All posts tagged Peter Lougheed

Never mind the pundits: Alberta Premier Alison Redford has plenty to celebrate today

by David Climenhaga on April 23, 2013 in 2012 Provincial Election, Alberta Politics, Alison Redford with No comments

Alberta Premier Alison Redford, second from right, with Environment Minister Diana McQueen and Culture Minister Health Klimchuk, watch as Deputy Premier Tom Lukaszuk celebrates the Progressive Conservative Party’s victory on this day last year with a sip of champagne. Actual PC cabinet members may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: the real Premier Redford, swearing the oath of office.

Today is the first anniversary of Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s unexpected but comfortable election victory.

If you follow Alberta politics, you’re bound to have been reading a lot of stuff lately about how unpopular Ms. Redford is just now and how she really has no reason to celebrate.

“There is no cause to party,” the Edmonton Journal’s political columnist wrote gloomily, recommending against her drinking anything more expensive than Baby Duck.

He, like everyone else at the moribund local rag and its similarly declining Postmedia counterpart in Calgary, has been touting a self-confessedly iffy Leger Marketing on-line-panel survey that suggests Ms. Redford has no friends.

Well, it’s true, I guess. The popularity of Alberta’s premier does seem to have rather slumped of late – although probably not as badly as the doubtless politically charged members of Leger’s panel indicated – and her Progressive Conservative government likewise seems to have a penchant for making many more enemies than friends.

If there’s anything to this Leger poll – which the Calgary Herald cautiously noted in its story on the survey is “a non-random Internet survey” that “does not report a margin of error” – the news wasn’t particularly good for anyone else either, at least anyone else the Journal or the Herald is likely to advise readers is a credible and serious candidate.

So if, as the poll suggests, 60 per cent of Albertans disapprove of the job Ms. Redford is doing, nearly 40 per cent disapprove of the work of Opposition Leader Danielle Smith as well. Ms. Smith is doing better with her own supporters, the poll suggests, with 39 per cent who approve, versus 26 per cent who approve of Ms. Redford. But … yadda-yadda … Feel free to read it for yourself if you care all that much.

In reality, the situation Ms. Redford and her government find themselves in is akin to that experienced by all of us who have discovered to our astonishment we’re not as young as we used to be. To wit: Growing old is for the birds, but the alternative is worse.

And the alternative for Ms. Redford last year, it could be argued, was a fate almost worse than death, that is, political death!

A year and a couple of weeks ago, tout le monde political Alberta had written off Ms. Redford and her Tories and were already typing up the obituaries, not to mention the longer one for the four-decade-plus PC regime started by Peter Lougheed.

The really important reporters, of course, were writing up glowing tributes to Danielle Smith, Tom Flanagan and the other Great Minds behind the Wildrose Party, which we were all persuaded was about to win a huge majority.

So let us not forget the reason the Alberta political punditocracy was writing off Ms. Redford and the PCs last year in almost exactly the same words they’re writing them off now was public opinion polls that looked an awful lot like this latest survey.

Instead, as we all know now, Ms. Redford posted a respectable 61-seat majority government and got the last laugh, or at least the next-to-last one.

Since political life is better than political death, I’d say Ms. Redford has something to celebrate right there.

What’s more, plenty of Progressive Conservative MLAs who expected to lose their seats are still safely ensconced in their Legislative sinecures. So, no matter how worried they are about where Ms. Redford is taking them next, neither they nor any others in the party, are very likely to take the chance of skidding the premier at her mandatory PC Party review next November.

So there’s a second reason for her to celebrate – she’s probably safe at least through to the next general election in 2016, or whenever.

Of course, she may lose then, as everyone seems to think now that she will, with voters complaining about the shards of broken promises that litter the streets of Alberta’s cities and towns.

But are you really certain that, three years hence, Alberta voters will even notice, let alone care?

The truth is, it could happen, and the Opposition will try mightily to ensure it does, but Alberta voters have a long and undistinguished history of ignoring broken promises, incompetent government and bonehead mistakes before returning Progressive Conservative governments to power by comfortable majorities.

Is anyone who doesn’t have a partisan point to make really confident enough to predict the same thing won’t happen again in 2016?

We should also be careful what we wish for. Ms. Redford still has three years to keep those promises, and, what’s more, some of them aren’t worth keeping. Do you still want – as Ms. Redford promised on page 29 of her 2012 policy platform – to “recruit foreign temporary workers”?

The fact is, Ms. Redford and her government have plenty to celebrate today. So why wouldn’t they say, “what the hell,” and pop the corks on some champagne?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Redford Tories’ conundrum: Progressive reason versus Conservative passion

by David Climenhaga on January 17, 2013 in Alberta Politics with 2 Comments

They kissed us once. Will they kiss us again? Alas, in Alberta right now, there’s no way to be cert- cert- certain. Alison Redford chats with a typical Alberta voter last spring – although, Alberta politicians and their supporters may not turn out to be exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Ms. Redford, Finance Minister Doug Horner.

Here in 14 words is the conundrum that faces the Progressive Conservative government of Alberta Premier Alison Redford: you can be progressive, or you can be conservative, but you can’t be both.

So which is it?

The problem that confronts Ms. Redford’s PCs is that they aren’t really sure themselves.

Progressive? Or Conservative? Great taste? Or less filling? Breath mint? Or candy mint?

This, it is said here, is the source of the real pain that shows through the Redford Government’s commentary about how we all need to reduce our expectations for the provincial budget scheduled for introduction on Thursday, March 7.

Yeah, I know, Alberta Tories have a long history of saying things are going to be terrible come budget time, then laughing at us behind their hands when we all heave a huge sigh of relief after things turn out not to be as quite as bad as forecast.

That’s a perfectly plausible explanation for much of the gloom and doom about declining petroleum revenues that is emanating from Ms. Redford’s inner circle nowadays.

It’s also true that Ms. Redford probably promised more than she could sensibly deliver in the desperate final days of the 2012 election campaign, when it looked very much as if the ultra-conservative Wildrose Party might actually win a majority. That was when she told Albertans that thanks to a heaping dosage of political Retsyn ™ her party could be a breath mint and a candy mint!

But neither of those cynical explanations account for the level of genuine angst apparent in the Red Tory Budget Blues that are playing continually in Alberta these days.

