Plenty of verbal jabs were traded during the Leaders Debate in Edmonton on Thursday, but none stung enough to sway voters, say political observers.
“With debates, you judge them like you do a boxing match, so there was no knockout last night,” said Marc Henry, president of ThinkHQ Public Affairs.
“And I don’t think, frankly, the debate moved a lot of voters one way or the other. So then you’ve got to go to the scorecards, and the scorecards are based upon, what are the expectations of each of the leaders and what did they need to do last night. Three of the four did exactly what they needed to do and one didn’t.”
NDP Leader Rachel Notley, said Henry, didn’t perform up to expectations in his view.
As the sitting premier, making her the defending champion in boxing parlance, Notley is trailing in the polls but has gained some momentum in the first two weeks of the campaign, adding extra pressure, said Henry.
“Rachel Notley needed to have the same sort of performance that she did in 2015, she needed to be the last person standing on that stage looking like a premier, didn’t happen,” he said.
Also on stage were United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney, Alberta Party Leader Stephen Mandel and Liberal Leader David Khan.
A recent poll by Janet Brown Opinion Research suggests the UCP are a full 19 points ahead of the NDP among decided voters. But that same poll also suggested the province is divided into three camps: Edmonton, Calgary, and the rural areas outside the province’s two major cities.
The NDP lead by seven percentage points in Edmonton while the UCP lead by 21 points in Calgary and 43 points in the rural areas. Traditionally, a party needs to win two of those three to form government.
Duane Bratt, a professor of political science at Mount Royal University, felt Mandel, whose Alberta Party had four per cent support in the recent poll, had the best performance during the debate.
“He would criticize Kenney, then he would criticize Notley, then he would say something about what the Alberta Party would do,” he said.
“I thought David Khan was too focused on the Alberta Party than he was on the other two.”
Freedom Conservative Party Leader Derek Fildebrandt wasn’t invited to participate in the debate as he wasn’t elected under the party’s banner, but that didn’t stop him holding his own event, streaming answers to the questions on social media.
“You should have the option to decide who you want to vote for, not who the media and other political parties say you have the right to vote for,” he said.
Fildebrandt was elected as a Wildrose MLA in 2015, which merged with the Progressive Conservatives to form the UCP. He was then ejected from the UCP after pleading guilty to a hunting charge of illegally possessing an animal, for which he was fined $3,000, and renting out his taxpayer-funded condo in Edmonton through Airbnb.
At the time, Kenney said Fildebrandt had failed to disclose the hunting charges to party officials.
Voters in Alberta head to the polls on April 16.
