CALGARY—After a short four years, the orange wave that swept into Alberta in 2015 was replaced Tuesday night by a sea of United Conservative Party blue.UCP Leader Jason Kenney — a former federal cabinet minister who entered provincial politics three years ago with a plan to reunite Alberta’s conservatives — will be the province’s 18th premier. The fledgling party, created by a merger of the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose in 2017, surged towards a majority government, toppling NDP seats in just about every corner of the province.Tuesday night’s election ends what turned out to be a brief NDP era in Alberta. Many saw the party’s surprise 2015 victory as an accident, a reaction to the entitlement and cronyism of the previous 44-year Progressive Conservative dynasty and the result of vote-splitting between two solid right-wing parties.The centre-right Alberta Party and Alberta Liberals seemed unlikely to take any seats Tuesday night, meaning the province will have just two parties in the legislature. Alberta’s past few provincial elections have been marked by last-minute twists. But the UCP’s decisive victory shows that conservative Alberta is back — and, perhaps, that it never really left.On Tuesday night, the UCP dominated rural Alberta as expected, taking even key northern ridings the NDP had hoped to hold. A few ridings in Edmonton and Calgary were too close to call as of 9:30 p.m., but by that point the UCP had convincingly overtaken the NDP in most of Calgary, all but erasing the New Democrats’ hold on the city. Read more:Blue UCP wave sweeps Alberta, NDP hangs on in EdmontonUCP faces discord if it forms government while under investigation, says professorIs a foreign-funded campaign the reason for Alberta’s pipeline woes?The outcome was widely predicted by polls ever since the UCP’s creation.The weeks and months ahead will likely be a period of upheaval in Alberta as Ke ...
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