After her first 2013 meeting with her PC caucus, Ms. Redford warned that falling petroleum prices – which with metronomic regularity catch Alberta PC governments by complete surprise – mean tough choices, deep cuts, reduced expectations, haircuts all ’round, programs under the microscope, tighter belts, (insert spending-cut metaphor of choice here), yadda yadda.

Finance Minister Doug Horner has also joined this chorus of Gloomy Thursday, a tune so melancholy many listeners that hear it are immediately tempted to jump off a fiscal cliff!

But their real problem is that old habits die hard. The Alberta PCs have been a party of deep fiscal conservatism and knee-jerk austerity for so long that the instinct to cut in a crisis is bred in the bone.

Like a Civil War surgeon presented with a health care problem, the only thing they can think of is a hacksaw and a broom handle for the patient to bite down on while they cut. So they can’t help telling us that if you think that image is painful, just wait for the Budget Speech on March 7 – and they mean it!

After all, that strategy has worked for years for the Alberta Tories, at least once the quasi-NDP government of their founder, Peter Lougheed, came to an end in the mid-80s just as the neoconservative verities of Ronald Reagan, the Fraser Institute and General Augusto Pinochet began to really take root around the globe.

Many believers in that worldview remain influential in Tory ranks.

The trouble is, in the Alberta of the early 21st Century, that territory has been ceded to the Wildrose Party led by former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith and abetted by the unprogressive federal Conservatives of Prime Minister Stephen Harper who campaigned tirelessly for the Wildrosers last spring.

And those voters, it now seems clear, are not coming back. To them, Ms. Redford is beyond the political pale, and nothing she says or does will assuage their bitterness at her defeat of former finance minister Ted Morton, the worst premier Alberta never had, and her rejection, however temporary, of their Paleolithic values.

Faced with the grim prospect of defeat at the hands of these unreconstituted market fundamentalists and social conservatives, Ms. Redford’s strategists did a clever and rather courageous thing – on very short notice they cobbled together a new coalition with small-l liberal supporters of the Alberta New Democrats, Liberals and Alberta Party who preferred a soft Tory government to a hard-edged Wildrose premier. If that meant fewer seats for the parties they traditionally supported, well, the Devil take the hindmost!

The Redford Tories built this instant coalition by promising things that were traditionally anathema to many of their party’s core supporters: public services, investment in health care and education, commitment to inclusive values.

Now, facing a temporary decline in resource revenues, their deepest instinct is to backslide – just when what the situation calls for is a modest tax increase, a recommitment to small-l liberal values, a willingness to live with deficits a little longer and the courage to stay the course on health, education and social spending.

If they respond to their the primitive instincts of their political lizard brain, they will likely lose the new and still fragile coalition that saved their bacon in 2012, but they won’t win back the right-wing rump they have already lost to the Wildrose Party.

So reason tells them to stay the course. But passion tells them to abandon it. The resulting pain they feel is real.

To paraphrase the breath mint ad of yore: They kissed us once. Will they kiss us again? Alas, in Alberta right now, there’s no way to be certain until March 7.

Right now, they don’t even know themselves!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta Tories send feds a message, but keep their most dangerous enemies close

by David Climenhaga on November 11, 2012 in Alberta Politics with 3 Comments

Friends close, enemies closer: Alberta Tories, left, send a message to their federal counterparts. Alberta political parties may not be exactly as anthropomorphized. Below: Premier Alison Redford, Niccolo Machiavelli.

Proving you really can have it both ways, Premier Alison Redford’s Alberta Tories rapped the knuckles of their federal counterparts yesterday but kept their most dangerous enemies, members of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Wild Rose Country caucus, where they can keep an eye on them.

Redford Government insiders were furious so many of their federal brethren, including several prominent Alberta MPs, openly backed the market-fundamentalist Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith in last spring’s provincial general election, which despite the premier’s comfortable majority once the dust had settled was a close-run thing.

So never no more, as long as Ms. Redford has anything to do with it, will rank-and-file members of Mr. Harper’s so-called Conservative Party of Canada be automatically entitled to cast votes at Alberta Progressive Conservative events like annual general meeting taking place yesterday and today in Calgary. That’s the knuckle rap.

However, PC Party members at the Cowtown bunfest voted, any Conservative Member of Parliament holding an Alberta riding – and that would be 26 or 28 of them just at the moment – still retains the right to an automatic vote at a PC AGM. That’s the tip of the Florentine cloth cap to Niccolo Machiavelli’s sage advice to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

Instead of a political divorce, call it a trial separation.

This, judging from the media coverage of the vote, was deemed to be “a good compromise” by everyone in authority before the 1,100 delegates were sent back to sleep – which on the face of it is odd, because the federal Tories that members of Ms. Redford’s inner circle were the angriest at were the ones the members decided not to punish. Nevertheless, there is a kind of perverse logic to this outcome.

Presumably Ms. Redford’s inner circle decided they needed both to send Mr. Harper’s Alberta caucus a clear message about the dangers of not playing ball with the people who are still in control of Alberta’s vast petroleum resources and intend to stay that way, but also to keep open clear lines of communication with them.

This gesture accomplishes that goal without really goring anybody’s oxen. This is because, while it is symbolic, it is essentially meaningless at the practical level. After all, there is nothing to prevent a now-disinvited federal Tory party member from becoming a provincial PC member for five bucks, and thereby continuing their Fifth Columnist activities.

Indeed, simultaneously being members of more than one political party nominally or officially at war with one another is considered quite normal in Alberta’s eccentric political culture.

Thus many provincial Tories joined the Alberta Liberals (now known as the Liberaltarians or something) to vote in former Progressive Conservative Raj Sherman’s successful leadership campaign last year – though whether this was intended to help or hinder the former Official Opposition party is not so clear.

And while it is impossible to prove, it is likely that at least half the current Opposition Wildrose Party’s membership also hold Progressive Conservative Party cards. Indeed, considerable numbers of Albertans are members of as many political parties as possible. Only the provincial NDP has eschewed the temptation to invite members of other parties to join their ranks as well – although here’s a bet that more than a few Alberta Knee-Dips quietly break that party’s ban on simultaneously holding other memberships.

So from a practical standpoint, the only impact of yesterday’s provincial cannonade across the federal party’s bow may be an increase in PC memberships and a small bump in revenue.

