1959 жылғы Альберта провинциясының сайлауы

General election in Alberta, Canada

The 1959 Alberta general election was held on June 18, 1959, to elect members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. Ernest C. Manning, in his fifth election as party leader and provincial premier, led the Social Credit Party to its seventh consecutive term in government, with 55% of the popular vote, and all but four of the sixty five seats in the legislature. Social Credit was also helped by a split in the opposition vote: whereas in the 1955 election, opponents were largely united behind the Liberal Party, in this election the vote was divided between the Liberals and the resurgent Progressive Conservative Party under the leadership of Cam Kirby, won almost 15% of the popular vote, placing ahead of the Liberals whose leader, Grant MacEwan lost his Calgary seat. The Tories and Liberals each won only one seat in the legislature while the Alberta CCF was shut out of the legislature for the first time in seventeen years. The other two opposition seat were taken by a Coalition candidate in Banff and an Independent Social Credit er, both with strong local support.

Under an Act passed in 1956, Alberta's MLAs were now elected through First past the post voting. Previous to this election, the Social Credit government had done away with the Instant runoff voting system in use in the rural constituencies, and the Single Transferable Vote system in Edmonton and Calgary, both of which had been in place since 1924. The move was made, the government claimed, to prevent the waste of votes caused by votes being declared spoiled due to unsatisfactory ballot marking, to bring Alberta in line with the other provinces who were using the First past the post systems, and to stop what the government called a conspiracy by the opposition parties to gang up on the SC government. The cancellation of STV and AV also standardized and simplified voting results across the province. Under single transferable vote and instant runoff voting, final results would take up to five days to count the necessary vote transfers, before the last seat in a multiple member district, Edmonton nor Calgary, was declared filled. (Manning always knew he was elected only hours after the polls closed due to his high vote count on the First Count.) The delay was especially large in the Edmonton, which elected seven members in 1955. The 1955 election had produced a large opposition in the Legislature (large by Alberta standards anyway). Besides Liberals, Conservatives and CCF ers electing MLAs in proportion to their numbers in the cities, the government had lost a few members in rural constituencies due to IRV, when they had received the largest portion of the vote in the constituency in the First Count (but not a majority) but were not elected to the seat due to another candidate receiving many vote transfers and eventually accumulating a majority of the vote themselves. The cancellation of IRV system in the rural districts was meant to prevent this in the future. The cancellation of STV in the cities gave the government a windfall of seats as well. SC candidates captured all the seats in Edmonton and all but one in Calgary although getting only 48 percent of the Edmonton city vote and only 54 percent of the Calgary vote.

PartyParty Leader# ofcandidatesSeatsPopular Vote1955Elected% Change#%% Change Social Credit Ernest C. Manning64 37 61 +64.9% 230,283 55.69% +9.27% Progressive Conservative Cam Kirby603 1 −66.7% 98,730 23.88% +14.69% Grant MacEwan 51 15 1 −93.9% 57,408 13.88% −17.25%Independent Social Credit 2 1 1 2,393 0.58% −0.14% Frank Gainer 1 1 1 2,279 0.55% −0.66% Co operative Commonwealth Floyd Albin Johnson 32 2 −100% 17,899 4.33% −3.91%Independent 2 1 −100% 3,640 0.88% −0.25% 4 884 0.21% −0.69%Total 216 61 65 +6.6% 413,516 100%  Source: Elections Alberta