In their own words: Alison Redford and Danielle Smith on why Alberta Tories beat Wildrose

Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, left, and newly re-elected Premier Alison Redford disagree about the role strategic voting may have played in the PC win Monday.

Why the PCs won

Wildrose leader Danielle Smith:
“I think Ms. Redford won her leadership on the basis of getting Liberal and NDP supporters to vote for her in the leadership and clearly she did the same thing tonight. You just have to look at the percentage of the vote for the Liberals and the NDPs to see that it was a successful strategy… I kind of feel like the Saskatchewan Roughriders in that game where they were ahead all the way right until the final bell and then because they had a penalty they ended up losing on a kick off, but this happens from time to time. You do end up thinking you’re going to end up with more seats and obviously Albertans wanted to give us more time to season.”
Premier Alison Redford:
“Last year the Progressive Conservatives had a leadership campaign. We changed leaders and we, as Progressive Conservatives, defined ourselves, what we believe we are, who our candidates are, and what our vision is for the future of this province. And I believe that it’s a great disservice to Albertans to continually go back to these ideologies based on old political stereotypes when I don’t think that is Alberta, and I don’t think that’s the future of Alberta. I’m sure there will be political commentary with respect to [strategic voting] but you’ll know that I said during this campaign that what we were doing as Progressive Conservatives was setting out a vision and plan for the future of this province that we believe is socially progressive and fiscally conservative that allows us to succeed.”

Their pivotal moments

Alison Redford
The TV debate:
“In the debate, that that was the first time Albertans had an opportunity to see all four leaders basically unedited and to hear each leader speak for themselves for a very long time instead of having leaders cast aspersions, or try to misstate what other leaders might think. And from my perspective, after that in the campaign, we very much heard from our candidates that that was a turning point.”
Danielle Smith
When she did not distance her party from two controversial candidates:

‘To me it means that I believe in liberty, I believe in freedom’

“I’ve always called myself a libertarian although most people don’t know what that means. To me it means that I believe in liberty, I believe in freedom and I’ve spent three years talking about my commitment to free speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, economic freedom. And you don’t throw your values overboard just because you have a couple of candidates who cause you political trouble. That’s expedient. I’m not an expedient person. I’m a principled person and it seems to me that it would have been wrong for me to all of the sudden become intolerant of the different viewpoints of some of my religious candidates. And it would have been wrong for me to make a rash decision on a man who is a good man, who I know does not hold racist views, who misspoke. I forgave him, I think his campaign forgave him, but obviously Albertans in his ridings did not. I wouldn’t have done anything different.”

Courtesy: National Post