However, from a practical point of view, the federal caucus has been sent a strong message that nevertheless doesn’t slam the door on communication – not that Wildrose enthusiasts like Calgary West MP Rob Anders or Calgary Southeast’s Jason Kenney are going to be showing up at any Redford PC get-togethers any time soon.

What’s more, if the Harper Tories go the way of their U.S. Republican exemplars, the Alberta PCs can now plausibly claim to have no connection to that Canadian offshoot of the Tea Party as they try to build a broad coalition of support that includes segments of Alberta society not traditionally associated with their party.

In that, they would not be so different from the Alberta Liberals, I mean the Liberalbertas, who have been shamefacedly claiming for years to have no connection whatsoever to the L-Shaped Party of Pierre Trudeau and his many successors.

Meanwhile, with Ms. Redford’s vault in October 2011 from third place to the party’s leadership now made utterly secure, the Alberta Tories in convention also voted yesterday to make sure such an unexpected result would never happen again.

Henceforth and forevermore, the final ballot of a PC leadership race will have only two names on it – a situation that had it been in effect in 2011 would almost certainly have assured the ascendancy of frontrunner Gary Mar to the leadership of the party and the premiership of Alberta.

This too is not as contradictory as it sounds.

Never mind the rhetoric about the party getting back to what worked well in the past. The practical effect of this change is to give the PC inner circle – which now, of course, is Premier Redford’s inner circle – the edge in ensuring their favoured candidate triumphs when Ms. Redford eventually steps aside.

This in turn will seal forever her coup against the party establishment in 2011 and allow her to impose her vision of a restoration of Peter Lougheed’s centrist principles on the sometimes restive and divided party.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Tip for Tories: a grownup conversation about debt will pay political dividends

by David Climenhaga on November 9, 2012 in Alberta Politics with 11 Comments

The House that Ralph built. Alberta mismanaged by market fundamentalists may not appear exactly as illustrated, but close enough. Below: Peter Lougheed, Alison Redford, Ralph Klein.

As Alberta’s Tories gather today in Calgary to celebrate Peter Lougheed leading them out of the Social Credit wilderness 41 years ago, they will expend plenty of energy feuding over disinviting their federal Conservative brethren from future affairs of this nature.

In the past, federal Conservatives have been automatically entitled to cast votes at Alberta Progressive Conservative bunfests like the Cowtown annual general meeting today and tomorrow.

But so many of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Alberta caucus tilted openly in favour of the radically market-fundamentalist Wild Rosehip Tea Party during last April’s provincial election that moves are afoot to sever the ties that bound.

Judging from her comments on CBC radio this morning, notwithstanding federal Conservative candidate Joan Crockatt’s Calgary-Centre by-election sign on her home’s front lawn, the idea of a Tory v. Tory political divorce appears to have Premier Redford’s imprimatur.

Certainly the Harperites have come to be seen in Ms. Redford’s inner circle as a Wildrose Fifth Column that needs to be driven from the encampment before the government faces, as they like to say in conservative circles, an existential crisis.

This will be entertaining, but it is nevertheless a pity since there are topics that could be more profitably pondered by the gathered Redford Tory weighty ones – indeed, by all Albertans. Prominent among them would be a grownup conversation about debt, deficits and fair taxation, issues that are certain to bedevil this party in the months ahead.

For an awfully long time now out here in the New West, the only people we’ve listened to on those particular subjects have been pre-Wildrose market-fundamentalists like Ralph Klein, our (un)Progressive Conservative premier from 1992 to 2006 who through his government’s mismanagement did so much damage to Alberta’s infrastructure and social fabric it could almost be described as vandalism.

Mr. Klein has now passed from the political scene, of course, to be replaced in 2006 by Ed Stelmach, who realized that he needed to move his party toward the centre for it to survive, and last year by Ms. Redford, who confirmed and proved the wisdom of her predecessor’s assessment.

But Mr. Klein’s neoconservative nostrums and notions continue to be the conventional wisdom many in his old party and everyone in Wildrose circles, all of it amplified through the media echo chamber. These include:

  1. All debt is bad. Always.
  2. All deficits are bad. Always.
  3. Revenue may never be increased, except by happenstance.
  4. And, of course, we should run our province’s budget as if it were our family’s budget.

The problem with this dogma, tattooed on the back of Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith’s left hand for easy reference during public meetings, is that it is mainly baloney, and contradictory to boot. (The bit about the tattoo was a joke. I don’t know Ms. Smith well enough to know if she has any tattoos. But you get the idea.)

Since the same fundamentalists and their media acolytes have persuaded us all for the moment that any kind of fair taxation – or even bothering to collect 100 per cent of the ludicrously low taxes and royalties we levy against some businesses – is just not on, this means reducing benefits to citizens, limiting public services and doing without needed facilities are the only mechanisms available to eliminate the supposed evils of deficits and debt.

One result here in Alberta, notwithstanding our famous petroleum revenues, is that we end up paying cash for everything so as to avoid the horror of debt. But paying cash for everything, as should also be obvious to anyone who’s run a real family budget, is like burning up your RRSP to pay your rent!

Slashing expenses when you need to spend, as Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman famously observed, “represents a stunning failure of policy.”

What these Kleinite holdouts advocate is akin to not heating your house in December if your holiday bills outpace your income, never mind the lower heating costs in summertime. Some structural damage may result, not to mention hypothermia. When damage begins to threaten your house’s structural integrity, bet on it that the repairs will cost more and take longer!

This is essentially what Mr. Klein did to Alberta’s infrastructure as premier. He let it run down like a homeowner who refused to fix the roof so he could brag about having no debt. Eventually, the roof started leaking.

In the case of Alberta, roads crumbled, schools and hospitals started to fall apart and infrastructure didn’t keep pace with population growth. Municipalities set to feuding over scarce regional resources. Emergency repairs cost a fortune, because we couldn’t control the timing of the emergencies.

Of course, very few of us would have a house at all without a mortgage, that is, debt – which is why no family waits until they have100 per cent of the money in the bank, as the Kleinian “family budgeters” advocate. Their way, most of us wouldn’t buy our first houses until we were about 70!

That’s OK, though, because we wouldn’t have had the cash to buy a car either, so we’d have to live walking distance to work. Mind you, we wouldn’t have a very good job, because we wouldn’t have had the cash to pay for an education, so we’d live in a crappy part of town.

