The province, known for its prolific oil reserves and strong conservative leanings, elected a left-wing government. Not only that, it elected a left-wing government by a landslide.
If you don’t know much about Canadian politics and want to understand how unprecedented this is, it’s useful to think of it as a comparison to Texas. As Bloomberg’s Dave Weigel put it on Twitter, abbreviations extended: “Imagine if Democrats took not only Texas Governor, but supermajority control of [the] Legislature and all state offices. That’s what [Alberta’s election] is like in Canada.”
As it happens, Alberta is “often thought as being the Texas of Canada” — that’s at least according to Ed Whittingham, the executive director of the Pembina Institute, a leading environmental and energy think tank in Canada. And just like oil-rich Texas, oil-rich Alberta is has grown accustomed to having strong conservative governance (the Progressive Conservative party has been in the leadership there for more than four decades).
Now with the votes in and counted for, Whittingham told ThinkProgress that Tuesday’s elections results would likely mean changes for Alberta’s oil country. He put an emphasis on “likely” — based on the left-wing New Democratic Party’s (NDP) policy platform, he said it’s “too early to tell” what they’ll do exactly — but there is hope for change particularly when it comes to mitigating human-caused global warming.
“What we hope they’re going to do is coming out the gate as tackling climate change,” Whittingham said. “That’s going to include somehow regulating the oil sands emissions.”
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There are currently regulations on carbon emissions from Canada’s tar sands reserves, but according to the Pembina institute, they’re very weak. Because of tar sands extraction, Canada’s energy industry recently became the largest producer of climate-change causing greenhouse gases in the country, surpassing transportation for the first time.
Whittingham said he’s hopeful that stronger climate policies will come out of the new NDP government, because tackling climate change is a specific tenet of the party’s platform. Newly elected NDP premier Rachel Notley has said that delaying Alberta’s climate change strategy is ”profoundly irresponsible,” and has said she’d work with other provinces to come up with a more comprehensive strategy to reduce carbon emissions.
Read more at The Texas of Canada’ Just Elected a Left-Wing Government
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