Why being boring could work for Rachel Notley

Every day during Alberta’s election campaign, Maclean’s correspondent Jason Markusoff is tracking platform promises, bozo eruptions and any other notable news from the hustings. Sign up for the Maclean’s politics insider to get Markusoff’s inside track in your inbox every morning. Rachel Notley promised to expand the NDP’s current $25-a-day daycare pilot project to every daycare and dayhome in Alberta, to dramatically ease the burden of some of Canada’s costliest child care (economic analysis of plan here, here and here). At an annual cost of $400 million by 2023, and offered province-wide (within a $50-billion provincial budget), it’s the most costly and likely ambitious platform piece she’ll  announce all campaign long, after a few less flashy first-week election pledges to add more long-term care beds, Calgary flood protection and incentives for petrochemical and oil upgrading projects. In each case, she’s promising nothing new—just more of what the NDP has already brought Alberta. Even the $25 day-care plan is a fuller realization of something Notley promised in the 2015 NDP platform. An underdog incumbent government doesn’t tend to run a more-of-the-same campaign. So what gives? Alberta’s budget deficit, currently at $6.9-billion, is a major political albatross in the once debt-free province—the NDP claims they can balance by 2023, which leaves them little wiggle room for the sort of multibillion-dollar goodies that Liberal or NDP governments like to offer in elections. Secondly, the NDP wishes to come across as fiscally pragmatic and stable up against a fiscally hawkish and reformist United Conservative Party, and know they’ll lose in Alberta if they hew too close to New Democrat spend-happy stereotypes. Notley even pitches child care as an economy booster. The NDP is also taking care not to distract  from a bigger message it is pushing: attacks on Kenney’s character, his social conservatism and the rogue candidates he’s had to distance himself from. Notley’s side doesn’t want the ballot question to be about the economy (as Kenney does) and seems content not to wage a battle on whose policy book is most inspiring. They’d rather point to how scary and menacing their opponent appears. If Notley emerges as the kinda boring alternative?  Fine by the NDP.