In Danielle Smith era, Premier Notley's tenure now looks peachy

EDITOR'S NOTE: CBC News and The Road Ahead commissioned this public opinion research in mid-October, starting six days after Danielle Smith won the leadership of the United Conservative Party.

As with all polls, this one is a snapshot in time. 

It's a surefire applause line, at least at a United Conservative Party function: "Alberta cannot afford Rachel Notley and her gang of socialists and ideologues who want to take us back to the past." It came from Brian Jean, the UCP leadership candidate turned jobs minister, as he introduced to last month's party convention Danielle Smith, who'd defeated Jean and then rewarded him.

Smith's keynote speech took its own swipes at the "socialist NDP" and pumped her own party's performance "after the train wreck of an economy handed to them by Rachel Notley."

Voters have already rendered judgment once on how much of a wreck Notley was as premier, and in 2019 it wasn't kind. For the first time, Albertans dumped a government after one term.

Notley is giving Albertans an unusual chance. Never before has an Alberta premier been punted, but then dusted themselves off and tried again.

And guess what? Albertans now think highly of the Premier Notley they had from 2015 to 2019. A clear majority — 55 per cent — approve of her performance, while only 42 per cent disapprove in retrospect, according to the latest Janet Brown Opinion Research poll done for CBC News.

Perhaps the greater clarity of hindsight improves the view of the NDP premier among Albertans, of whom fewer than one-third voted NDP last election. Or perhaps it's the benefit of knowing what the alternatives are like — especially if they leave a more acrid taste in the mouth.

Compare this to Albertans' rear-view of Notley's successor, Jason Kenney: 38 per cent approve of his tenure, and 60 per cent don't.

While that's below the approval of Notley's premiership, it's still a bump over Kenney's approval rating throughout the final year of his reign, according to the Angus Reid Institute's tracking.

There could be a couple reasons for that. One, is that UCP supporters may be less miffed at him now that he's powerless; 64 per cent of them now think well of Kenney's job as premier, which compares to the anemic 51 per cent leadership review score that spelled his doom. (Or, it highlights a gap between what the card-carrying party activists want versus the party's wider voter base.)

It may also signal that, now that Albertans are out of the restriction and order phase of the COVID pandemic, they are more likely to believe Kenney's argument that he was faced with only terrible choices — between imposing business closures and vaccine rules, or letting a province's intensive care units collapse under pandemic waves turned tsunamis.

Albertans may apply that sober reconsideration to the Notley years, when tanking oil prices drove a generationally-bad recession — which in the heat of the moment is easier to blame on the sitting premier.

But from 2022's vantage, we can see more of the picture. That includes oil price charts that show West Texas Intermediate below $75 US per barrel throughout Notley's tenure. It's been much higher over the last year as the provincial economy has been humming, surpassing $100 US for a while.