MISCHIEF MAKER?
Rogue MLA needs to tone it down, Simons writes
Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, said the great English wordsmith Samuel Johnson.
Which brings us to the case of Alberta’s rogue and roguish MLA, Derek Fildebrandt.
On Friday, Fildebrandt held a news conference in Calgary to introduce himself as the new interim leader of the Freedom Conservative Party of Alberta.
“I would describe us as an Alberta patriot party, or autonomous party,” Fildebrandt told the Calgary press.
Fildebrandt, you may recall, started his career in the Alberta legislature three years ago as a Wildrose MLA for Strathmore-Brooks.
After a very public falling-out with Wildrose leader Brian Jean, Fildebrandt pushed hard to force Jean out and to merge the Wildrosers with the Progressive Conservatives, under the leadership of Jason Kenney.
In due course, the parties merged and Kenney ousted Jean.
Score one for Fildebrandt. Until, that is, Kenney turned around and ousted him after an embarrassing series of what you might call scandalettes, embarrassing incidents which, taken together, gave Kenney the necessary excuse to bounce his MLA right out of the United Conservative Party caucus.
Fildebrandt has spent the last 11 months sitting as an independent.
During that time he redeemed some of his tarnished political reputation. When the UCP MLAs fled from the legislative chamber en masse, rather than debate the NDP’s plan to establish bubble zones around abortion clinics, Fildebrandt stayed in the assembly and engaged in thoughtful discussion.
It looked as though he were actually enjoying the independence that being caucus-free had given him.
But this week, Fildebrandt was back with a vengeance, denouncing the UCP as a “vanilla” political option, denouncing Kenney as a betrayer of the grassroots, vowing to make his new party the voice of free and patriotic Albertans.
And what is a “patriotic” Albertan?
“I would define an Alberta patriot as someone who has a strong sense of Alberta’s identity and who believes in a strong and equal place for Alberta in Confederation,” Fildebrandt told reporters.
Well, so far, so good. By that logic, I’m an Alberta patriot, too.
Then his answer got more peculiar.
“Right now, Alberta is treated as a colony in Confederation. Every single province in Confederation except for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba negotiated their way into Confederation as previously established colonies, before becoming provinces. Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba were just created by the federal government as colonies and that has created many institutional barriers against Alberta,” he said.
Fildebrandt blamed our colonial start for our relatively small number of Senate seats and claimed that is why the federal government “largely ignores us.”
It is a creative re-interpretation of Canadian history — not least because it ignores the whole Louis Riel/Red River Rebellion business in Manitoba.
James Muir is a professor of Canadian legal history at the University of Alberta.
“His starting premise is correct — and the conclusions he draws from it are ludicrous,” Muir told me Friday.
“Everybody else was, to some degree, an independent colony that negotiated its entry into Confederation. Alberta and Saskatchewan didn’t enter in the same way, so that’s true. But the implications he sees from that are bogus.”
Until 1929, said Muir, the Prairie provinces did have secondclass status until the Liberal government of Mackenzie King passed the Natural Resources Transfer Acts, which gave Alberta and Saskatchewan full control of their oil and gas and forests and fisheries.
Since then, Albertans have certainly had their share of grievances against successive federal governments. But to suggest, as Fildebrandt does, that Alberta is “a colony simply to be milked” is a tad overwrought.
There’s long been a thread of Alberta separatism woven into the fabric of Alberta’s quite right parties. Fildebrandt is literally taking over the name and the brand of a party that was once avowedly separatist. But even if he’s only flirting with the idea of “autonomy,” dividing Albertans into “patriots” and non-patriots is dangerously mischievous.
And it’s more than a little ironic for Fildebrandt, who moved to Alberta only six years ago, to be Alberta-splaining to the rest of us about who is and isn’t a real Albertan.
Could we please just start with the presumption that all those who live here, whether their roots go back 100 years or more, or they chose to move here last month, whether their politics are left, right or centre, are invested in Alberta and in its future?
A patriot, per Mark Twain, is the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about. That’s not the kind of noise Alberta needs.