UCP should at least make its theatre dramatic

Three of the four candidates for the leadership of the United Conservative Party are so teethgnashingly fed up with Alberta’s carbon tax that they signed a pledge this week to repeal it.

Brian Jean, Jason Kenney and Doug Schweitzer took part in an event organized Thursday by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation where they put pen to paper. The fourth candidate, Jeff Callaway, had a scheduling conflict, but would have gladly signed the carbon tax’s death warrant.

It was all, of course, just political theatre.

We know all four candidates are against the tax and have promised to repeal it if they ever become premier. Signing a stagemanaged “pledge” doesn’t make their position legal or binding.

Kenney seems particularly partial to this type of performance. Twice in the last year, he has issued a “grassroots guarantee” to demonstrate that, by golly, he is so serious about a specific issue that he’ll sign his name on a big piece of cardboard while people watch.

These make for a brief moment of theatre, no matter how unoriginal or meaningless.

Oh, I’m not saying the UCP leadership candidates wouldn’t scrap the carbon tax if given a chance.

I’m sure any one of them would happily carry out the death sentence.

It’s just that the moment they axe the tax, it will be replaced by a carbon price imposed by Ottawa.

The federal government has told provinces that if they don’t have their own carbon-pricing scheme in place by 2018, Ottawa will impose its own carbon tax.

Some of the UCP leadership candidates have said they will join Saskatchewan in a legal fight

against a federal price on carbon. Good luck with that. They’d likely have a chance if Ottawa were keeping the money for itself, but it’s not. It will return all money collected back to the province from whence it came.

But shaking your fist against a Liberal government in Ottawa always plays well to conservatives in Alberta.

It’s a throwback to that master of fist shaking, Ralph Klein.

In 2004, he thundered, “By God, Ottawa, keep your hands off,” even though no Liberal in Ottawa had threatened to put their hands on Alberta’s resource wealth.

It was pure theatre.

As premier, Klein also led a succession of high-profile court challenges on issues including social transfer payments, the gun registry and the Delwin Vriend case on the rights of homosexuals.

He lost every one of them. Klein blamed liberal-leaning judges for making bad rulings.

He also offered an empty threat to invoke the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to stop same-sex marriage in Alberta.

Klein never really expected to win any of the fights.

He just wanted to offer a bit of political drama to his conservative audience members, who eagerly applauded.

Klein also introduced a “law” that the government would never

run a deficit.

The thing about a province passing laws on itself is that it’s free to change those laws whenever it wants.

It’s a bit like making a New Year’s resolution. It’s more guideline than guarantee.

The no-deficit law lasted right up until the government under Ed Stelmach scrapped the law and began running a deficit.

This week, the UCP leadership candidates’ pledge-signing also included a promise to balance the budget in the first term of a UCP government.

It’s a promise that would likely be popular with many Albertans, not just UCP supporters.

Except that we don’t know how they’d actually balance the budget.

Klein’s first term, for example, included massive cuts to government services to help bring the budget under control.

It’s easy to sign a “pledge” to scrap a tax or balance a budget. Heck, it’s so easy they should have added a pledge to build multiple pipelines to tidewater, burn coal with no emissions, and make our health-care outcomes the best in the country.

Oh, and have the Oilers and Flames make it to the last round of the playoffs.

I mean, if you’re going to give us political theatre, let’s make it a little more dramatic.