At first glance, the 2008 provincial election suggests that gambles made by the Progressive Conservatives paid off. The party’s choice of Ed Stelmach as leader and the folksy farmer’s decision to enact a new royalty regime played well with voters. The Tories won an increased, overwhelming majority of 72 seats in the 83 member seats in the legislature.

“Ed came in as a populist. His appeal in the Edmonton area and in northern Alberta was in sharp contrast to the polarized camps [of leadership rivals Jim Dinning and Ted Morton],” says Chaldeans Mensah, a Grant MacEwan College political science professor and frequent commentator on Alberta’s political affairs. “He carried this populism into office to some extent. It came out in the form of the changes to the royalty regime. He wanted to do something for the benefit of Albertans, to recapture some of the economic rent from industry.”

Stelmach’s 2006 leadership win over Dinning, Calgary’s favorite, challenged the Alberta business capital’s political power and fueled fears that his party would no longer understand the province’s economic engine. By raising royalties, Stelmach took on Big Oil. The election appeared to show that people in Calgary’s corporate and financial sector had quickly put the conflict behind them. Left-wing critics, and especially the aggressive environmental faction led by Greenpeace, kept on using disparaging protest slogans calling the Tories the best government oil money can buy.

But beneath the placid surface, a barometer of political support – campaign finance – shows the Tories ran into a lasting storm of hard feeling with a big price for annoying the economic elite. Campaign contribution records for the 2008 election reveal several remarkable trends – and most strikingly, a significant decline in oil industry support for the political party that has ruled Alberta for 37 years.
Compulsory party disclosures, filed with Elections Alberta, show corporate campaign donations to the Conservatives shrank from $652,038 for the 2004 election to $384,925 in 2008 – a 41 per cent drop. The bulk of the loss was owed to cuts by Calgary corporations, which contributed nearly $200,000 less in 2008 than in the previous election.

About $60,000 was withdrawn by oil sands developers. Several that previously supported the Tories, such as Suncor and Canadian Natural Resources Ltd., dropped off the list of contributors in the 2008 election.

Some, but not all, of the money shifted over to the Liberal party. Corporate campaign contributions to Alberta’s official opposition rose from $133,033 in the previous election to $214,596 in the 2008 campaign – a 61 per cent jump.

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