Stampede spirit missing from politics
Nearly 50 friendly NDP legislators stood behind Premier Rachel Notley on Monday, flipping pancakes at the annual McDougall Centre premier’s breakfast.
The crowd in front of her was not quite so friendly. Just hungry.
Notley and her crew are trying hard to win over Calgarians this week. It’s not easy. Often they seem to be peering out warily, like troops in a surrounded platoon.
Oil prices appear stuck around US$45 per barrel. Interest rates are about to go up; awful for a province that’s pouring on debt.
Thousands of empty offices echo in the towers around McDougall. The drive downtown to the barbecue, once a crawling agony, was like a weekend spin in the country.
Notley’s constant repetition that Alberta has added 47,000 new jobs since last year doesn’t mean much to oilpatch castoffs. Her cheery line may fit Edmonton’s reality, but not Calgary’s.
Monday morning brought the added bad luck of a downpour. The sodden diners didn’t abandon their slow march to the food trestles, though. For some, this had nothing to do with politics. It was about a free meal.
A surprising number of conservative activists paced the high ground of the park, much as they used to do in the PCs’ glory days of lavish surpluses when the barbecue was more like a flapjack banquet. Of course, oil prices were much higher then.
Today, the PCs hope for conservative unity and pray for re-election. A trace of the old cockiness is back.
But Notley thinks conservatives still have their old Achilles heel — chronic arrogance.
On Saturday, PC Leader Jason Kenney said the New Democrats are “economic illiterates … I will happily pay for tuition to send the premier on a remedial economics course.”
Notley snapped back Monday that Alberta conservatives have “a long history of arrogance and I think this is an indication that hasn’t changed.
"We know we’re doing the right thing for our economy right now. People who think you can take $7 billion out of the economy that’s in recession, those are the folks that need to go back to school …
“Anybody who doesn’t see that needs to rethink why they’re in politics.”
Kenney’s comment, she said, shows “an ongoing form of arrogance on the part of people who still feel very entitled not only to make those kind of decisions, but to be in power.
“They may or may not be entitled to be in power. We’ll see.”
Mayor Naheed Nenshi had a few words of his own for conservatives who lump him into their unholy trinity: Notley, Nenshi, Trudeau. The cluster slamming is becoming routine.
Nenshi called these opponents “people who are used to being in power who are frankly a bit bored. These are folks who probably haven’t won a (civic) election in 20 or 25 years and now are trying again …
“We’ll see what happens in the fall. I think voters are very smart.”
Notley seems to think conservative partisanship no longer resonates. Nenshi says it just doesn’t work at the civic level.
“You always have people who think they represent a particular political party putting candidates forward. What we find is that the electorate rejects that,” the mayor said. "I find that very, very quickly in municipal politics, people park their partisanship at the door because you’ve just gotta get the work done.
“Voters have consistently rejected partisan slates. Even if people on a slate are elected, the slate won’t last.”
Nenshi says his refusal to be pinned down as a politician of left or right “drives people on both sides crazy.”
Remember those old Stampede values — hospitality, friendliness, helpfulness? They aren’t so obvious on the political side this year.