Thanks to the Klein Government’s negligent mismanagement of Alberta – which the Wildrose Party proposes to continue, presumably because that’s the easiest way to attack the government – this has become the principal political problem the Redford Tories face today.

If they want to invest in the future, even with cash flow that’s healthy by Canadian standards, they’re going to need to borrow money at the extremely low interest rates available to governments.

But if they borrow money, the Wildrosers are going to shriek, and when that happens the Pavlovian media will bark and proudly conservative Albertans will fuss. If the government doesn’t, though, their choice is either to steal from our retirement fund (because, people, that oil’s not gonna be there forever) or let the place run down like a Third World slum with a big bank account.

That might suit the Wildrosers, because it provides a bogus an argument for privatization, but it ought not to work for the Redford Tories, who insist they are committed to fair public services.

Then there’s the matter of Mr. Klein’s ridiculous flat tax – which is semi-sacred in certain circles around here – which benefits the extremely wealthy and penalizes the middle class at the cost of at least $1.5 billion a year in foregone revenue.

Well that – no matter what is written on the back of Ms. Smith’s hand, or wherever she keeps her notes – is just nuts, especially with interest rates as low as they are right now. We really need to stop doing it.

So if Ms. Redford and her Tories want to solve the biggest political problem they are going to face – which won’t be Rosehipsters yelling “culture of corruption” – they need to address the problem of how to build up this province, as the late Mr. Lougheed, Alberta’s first PC premier, unquestionably did.

So they really should pause a moment during their scrap over whether members of Mr. Harper’s Wildrose Party of Canada should keep their automatic influence over PC affairs to start thinking about how to encourage a mature discussion about debt, deficits, fair taxation and the way we run this place.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Advice to Alison Redford: Own fair and reasonable, and leave the comedy riffs about Danielle Smith to us bloggers

by David Climenhaga on October 15, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Alison Redford, Danielle Smith with 5 Comments

Yuck! Alberta Opposition Leader Danielle Smith learns about veterinary medicine at the source. Or was this the lesson on Wisconsin’s “grassroots democracy”? Whatever. After that, she had cheese in Wisconsin. Below: Alberta Premier Alison Redford.

I recall hearing somewhere the image experts have come to the conclusion that “if you own fair and reasonable, you win.”

So I wonder if Alberta Premier Redford picked the best strategy last Thursday when she decided to poke fun at Opposition Leader Danielle Smith for her American-paid tour of the United States, courtesy the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program.

The IVLP, of course, is the American government program with the apparently remarkable history of picking future foreign leaders – who oddly enough frequently turn out to be foreign leaders sympathetic to American interests – and giving them a nice, most-expenses-paid (except for the odd muffin or vanilla latte) three-week tour of the United States. Ms. Smith wrapped up her American Tour on Oct. 6.

But Premier Redford’s mocking welcome home to Ms. Smith during a Progressive Conservative party fundraiser in Red Deer is not going to sound particularly fair and reasonable to a lot of Alberta voters who think things like university degrees in anything but petroleum engineering, the desire to eat squishy uncooked foods and trips abroad (a Target mall in the Good Ole U.S.A. and Mexican holiday resorts excepted, of course) are signs of eccentricity at best and un-Albertan airs more likely.

After all, this is the province that elected and kept re-electing Ralph Klein, the notorious high-school dropout and recreational drinker, as premier. Readers will recall that Ms. Redford had to put up with a certain amount of disdain during the recent provincial election campaign from supporters of Ms. Smith’s faux-populist Wildrose Party for letting it be known she’d been an international human rights lawyer.

We all heard these Wildrose supporters ask why, if Ms. Redford loved Alberta so much, did her curriculum vitae show that she went and lived the easy life in such well-known leisure spots as Mozambique, Vietnam, the Balkans and Afghanistan? Quelle horreur!

Who knows, maybe the premier was griped because the U.S. government didn’t identify her as a future foreign leader, back in the day. (They hardly need to now, do they?) Or maybe Ms. Smith got up her nose with the ridiculous comparisons she keeps making between the Opposition leader’s modest travel expenses (mostly paid for by U.S. taxpayers) and the premier’s (necessarily subsidized by Alberta taxpayers).

Whether or not the State Department gets a good deal on Holiday Inn rooms in Montana and Wisconsin, low hotel bills alone are not proof of frugality on Ms. Smith’s part, unless she can produce a note from the U.S. State Department promising to pay her expenses if she becomes premier. (Heaven knows, this kind of thing does happen, but it’s frowned upon for the Americans to actually admit it.)

At any rate, the premier tried to yuk it up by suggesting that Ms. Smith ought not to be criticizing Alberta’s activities abroad when she tacitly admits needing to be schooled by the U.S. State Department on the American system of government.

In fairness to Ms. Smith, that is kind of a cheap shot, since the U.S. system of government is what she’s been advocating non-stop for Alberta and Canada ever since she signed on with the Fraser Institute, whose mission is to get Canada to adopt all of the worst ideas of America’s barely functional democracy without any of the good ones.

That was not as cheap, though, as yesterday’s shot from the Edmonton Journal, which complained in effect that Ms. Smith hasn’t been sending out enough press releases since Ms. Redford got elected. Well, whatever.

Getting back to Ms. Redford’s ridicule, “if you want to stand up in front of the people of Alberta two years ago or six months ago and say you are ready to be the premier of the province and you understand Alberta’s role in North America, then you better be pretty confident about that,” the premier told her sympathetic Red Deer audience. (Leastways I assume they were sympathetic. Down there in Red Deer, I don’t think you, or the premier for that matter, can ever be all that confident of that.) “…I’d suggest that a seat on a tour bus is markedly different than the premier’s chair.”

Ms. Smith, naturally, reverted to form with her response: “She been gallivanting around the world staying in $900 hotel rooms and ordering oysters and not paying enough attention to matters at home.”

There’s that Wildrose thing about weird squishy food again – no Real Albertan would eat oysters, not even the men since the invention of Viagra. As for Ms. Smith’s hotel rooms in Wisconsin and Montana, they may not cost the same as Ms. Redford’s did in London (and who knows, the U.S. government may get a discount deal on little-used Holiday Inn rooms along the High Line, what with the occasional witness protection program participant and Canadian politician passing through), but I’d be surprised if her Uncle Sam ever put anyone in Ms. Smith’s shoes up at the YWCA in Bozeman.

