NDP's Notley seen as better able to respond in a disaster than UCP's Smith: Vote Compass

Danielle Smith took to the air on Friday to survey the enormity of the wildfires raging in northwest Alberta that's forced thousands from their homes.  

Following the helicopter tour, she held a press conference to update reporters and spoke about the devastation she'd witnessed. 

Earlier in the day, Smith tweeted photos of a fire station visit in the County of Grande Prairie. 

Politics is performance — and Smith is walking a high-wire tightrope of sorts, trying to lead the province in what she calls an "unprecedented crisis" — and campaigning for reelection in a competitive race, while also not appearing to take political advantage of the fires consuming her prairie province's grasslands and boreal forest.

Last Thursday, at a Calgary campaign announcement about affordability for Alberta's pensioners, an earnest-looking Smith first announced that 300 soldiers would help support fighting "these unprecedented fires," before pledging to cut fees for personal registry services, camping and medical driving exams for seniors by 25 per cent.

Undoubtedly, handling the province-wide state of emergency declaration and electioneering  requires deft political skill. 

"There's no question it's an opportunity," said Lori Williams with Mount Royal University's department of policy studies, "but it's also potentially a liability."

Vote Compass data suggests that when the wildfires started, Smith was at a disadvantage politically with many respondents preferring her rival for Alberta's top job  in charge during a natural disaster.

Vote Compass is an online tool developed by a team of political scientists designed to help users understand how their political views line up with the parties running in Alberta's general election.

Vote Compass respondents prefer Notley over Smith during disaster

Vote Compass users were asked on May 9-11 who they thought would do the best job in the face of a natural disaster.

Almost half of respondents — 49 per cent — picked  NDP Leader Rachel Notley over Smith as who would do the best job responding to a natural disaster. 

Only 15 per cent prefer Smith in charge of Alberta in a natural disaster, according to the weighted results of about 3,000 people who responded to Vote Compass. 

Thirty-six per cent didn't know.

While 81 per cent of NDP supporters think Notley would do a good job responding to a natural disaster, only 52 per cent of UCP voters think Smith is the best person for the job in a crisis.

Forty-four per cent of UCP supporters who used CBC News' voter engagement tool, in fact, didn't know who would do the best job responding to a natural disaster in Alberta.

"There are serious questions being asked about Danielle Smith's abilities and competence," said Williams in an interview with CBC News on Thursday.

But Williams added the crisis presents an opportunity for Smith to "demonstrate a greater degree of competence and ability to respond" to a natural disaster.

Notably, slightly more than four in 10 (41 per cent) of Vote Compass users give the governing United Conservative Party a somewhat good or very good grade for handling the fires burning now.

About the same number — 43 per cent — think the UCP is doing a somewhat or very poor job handling the response to the out-of-control fires ravaging northern Alberta.

Fifteen per cent said they didn't know. 

"There have been some positives in the way that Daniel Smith has dealt with the crisis," said Williams.

Critics, however, charge the UCP leader has also misstepped, including holding a campaign event on the same day the province declared a state of emergency.

But others praise Smith's words and actions responding to the fires. 

The view from a UCP supporter

Depending on the winds, smoke from the fires can drift over Hayes Braaten's home in Grande Prairie in northwest Alberta.

So far the air quality has not been "bad at all."

"There was one day here that was really bad and that was it," said Braaten on Friday.

The UCP supporter — and member of CBC News' citizens' panel during this provincial election — gives Smith the thumbs up for her handling of the fires.

"She seems to have a pretty good grasp on the nature of everything," said Braaten, a welding inspector in the oil and gas industry.

Braaten contrasts Smith's "good" response to the current fires to Notley's "bad" handling of  the Fort McMurray wildfires that forced the evacuation of 80,000 people.

"Things could have been handled a lot better than they were, and unfortunately they weren't," he said. 

Alberta voters will naturally make comparisons between Notley and Smith's response to the fires seven years apart. 

Comparing Smith to Notley's handling of the Fort McMurray Fire 

Notley received high marks from many for how she handled the wildfires seven years ago this May.

Smith, at the time, even called the then NDP premier's communication "brilliant" in comparison to how the Progressive Conservative government of Alison Redford handled the 2013 floods around Calgary that forced more than 100,000 people from their homes and racked up as much as $6 billion in financial losses.

Williams suggests it will take time for voters to sort out their comparison between Notley in 2016 and Smith in 2023. 

"I think the jury is out on… the overall judgment," added Williams.

And there's still plenty of wobbly tightrope for Smith to cross in the coming days.

Possible missteps and controversies

Already some of the 29,000 Albertans displaced by the fires have blasted the provincial government, upset about the lack of information about their homes, livestock and interruptions to critical services.

Some Albertans have even disobeyed evacuation orders, putting Smith in a tough spot because of her vocal opposition to public health restrictions during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"She's trying to say that it is justified and necessary and people should follow the [fire] orders when she has actually been on the other side of suggesting that people ought not to follow the government," said Williams.

As if that wasn't enough, the UCP also took heat from the news media's spotlight  last week for its recent budget cuts to fighting wildfires.

Critics question whether the government's cuts played a role in exacerbating the fires consuming much of the province's forest and grasslands now.

A former member of the province's disbanded Wildland Firefighter Rappel Program flamed controversy, this week suggesting the governing party's 2019 budget-cutting decision to get rid of the firefighters who repelled from helicopters to get at wildfires in their early stages could have been the "difference-makers" in fighting the current wildfires. 

The fire could also help Smith's reelection campaign, focusing voters' minds on the fire, and not the campaign and the controversies that dog Smith. 

The fire's election effect 

Only two weeks remain before Alberta voters go to the polls.

Much of the campaigns so for was consumed with media and public attention directed at the wildfires.

This week, as the fires raged, Smith apologized for past comments where she suggested the 75 per cent of the Albertans who received a vaccine fell for the "charms of a tyrant," and specifically referenced Adolf Hitler.

Newscasts, however, led with the fire.

And fortunately for Smith, according to Williams, most voters have not started paying close attention to the election yet.  

But as election day grows near, voters traditionally tend to focus their minds on who to vote for.

"It's too early, I think, to tell how [the forest fires] and the attention paid to them … how that's actually going to affect the election outcome," said Williams. 

How the Vote Compass data is gathered and interpreted:

Developed by a team of social and statistical scientists from Vox Pop Labs, Vote Compass is a civic engagement application offered in Alberta exclusively by CBC Radio-Canada. The findings in this story are based on 2,947 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from May 9 to May 11, 2023.

Unlike online opinion polls, respondents to Vote Compass are not pre-selected. Similar to opinion polls, however, the data is a non-random sample from the population and has been weighted in order to approximate a representative sample.

Vote Compass data has been weighted by gender, age, education, region and partisanship to ensure the sample's composition reflects that of the actual population of Alberta according to census data and other population estimates.