Premier Ed Stelmach got the support he needed from his party last weekend. Now he just has to convince the rest of the province that his government is on the right track. That may not be so easy.

Although 77 per cent of the 1,200 delegates at the Tory convention in Red Deer voted against holding a leadership contest, many of them admitted they didn’t have much choice. There is no obvious successor to the premier, and a divisive fight for the Tory crown less than two years after Stelmach won 72 out of 83 seats could fatally weaken the party.

So they chose to back him even though the day before the convention an Environics poll found only 34 per cent of Albertans favour the Tories. Nipping at their heels is the upstart Wildrose Alliance with 28 per cent. In Calgary, the new party, which has only one seat in the legislature and a brand new, untested leader, is more popular than the Stelmach Conservatives.

The mighty party of Peter Lougheed and Ralph Klein has fallen fast. All the problems brought on by the economic recession are being blamed on the Stelmach Conservatives and they don’t seem to know what to do about it. “If he would just get mad, for once, stand up for something, it would help a lot,” said one frustrated delegate. Conservative Senator Bert Brown (who was sporting a Stelmach button) said the premier simply hasn’t effectively countered the Wildrose Alliance’s accusations about his government’s fiscal mismanagement.

And then there’s all the anxiety over health care; hospital beds closing, a drug program for seniors that will see them pay more, a superboard that seems more interested in their own salaries than patients’ welfare. The first week of the H1N1 flu vaccination program, which saw children, pregnant women and the elderly lining up in the bitter cold for hours while the Flames hockey team and their families got preferential treatment, outraged people across the province. But through it all Stelmach seemed unaware of what was really happening in the streets and hospitals as people sought help to thwart swine flu.

It’s this befuddled kind of leadership that has upset both those inside and outside the Conservative party. To many people, especially those under 45, Stelmach seems as old-fashioned and fuzzy as black-and-white television. He just doesn’t fit with their idea of what it means to be Albertan. And neither do his party stalwarts. At the convention, many of the delegates looked old and creaky, as if they had just stepped out of a Social Credit rally of the 1950s. When they sat down to lunch (provided by Imperial Oil) they seemed blissfully unaware that just across the street 700 people were loudly protesting against health care cuts.

Contrast that stodginess with the image projected by Danielle Smith, the new leader of the Wildrose Alliance. She’s 38, eager, attractive, smart and decidedly urban. She tweets and blogs. Young people identify with her. Even political veterans see her as a fresh new face and attitude that the province badly needs.

But there’s no question that Smith and the Wildrose are reaping much more than they have sown simply because so many Albertans are angry with the Stelmach government. No one really knows how the Wildrose Alliance plans to revive the economy; or how they would improve the health care system they so readily criticize; or what they intend to do about the environmental damage caused by the tarsands; or if they even believe in climate change, let alone have a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Stelmach now has to reach out to people outside the party, many of whom were once avid Tory supporters but have parked their support with the Wildrose Alliance. He will also have to fire up all those people who didn’t vote Conservative or any other party during the last election. Will he try to woo people over by becoming a pragmatic conservative like Peter Lougheed? Or will he veer to the right and become more like Ralph Klein, slashing and burning public programs? How will he deal with the oilpatch? Will he buckle to its demands for lower royalties to ensure the money keeps flowing into party coffers? And perhaps the biggest question of all: Will Albertans endlessly reinvent conservatism or will they eventually come up with something to replace it?

For now, many people support the Wildrose Alliance simply because they are not the Stelmach Conservatives. But one day, Stelmach may well wish that his party had dumped him last weekend so that he wouldn’t be remembered as the premier who finally ushered out the Tory dynasty.