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In the Alberta Party’s third election since forming as a very Twitter-savvy group of forward-looking pragmatists remain the Party of Perpetual Tomorrow. They still struggle to define themselves to the public—it takes half of the pamphlet that came to my house to merely describe what the party is “If you say you’re of the right or of the left, they know what you mean by that,” Mandel says over coffee in Calgary.
Mandel gets a lectern at the leader’s debate this week, but so does David Khan of the similarly centrist Liberals. That’s one more voice the Alberta Party will have to scream to be heard over, in an already incredibly noisy campaign. No stopping Notley’s oil train program Jason Kenney may call the NDP government’s plan to buy rail cars for oil shipments a $3.7-billion “boondoggle” and vow to shred the contracts. But further signals emerged Monday that the program, announced a month before the election call, is too far down the track for him to do anything. Reuters reports:
Further reading: Don Braid on Notley’s play for Calgary: “Notley hasn’t been speaking directly and emotionally to the deep anger many Calgarians feel. Her habitual tone of steady competence seemed a bit distant. She didn’t appear to be taking Calgary’s troubles personally. That changed Monday when she talked about the city and the Trans Mountain pipeline.”