I am finally getting caught up with non election related work and have slowly read through much of the comments and figured it was time to add a few of my own.
To start with, I have been involved in the Wildrose party for about three years now. I attended the initial meeting to setup a constituency association in my riding and grew my role within the party as it grew. Going back three or four years I was annoyed with what I saw as the PC party slowly moving to the left. From my perspective, the only competition that the PC party had was on the left so that was the direction of most of their criticism. They want to be the inclusive party so they started crafting policy to satisfy and quiet the criticism from the left. My thoughts at the time were that Alberta needed a strong opposition party on the right to make the public aware of the fiscal irresponsibility of many PC government decisions.
Of course we ran the campaign to win every seat, and many people, myself included, inside and outside the party began to believe the polls and come to envision a majority government being announced Monday night. Absolutely, I was disappointed with the results last night, we had some great candidates and friends who worked really hard and came up short. That said, I look forward to having the WRA sit in the official opposition seat. For the next four years we will have 17 great candidates watching over the PC government, working with them and hopefully successfully pressuring them to keep the spending under control.
I have some of the same fears as Captain about the direction of the next four years and know that if they come to pass than the WRA should have a cakewalk in the next election. But I am an Albertan first and foremost, I would rather have the PC's run a fiscally responsible term and a tougher fight on our hands in the next election.
On the election itself I think that 35% of the popular vote is a pretty great achievement. Additionally, there were several ridings where the WRA lost by a few hundred votes leaving the election very close. The weekend before the election I was at a professional organization meeting and almost all of the election talk was centered around Huntsberger and Leach. I agree with FL that they should have stepped down themselves rather than have the leader remove an individual who was properly elected by the local riding CA. Going forward, I will be attending our AGM in the fall and will be voting and speaking against any social conservative policy (as has been done successfully in the past).
Sorry if it is a bit ling winded, I have been thinking on my response for a while.
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