Who do Albertans think they are?

This column is an opinion from Jared Wesley, an associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Election outcomes are often used to gauge the mood of a community. Last week's provincewide municipal elections in Alberta were no different. 

Headlines emerging from the Oct. 18 vote were reminiscent of Naheed Nenshi's election as Canada's first Muslim mayor, Alison Redford's victory as the first woman to become premier, and the rise of Rachel Notley's NDP. 

All of these events challenged conventional notions of Alberta as a "wild west" province dominated by white, conservative, Christian men.

These traditional images are incongruent with the widespread victories by progressive and women candidates in the 2021 municipal elections in general, and the election of first-generation Punjabi immigrants to the mayor's chair in Alberta's two largest cities in particular.  

For the first time ever, Calgary's mayor and two-thirds of Edmonton's new City Council are women. Medicine Hat elected its first woman mayor, and she's joined by women occupying more than half of the seats on city council. Edmonton's most conservative mayoral candidate and the six candidates he endorsed all went down to defeat on election night. So, too, did Calgary's top right-wing mayoral candidate.  

What do these recent events and others tell us about Alberta's political culture — those unspoken assumptions and values that remain buried below the surface of political life in the province? Are the days of Alberta's wild west cowboy culture behind us?  

The short answer is no, or at least not yet. Our collective culture remains fixed in a cowboy mentality that dates back generations before many of us settled this province. But our political orientations as individuals are increasingly out of step with that image. This disjunction creates a political identity crisis, of sorts — one that has become clearer, if not been exacerbated, by other crises we've encountered in recent years.

Over the course of the pandemic, our Common Ground research team has engaged thousands of Albertans, learning about their backgrounds, political perspectives, and struggles. Through our surveys and focus groups one thing has become abundantly clear — the province appears poised for a major political shift. Yet the cowboy myth remains firmly embedded in the minds of Albertans from all walks of life and all parts of the political spectrum. So the political culture remains fixed in its wild west origins.

According to our research, a gulf has emerged between how Albertans describe the dominant forms of politics in the province, and how they feel about politics on a personal level.  

When asked which values animate provincial politics, most Albertans continue to describe the dominance of wild west notions, like populism, western alienation, settler colonialism, frontier masculinity, bootstrap individualism, and the primacy of prosperity doctrine (hard work produces wealth). 

This becomes clearest when we ask our focus group participants to draw an Albertan who has the most influence over politics in this province. The resulting caricatures most often depict roughnecks, cowboys and farmers. In short, Albertans' perception of the typical Albertan remains static, gendered, racialized, and rooted in a "wild west" past.  

When asked about their own political preferences, however, the average Albertan is far less conservative than this image portrays. 

Albertans tend to be centrist, even progressive, when it comes to social issues like health care and inclusion. And socio-demographically, the province has shifted even further away from this "cowboy" myth, becoming one of Canada's most urbanized and ethnically diverse provinces.