917 and 1930 (inclusive).  Where does the Unionist Party, which was a 1917 wartime alliance of the Conservative Party and some Liberals that ran on the conscription question, fit in?  Or how about the Progressive Party, which won seats in 1921 and 1925?  They had a major national breakthrough in 1921, forming the official opposition, but are traditionally seen as a Western protest party.  When the party failed to run any candidates west of Manitoba in 1925, a large number of the Eastern members allied themselves with the Liberals, running as Liberal-Progressives (or Liberal-Labour-Progressives).  Therefore do they fit in with the Reform Party, on the basis that that was seen early on as a Western protest party, or the Liberals?

We could look at what happened to the Albertan Progressives in order to decide, but that makes things even more confusing.  Following the party's implosion, the Albertan members allied themselves with the United Farmers of Alberta.  Again, a Western protest party, and again that question: do they get lumped with Reform in the tally?  But, upon the formation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (the fore-runner of the NDP), the majority of UFA MPs joined this; so should they be included in the Liberal/NDP tally?  (Of course, upon joining the CCF, all the former-UFA members promptly lost their seats to the SoCreds in the next election, which causes one to consider the motivation of the people voting for them.  (As did the one UFA member who joined the Conservatives.))

Anyways, there you go.  For the curious, the 1908 and 1911 elections are the only ones in which the Liberal Party won the majority of the seats in Alberta.  I have, however, come up with the perfect solution to the initial complaint:  have Gilles Duceppe visit Alberta.  That way they can't say that only one party leader has visited them, and he'll have just as much of an effect on the Alberta outcome as if any of the other leaders had.