Some British Columbians are looking pensively across the Rockies and wondering if the brush fire that started on the other side late last year can spread.
The Wildrose Alliance was a curiosity in Alberta politics. But in the space of three months, it has won a byelection, found a bright, articulate new leader, poached two MLAs from Premier Ed Stelmach's Conservative Party and opened a remarkable lead in the polls over the Tories.
The upstarts got seven per cent of the vote and zero seats in the spring election.
Today, a poll indicates they enjoy 39 per cent support, 14 points ahead of the Conservatives.
If you believe the polls, an election today would see a 39-year-old former newspaper columnist named Danielle Smith become the new premier of Alberta, leading a party that's barely two years old.
Leaving aside the fact that Alberta has sunk to such depths that it's relying on a newspaper columnist for leadership, it's a remarkable development.
Which leaves people here wondering if sudden upheaval on the political scene can spread west, just as the mountain pine beetles spread east?
Sure it can. But it's unlikely to arrive in the same form it did in Alberta. As others have noted, there aren't many provinces where a right-wing government can be outflanked by an even more right-wing alternative.
The closest thing B.C. has to the Wildrose Alliance is the B.C. Conservative Party. It mustered a couple of dozen candidates last spring and got two per cent of the vote.
The party's big problem is leadership. There isn't any. Conservatives have spent more time taking each other to court over who leads the party than they have actually building it. They were last in the news during the summer, when the leader and most of the board quit after losing the latest round in some argument no one else in the world cares about.
And regardless of who is in control of the party at the moment, there are no successors on the horizon who give any hope of leading the Conservatives anywhere. In fact, there are indications things will get worse for them.
Even if some entirely new outfit came along, there's limited room on the right for growth.
What about an upstart from some other point on the spectrum?
The various other fringe parties don't have much on the go, either. When it comes to imagining a new force making a breakthrough, the Greens have been leading contenders for a generation.
But it's never happened. Their act is getting a little old.
The last time a fresh new leader led a party to a sudden breakthrough in B.C. was 19 years ago. Ironically, it was the B.C. Liberals, under Gordon Wilson.
There are some similarities between political landscapes in the two provinces.
Stelmach and Premier Gordon Campbell both won elections last year with ease. Both went into slumps soon after. Both have their fair share of unpopular policies. And both the Alberta Conservatives (39 years in power) and the B.C. Liberals (12 years by the end of this term) are vulnerable to that most effective of all campaign slogans -- "It's time for a change."
That's one of the cards Smith is playing fairly adroitly.
The other one is the notion that the government has grown autocratic and stopped listening to the people.
"We see in these waning years of Alberta's Progressive Conservative era how badly leaders and caucuses behave when they are beyond any requirement to account regularly for their decisions," Smith said in her leadership victory speech last October.
B.C. Liberals have lost a lot of support since the May election. The pool of non-New Democrat voters who are disenchanted with them is a lot bigger than it used to be.
If there was a fresh new face out there chanting "time for a change" and railing about restoring democracy, a lot of people would be listening.
But there isn't. Upheaval is always possible, but it would have to somehow happen within the existing parties in B.C. It doesn't look like there's much room for an upstart here.
lleyne@tc.canwest.com