If this keeps up, the next thing you know they’ll both be invoking the memory of Peter Lougheed, Alberta’s sainted first Conservative premier, to slam the other one. Oh, wait, they already are.

Meanwhile, from selected venues along her bus tour – leastways, whenever the bus passed through a Montana town with Wi-Fi – Ms. Smith filed plenty of breathless material for comedians to make fun of in their routines.

Oh, wow, I’m in Wisconsin! … “one of the centres of North American grassroots democracy in the last two years.” (That’s code for “I’d really like to crush unions in Alberta too.”) And, “Yes, my hand really is in the stomach of that cow.” (Emphasis added, comment not necessary.) “But I did get a Romney-Ryan lawn sign from the Republicans.” (Ditto.)

By the way, from her online travel diary, we are pleased to report that Ms. Smith did not eat any oysters while in the Badger State, or so she said: “First meal in Wisconsin was – you guessed it – cheese. Cheese plate, deep fried cheese curds, and macaroni and cheese.” (This sounds pretty grim, but it’s not all bad. The Official State Drink, as is well known, is beer.)

So the point here is obviously not that there’s any lack of stuff here with which to make fun of Ms. Smith.

It’s merely that if she wants to own “fair and reasonable,” Premier Redford should stick to the substantive material and leave the boffo yocks to us bloggers. If she doesn’t, we may get shirty about it and start invoking the name of Peter Lougheed ourselves.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Are storm clouds forming in Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s sunny skies?

by David Climenhaga on September 28, 2012 in Alberta Politics, B.C. Politics with 17 Comments

Alberta Premier Alison Redford, left, gives a member of her caucus his marching orders. Alberta politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Ms. Redford, Stephen Carter.

Alberta Premier Alison Redford would appear to be unassailable.

A recent cross-Canada poll by Angus Reid found her to be the country’s second-most popular premier after Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall, with a 55-per-cent approval rating among Alberta voters. That’s practically “beloved” territory!

Another poll conducted last month by Trend Research of Edmonton put her in an even more commanding position, with 62 per cent approval of the way she is doing her job as premier and her party enjoying the support of 49 per cent of the voters, up from 44 per cent on April 23 when they were re-elected as Alberta’s government.

That compares to 27 per cent for the Wildrose Party (down from 34 per cent on voting day) and 42 per cent for the Wildrose Leader, Danielle Smith, according to the Trend poll.

Nevertheless, while you may not have read about this in the media, there are clouds on Ms. Redford’s horizon, and her personal political weather forecast is – if not exactly stormy – not all sunshine and sweet breezes.

Premier Redford’s troubles aren’t with the Alberta public, at least not yet, and they aren’t really with the Opposition parties. On the left, they are too small to have much impact. On the right, the Wildrose Party is not yet experienced enough to punch up to its 17-member weight.

No, her problem is with her own caucus, which to be blunt about this, doesn’t really like her very much.

Now, this is all inside baseball, as they say – but, really, really if you love politics, that’s the only kind of ball that counts! Correct?

Ms. Redford’s problem in a nutshell goes like this: Back before her election as leader, she wasn’t the most popular kid in premier Ed Stelmach’s cabinet. She was sharp-tongued, critical of her colleagues and didn’t have many friends. That’s why when she ran for the leadership, she had the support of only one caucus member, lacklustre Calgary backbencher Art Johnston.

She still doesn’t have many friends in caucus. The difference is, now she’s the boss.

Ms. Redford was never what you’d call a touchy-feely politician. I’ve never heard of her, like long-ago British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, making grown men, cabinet ministers to boot, weep. But like the Iron Lady, there’s little doubt that she could do it if she wished.

Actually, nowadays, her cabinet is pretty happy. They’re the insiders. They get listened to, and respected.

But if you’re a rank and file Alberta Progressive Conservative MLA, and you’re not in cabinet, you are, as Pierre Trudeau might have put it back in the day, a nobody.

When the Tory caucus meets nowadays, members aren’t consulted about their thoughts and ideas as they were in the days of premiers Stelmach and Ralph Klein. They sit in rows and are handed their marching orders. And those orders, insiders report, read like this: “March or die!” A lot of them are not happy about it.

In addition to their high-handed treatment by the premier and her inner circle, Alberta government insiders say at least three groups in the caucus will resent her forever for the way she campaigned for the leadership, ably assisted by her sometime chief strategist and chief of staff Stephen Carter.

These groups are:

  1. Ralph Klein loyalists – mad at the way she characterized their hero for leaving the government in a shambles once he’d finished attacking the province’s debt
  2. Ed Stelmach loyalists – who also feel their former boss was unfairly disparaged and pushed aside
  3. Gary Mar loyalists – furious at how Ms. Redford and Mr. Carter trashed their guy’s reputation during the leadership race, then kicked him when he was down over his fundraising activities

Folks from each of these three groups (which sometimes have rather blurred edges) are already grumbling, accusing the premier of ideological shiftiness and looking hopefully to the future for an opportunity to tape a “Kick Me” sign to her back when she’s not looking.

Staff members who are not part of the premier’s personal Praetorian guard, meanwhile, miss the days of Mr. Stelmach’s good cheer and inclusive friendliness as the current premier blows by them without so much as a regal wave, and mutter darkly about some of her current favourites.

In other words, it’s a snakepit!

For her part, here’s betting that Ms. Redford believes she succeeded despite her caucus and her party, which she reckons had long ago wandered away from the path of righteousness as defined by the now-sainted Peter Lougheed. Indeed, to stick with the religious metaphor, she may think the party was only resurrected because she returned it to the straight and narrow. There are those who believe she is right, of course.

The trouble with this is that it’s not the voters or the Opposition who are likely to cause Ms. Redford the biggest problems in the next couple of years – it’s her own troops.

Remember, it wasn’t voters who brought down either Mr. Klein or Lady Thatcher, it was dissidents in the ranks of their own parties. This can – and does – happen in the Parliamentary system.

Moreover, here in Alberta, disenfranchised Tories have a home to run away too if things get to be too much for them in the form of the Opposition Wildrose caucus. Could there be more defections to the Wildrose? Not just yet, maybe, but in a word, yes.

Meanwhile, Ms. Redford is without her rainmaker. Mr. Carter has all but disappeared.

