Conservative Party merger alters landscape in Canada’s oil patch

Bloomberg

The merger of Alberta’s two main conservative parties creates a new political force in the heart of Canada’s oil patch that threatens to unseat Premier Rachel Notley and kill the province’s carbon tax.
Members of the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties voted to create the United Conservative Party. Combined, those
parties hold 30 of 87 districts, though they received 52 percent of the vote in the last election.
In recent polls each has outpaced Notley’s New Democratic Party, which won a surprise majority in 2015 and benefited heavily from a split among right-leaning voters in the province with Canada’s highest median household income. The next election
is due in 2019.
For the NDP, unification “is their worst-case scenario,” Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said in an interview. While an improving economy or a divide over social policies could still help Notley hold power, “a unified conservative party at this stage would be tough to beat.”
Some 95.4 percent of Wildrose members who voted backed the merger, while it won 95 percent support from the PCs, according to the results announced.

CARBON TAX
While the merger agreement doesn’t specify a plan to repeal the carbon tax, its key figures have all campaigned against it. Notley’s carbon measures include a hard cap on emissions from Alberta’s oil sands, the world’s third-largest proven oil reserve, though the province isn’t near its self-imposed cap. Repeal of that will set up a collision course with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who has imposed a minimum carbon price nationally as of 2018.
Alberta is Canada’s heaviest carbon emitter, though only its fourth-most populous, and a
frequent target of environmental and anti-oil campaigns.
“I’m not convinced that the carbon tax will disappear, and for
evidence of that, all you have to do is look south of the border with repeal-and-replace of Obamacare,” Bratt said. “Once you bring in a program and it runs for a couple of years, it is tough to get rid of.”
The parties had also pledged to balance the budget and slash Alberta’s ratio of debt to nominal gross domestic product, which has more than doubled in the past
two years, to 13.8 percent from 6.1 percent, with the slump in oil prices. Alberta draws 8 percent
of its revenue from oil and other non-renewable resources, down from 18 percent just three
years earlier, government budget documents show.