All political eyes in Alberta were firmly on Red Deer yesterday, as the governing Progressive Conservative party voted on whether or not to hold a review of Premier Ed Stelmach's leadership.
Long prior to the vote, former Premier Ralph Klein had suggested that Stelmach should resign if he mustered less than 70% support from the party.
Stelmach not only met that margin, but exceeded it, with 77% of the PC faithful supporting his leadership.
Some have speculated that it was uncertainty over party leadership that had harmed the Tories in recent polls, and that the party's resounding support of Stelmach will boost the party's fortunes.
So if Stelmach successfully fending off a leadership review may reclaim some of the Tories' lost polling share, one may wonder what, precisely, this means for the province's newest rising star, the Wildrose Alliance's Danielle Smith.
It seems Smith has provided the answer in advance. The answer is "absolutely nothing".
"From our perspective it doesn't really matter whether he gets 51% or 91%," Smith previously promised. "We have a mandate to move forward building our party and we continue to see membership sales grow in our party."
For Smith, all Stelmach's win really means is that she knows which leader she'll be preparing to face in Alberta's next election.
"So we're going to continue on building our constituency associations, finding good local candidates, because when they do call an election sometime in the next two years we want to be ready to run a full slate of candidates so that we can challenge them for government," she said.
Even the encouraging news offered by the most recent poll -- in which her party had closed the gap with the Progressive Conservatives to a mere six points -- matters little to Smith.
"Surveys are really just one point in time and I think that we've got a long way to grow the party," she explained. "We can't really be focused on what the poll of the day actually says because we've got to be focused on the hard work of building the party."
With many ridings left without so much as a riding association, Danielle Smith does, indeed, have a long way to go before her party is election-ready.
She does have one thing, however. In Ed Stelmach, she still has an opponent.
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