With B.C. Premier Christy Clark, a conservative Liberal, desperately low in the polls, facing an election in less than eight months, having just been forced to fire her chief of staff for unspecified naughtiness, who would want to bet against Mr. Carter showing up in Victoria with a smile on his face and a nice apartment overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Motion 312 and reproductive rights: pay attention to what Tories do, not to what they say

by David Climenhaga on September 26, 2012 in Canadian Politics, Reproductive Rights with 12 Comments

What? What? I’m pro-choice and pro-life, Edmonton St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber seems to say in this shot grabbed from his website. Below: Kitchener Centre MP Stephen Woodworth.

In this era of routine political deceit, wise voters are advised to pay attention to what their elected representatives actually do, not what they say.

So when Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada tries to have it both ways on abortion in the debate surrounding Kitchener Centre MP Stephen Woodworth’s Motion 312, which would have Parliament “study” the point at which a baby becomes a human being, this strategy should be seen for what it is: an effort to chip away at women’s reproductive rights through the Parliamentary back door.

Tory heavy Jason Kenney says he’s voting for it. Prime Minster Harper says he’ll vote against it. But by allowing the vote to proceed later today they are tossing a hunk of red meat to their hard-right social conservative base, which would ban abortion outright in a moment if it ever got the chance.

So even though the motion will likely be defeated – for the time being – they are keeping the issue on the front burner and providing the foes of reproductive choice with opportunities to organize, raise money and generate publicity for their cause. Count on it that they also see a continuing fund-raising opportunity for themselves in this tactic.

But no matter how calculatedly they split their votes, the Harperites really can’t be everybody’s good buddy on this one, as the party’s official caucus blogger, Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber, seemed to be trying to do in a jaw-dropping post on his Parliamentary website yesterday.

“I have come to the conclusion after years of deliberation and inner debate that I am both Pro-Choice and Pro-Life,” Mr. Rathgeber wrote. (Emphasis added.) “That does not make me bi-polar; it means that this matter extremely complicated, with multiple methods of examination, resulting in potentially polarizing conclusions.”

While it is indeed true this statement does not provide any evidence Mr. Rathgeber is bi-polar, what it does mean is that he’d really like to keep everyone voting for him and his party despite taking action on one side of an issue that is as polarizing in his riding as it is across Canada.

So it’s what Mr. Rathgeber does, and not what he says, that really matters.

And what he’s going to do today, as he stated elsewhere in the blog, is to vote for Mr. Woodworth’s motion, the intention of which is obviously to tighten the screws on women’s right to reproductive choice.

Mr. Rathgeber can try to justify his vote as he wishes, but he’s taking a stand against reproductive choice. Period. No excuses. No opportunity for appeal.

Yet try he does, at length: “A void exists in Canadian law regarding this issue; Canadians are perhaps unique among western democracies in that we have neither sanctions nor regulations approving abortion or the rights of fetuses,” Mr. Rathgeber bloviates. “The void in Canadian law means there are currently NO LEGAL restrictions regulating the process.  Theoretically, a very late term procedure, if performed, would not attract criminal sanction. …”

“Accordingly, given how divisive this issue is, I concede that if the matter were settled, it ought to remain so.  ….  So Parliament must do what the Supreme Court invited it to do in 1988: fill a vacuity in Canadian law, no matter how divisive and polarizing that debate will be.” Yadda-yadda.

In this way, Mr. Rathgeber – and by extension, the entire Conservative Party for which he so frequently speaks, even those parts of it that allow the vote and then say Nay – tries to pass off his action to suppress the rights of all women as just a matter of procedural consistency.

Sorry, but that dog won’t hunt!

A nice analytical hint about the Tories’ real motives is contained in Mr. Rathgeber’s previous blog post, about the death of former Alberta premier Peter Lougheed, in which the MP laments the decline in the quality of Parliamentary debate from a (largely imagined) golden age of substantial ideas to a contemporary one of fleeting and insubstantial sound-bites.

“Today, we live in the era of the seven-second sound-bite and reaction to the story becomes the next story. … Fulsome debate does not lend itself to the seven-second sound-bite,” Mr. Rathgeber moans, as if it was the other guys responsible for this. “It was policy, not spin, that interested Premier Lougheed.”

Unfortunately – for all of us – it’s nothing but blatant spin that interests Mr. Rathgeber, Mr. Kenney, Mr. Harper and all the rest of the Parliamentary Conservative caucus on this particular issue.

But it really boils down to something as simple as this: no matter what they tell you, if you’re concerned about women’s rights, you’re foolish to vote for the Conservative Party of Canada.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

If Alberta’s Tories loved Peter Lougheed so much, why do they have so little to say about him?

by David Climenhaga on September 24, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics with 6 Comments

Linda Duncan at the Alberta NDP’s 50th annual convention over the weekend. Below: Ralph Goodale, Peter Lougheed.

We have 28 federal electoral districts in Alberta of which 27 elected members of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Of those 27 Conservative MPs, one has since been kicked out of caucus for refusing to blow into a Breathalyzer and now sits as an independent Conservative. One has quit and not yet been replaced. The 28th is a New Democrat.

So how many Alberta Members of Parliament, do you think, paid tribute to former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed in the House of Commons when Parliament resumed sitting four days after Mr. Lougheed’s death in Calgary at 84?

The answer would be “only one.”

And who was that sole Alberta Member of Parliament who did make a tribute to Mr. Lougheed in the House of Commons? Why, that would be Linda Duncan, Alberta’s sole New Democrat MP, the representative for Edmonton-Strathcona.

Indeed, only two MPs had anything nice to say about Mr. Lougheed in Parliament when it resumed sitting after his passing, and the other was a Liberal from Saskatchewan – former cabinet minister and deputy leader Ralph Goodale.

I raise this only because of the instinctively critical reaction of a few people in Alberta Tory circles to recent suggestions by some New Democrats that today’s Alberta NDP has more in common with the program of Mr. Lougheed when he was premier from 1971 to 1985 than does the party whose long spell in power began under his leadership.

Actually, even on this point the Tory response has been pretty muted – except for a few Twitterers who obviously haven’t been paying adequate attention to the Tory Trollfeed. After all, the governments of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Premier Alison Redford, who claim to wear the mantle of the former premier, would have trouble claiming in a serious debate that their market fundamentalism looks much like any policy Mr. Lougheed would have adopted, or that current NDP policies wouldn’t have mostly made sense to Alberta Conservatives circa 1971.

It’s said here the Conservative braintrust must recognize that it could get a little embarrassing for today’s Conservatives to try to make a serious case they ought to be called the party of Peter Lougheed – and not the party of Ralph Klein!

Mr. Lougheed, Ms. Duncan told the House of Commons during the 15 minutes before Question Period during which MPs may comment on whatever they wish, was “a formidable advocate for establishing provincial control of natural resources and for establishing a stronger place for Alberta in the federation.”

“Yet he contributed so much more on other fronts,” she went on. “He created the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, investing resource royalties towards health care and medical research. He established the first Alberta Ministry of Culture and set aside protected areas, notably Kananaskis Country. He enacted the Alberta Bill of Rights and contributed to the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights. Recently, he raised concerns with the fast pace of development of the oilsands and called for greater attention to the environment. In his own words, Peter Lougheed was a Canadian first, an Albertan second and a political partisan third. He left a lasting legacy benefiting not only Albertans but all Canadians. We would do well to build on his legacy and his recent sage advice. …”

Since Monday was the first day after Mr. Lougheed’s death that our MPs got together, it seems unlikely Ms. Duncan’s remarks were meant as a cynical or overtly political gesture. As Opposition environment critic, however, she could hardly be blamed for mentioning Mr. Lougheed’s recent words of caution about the pace of oil sands development. That reference, along with the one about the Charter of Rights, must have made Mr. Harper and his spear-carriers grind their teeth – although possibly not nearly as much as when Mr. Lougheed said it.

No doubt Ms. Duncan expected to hear similar remarks from the some of her 25 Conservative fellow Parliamentarians. If so, she was disappointed.

Instead, from them, there was little but silence on the topic. From all the Conservative MPS in the House, according to Postmedia News, one said she was changing her name, one lauded an Olympic athlete, one said the government wants to restore the planet’s ozone layer and three told the same pathetic lie about the NDP’s tax policies.

Of course, you may say, Conservative politicians had their chance to make their remarks at Mr. Lougheed’s public memorial service in Calgary or in the media.

This is true enough. Mind you, Prime Minister Harper spent almost as much time on that occasion attacking the legacy of Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, even if he didn’t name the man, as he did praising Mr. Lougheed.

Those few in the ranks who mentioned him at all, like the redoubtable Parliamentary blogger Brent Rathgeber, passed pretty lightly over Mr. Lougheed’s real accomplishments – for the obvious reason, I am sure, that they don’t show the current crop of Conservative legislators at either level of government in a very good light.

Still, Mr. Rathgeber’s blog – posted eight days after Ms. Duncan’s tribute in the House – made one good point: “As a lasting legacy, modern politicians should study his style and replicate his methods. It would improve our democracy.”

Agreed. Although it wouldn’t hurt to adopt some of his policies too!

Twenty-five Conservative MPs from this province, and not one of them had anything to say in Parliament about Peter Lougheed! Their silence speaks for itself!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta NDP’s Brian Mason lays claim to Tory Peter Lougheed’s legacy

by David Climenhaga on September 23, 2012 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Canadian Economy, Canadian Politics, New Democratic Party with 2 Comments

Free of his moustache, Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason addresses his party’s 50th annual convention in Edmonton yesterday. Below: Federal NDP Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair, who also spoke yesterday; former Alberta Conservative Premier Peter Lougheed.

Freshly shorn of his trademark moustache, Alberta New Democratic Party Leader Brian Mason made the implicit explicit yesterday at the party’s 50th annual convention in Edmonton.

To wit: he stated outright what a lot of us have been thinking, that the policies advocated by today’s Alberta New Democrats have more in common with the managerial legacy of Peter Lougheed, who died in Calgary on Thursday at 84, than do those of the Progressive Conservative Party whose ruling dynasty Mr. Lougheed founded more than 41 years ago.

Conservatives, naturally, will scoff at this suggestion and accuse Mr. Mason of being the leader of a minor party trying to crash the former premier’s funeral cortege. Well, a minor opposition party the NDP still is, but, really, on the record, the logic of the rest of his case is pretty hard to assail.

Mr. Lougheed was a manager who raised petroleum royalties in Alberta to 40 per cent from the pathetic 17 per cent charged under the Social Credit government of Premier Ernest Manning. Today, after the succession of PC mismanagers that followed Mr. Lougheed into the premier’s office, Alberta royalties have been ratcheted down to 15 per cent, Mr. Mason said.

Citing the points Mr. Lougheed prescribed for sound management of the province’s rich natural resources, Mr. Mason concluded that “it is the NDP that is carrying on Peter Lougheed’s legacy and not the Progressive Conservatives in this province.”

Take Mr. Lougheed’s oft-made pronouncement Alberta’s government should “act like an owner” to manage the province’s resources. The numbers, he said, illustrate how premiers Don Getty, Ralph Klein, Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford have shortchanged future generations of Albertans. “That is billions of dollars that are being stolen from future generations in this province by a government that is in the pockets of foreign oil corporations.”

Of Mr. Lougheed’s call for Alberta’s resources to be developed with care and planning, Mr. Mason said: “The principles of planning have been abandoned by his party.” Of his call to add value here in Alberta: The PCs “are letting the oil industry write its own ticket and those jobs are going down the pipeline just as surely as the unprocessed bitumen.”

Mr. Mason didn’t mention the Wildrose Party – understandably enough, given the nature of the occasion – but it’s worth mentioning here that the province’s largest Opposition party would likely take corporate taxes and resource royalties even lower, exacerbating the artificial deficit crisis already created by the PCs.

There was far more tax fairness in Mr. Lougheed’s day, Mr. Mason observed, before business taxes were slashed, royalties rolled back and a flat-tax implemented that gave bit tax breaks to the wealthy and left the rest of us holding the bag.

Mr. Mason reminded his listeners that “when you attack teachers, you attack kids; when you attack nurses, you attack patients; when you attack long-term care, you attack seniors. We can’t permit deficits created by tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations to be paid for by the middle classes.”

Mr. Mason told his (obviously sympathetic) listeners of the great pride he felt at his role in defeating premier Klein’s “Third Way” health care policy, which, he asserted, was nothing more than an effort to bring in private health care by stealth. This is a plan, he warned, that despite new rhetoric is not much changed under the Redford Government.

“Alison will show her true colours before too long,” he predicted. “She may try to embrace the Lougheed legacy and lay claim to it, but in actual fact she is very different and shows no inclination to go back to that progressive vision. That leaves it up to the New Democrats.”

OK, this stuff is all well and good, but even with the opportunity to ride the Orange Wave generated by the federal NDP, Alberta New Democrats are still members of a boutique party in a province where the main opposition is even farther to the right than the government and the progressive vote is split at least between the NDP and the Alberta Liberals, and last time was shared with the Alberta Party to boot.

Mr. Mason’s prescription for changing the party from a phone booth to a big tent – in other words, reaching out other progressive voters who may have concluded that is where the future lies – is obviously needed.

Accordingly, earlier yesterday, convention delegates voted to give each party member a vote in future leadership contests, abandoning the old system of having elected convention delegates (who tend to be party insiders) choose the leader.

But if the Alberta NDP is going to succeed at broadening its base, it’s going to have to prove they can run a party meeting with more precision than a church supper – and get, for example, the evening’s main speaker to the podium in time to make the evening TV news.

Last night the time crunch left federal NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair scrambling with that deadline no doubt in mind to make similar points to Mr. Mason’s, packaged for a national audience.

Mr. Mulcair wondered why the Conservative governments of Alison Redford and Prime Minister Stephen Harper are so determined to ship Alberta bitumen as fast as possible to the Texas Gulf and Communist China, where they’ll likely further depress the price Alberta’s resources can fetch, instead of adding value and creating jobs here in Canada.

“Your premier has said we need a national conversation about our natural resources. And you know what? I agree with her.” But instead, the Redford and Harper Conservatives seem determined to sell Canadian bitumen to a Chinese company that is nothing but an arm of the Chinese government “without even having a national debate. We’re calling for a national debate.”

As for Mr. Harper’s unrelenting attacks on environmental regulation and sustainable development – leaving the costs of his recklessness to the future – not to mention his tactic of just making stuff up to attack the opposition, Mr. Mulcair responded, “we’re in favour of a more prosperous Canada, but a Canada that’s more prosperous for everyone.”

He asked: “How is it that the Conservatives, who tend to talk that game, are living off the credit card of a future generation?”

In other words, he agreed with Mr. Mason, it’s time for Albertans and Canadians to do what Mr. Lougheed advised, and act like the owners of their resources.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Adoration of Peter Lougheed moves beyond canonization into deification

by David Climenhaga on September 22, 2012 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Lives Lived with 10 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s message at Peter Lougheed’s state funeral. Below: Premier Lougheed with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, who haunts us still.

With his state funeral yesterday afternoon, the official adoration of former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed moved beyond canonization into deification.

If other Canadians happened to pause and listen to what was actually being said in Calgary’s 57-year-old Jubilee Auditorium, which was broadcast by the CBC, they could be forgiven for wondering if we Albertans had collectively taken leave of our senses.

I mean no disrespect for Mr. Lougheed with this observation. As has been said here before, he was an undeniably successful politician, far-sighted by the standards of any generation and surprisingly liberal in his economic views from the perspective of the positions held nowadays by his fellow Conservatives.

But Mr. Lougheed was not the father of our country, and his record is as mixed as that of other politicians of his generation. Alberta would have been a great place to live, pretty much as it is today, had someone else become premier in his place in 1971. He most certainly was not born atop a mountain in the Kananaskis Range, which is what it was starting to sound like this afternoon!

Mr. Lougheed’s family is entitled to its heartfelt grief. People who knew him or knew of him and respected him, even if they disagreed with him, are right to honor his memory. And his political allies and beneficiaries of the political dynasty he founded 41 years ago naturally remember him very fondly.

I am not so sure, however, if the occasion of a state funeral – Canadian provinces are indeed entitled to hold such events – is an appropriate venue to try to gain a political edge or revise history, as Prime Minister Stephen Harper most certainly did in his remarks.

And as for suggesting that “every single one of us woke up this morning in Peter Lougheed’s Alberta, it was the Alberta of which he dreamed, and it was the dream he was able to make real,” as Premier Alison Redford did, that seems just a little over the top.

Still, Ms. Redford hit the best note of all the official speakers at the funeral. She was dignified, didn’t try to milk the occasion for too much political advantage, and her assessment of Mr. Lougheed as intelligent, compassionate and honest is certainly fair.

But was he, as broadcaster Rex Murphy said, “the greatest premier this country has ever seen”? Do our soldiers and the rest of us “all stand a little taller because of E. Peter Lougheed,” as former Treasurer and Conservative leadership candidate Jim Dinning intoned in the voice and diction of a beat poet? (Presumably Mr. Dinning had in mind Canada’s soldiers, as, just yet anyway, Alberta doesn’t have an army.)

Oh well, a little hyperbole is permissible on such occasions.

As for Mr. Harper, he can be forgiven his little joke about the supposed benefits of “strong, stable Conservative governments” and his homily to using the wealth we were all endowed with by nature to reward “entrepreneurs and investors.”

But he really ought not to have tried to turn the occasion into a sneaky attack on the legacy of Pierre Elliot Trudeau – who, unnamed, haunts us still, even here – and “the folly of the National Energy Program.”

Is Canada a better country because Mr. Lougheed – an undeniably admirable and determined fighter – won the battle to ensure control of this resource remained in Alberta and to restrict the flow of benefits from it to all Canadians? Was the country “from that point forward … changed for the better”? Are all Canadians, therefore, “fortunate that Peter Lougheed was there,” as Mr. Harper asserted?

All these points of the prime minister’s are highly partisan, intended to perpetrate a certain view of history, and all of them are legitimately debatable – as indeed, is the suggestion the NEP was folly or responsible for the economic circumstances visited upon Alberta in its wake. This is true even though Albertans take in that opinion as if it were fact with their mothers’ milk.

After the funeral ended, the Alberta and Canadian flags were raised to the top of their staffs. The state broadcaster did not play the national song, announce plans for a granite memorial in Redford Square or inform us that driving was permitted again, but none of these things would have seemed entirely out of place.

Just the same, as the flags atop their staffs imply, it’s now time for us to take a deep breath and get back to reality.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

← Older Entries