A province moves on
Spare a thought, but not a tear, for the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, the greatest behemoth in Canadian political history, which administered a long- overdue self- execution last Saturday in Alberta. The political hygiene of my home province is improved by its disappearance, alas delayed by the haplessness of its proper heir, the Wildrose Party, which also ended its existence on Saturday.
Alberta has a most unusual political culture. It prefers that a party burst upon the scene, take power from a tired government, and then rule for decades with massive majorities until displaced by the successor. At which point it has the decency to disappear. Alberta was governed by the United Farmers of Alberta from 1921 to 1935. The Social Credit took over then, and ruled until 1971, a 36-year run, 25 of those years under Ernest Manning.
In 1971, Peter Lougheed and the Progressive Conservatives swept to power, where they remained until 2015, becoming the longest- serving government — federal or provincial — in the history of Canada. Those 44 years were about 10 years too many.
Lougheed’s PCs were never very conservative, and did not have to be, as oil revenues meant that lavish public spending could be combined with relatively low income taxes — and no retail sales tax. After Lougheed retired, his successor Don Getty ran into trouble. Oil revenues dipped, corporate welfare boondoggles exploded, and the PCs were on the ropes. Ralph Klein rode to the rescue, injected radical fiscal discipline, and not only eliminated the deficit, but paid off the entire debt and even offered a rebate on taxes. It was Klein’s success in Alberta that laid the template for what Jean Chrétien and Paul Mar- tin would do federally in the mid- to late-’90s, eliminating the deficit and paying down national debt.
But after the debt was paid off, the PC Party — then 35 years in power — had lost any sense of direction, save for an insatiable appetite for the perks of power. The PCs dumped Ralph in 2006 for no other reason that it thought a new leader might be able to further wrap their tentacles around power. A party that exists only for power quickly becomes a vehicle for those who want power for its own sake, and for their own interests. The PC Party of Ed Stelmach, Alison Redford and the late Jim Prentice became a collection of those characterized by Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell as “the sleazeballs, the opportunists, the hangerson, the influence peddlers, the bottom feeders, those who made a career sucking as much as they could off the public teat in the days of one-party PC rule.”
So powerful is inertia in Alberta politics that the PCs continued to govern under Stelmach, a personally decent man. It would take something more appalling than him to end the PC dynasty, and it was provided in spades by the two last protégés of Joe Clark, Redford and Prentice. Schooled at the feet of their master, they brought to Alberta liberal politics combined with a surpassing air of entitlement. The public finally said enough in 2015.
There was a new party waiting, formed right on schedule after the defenestration of Ralph meant the PCs were entering their decadent phase. It was the Wildrose Party’s turn in 2015, and, in the normal Alberta order of things, it would have been set to govern for 20-plus years. But the Wildrose’s leadership lost its nerve and jumped aboard the Tory ship just as it was about to sink. Hence Albertans, disgusted by the PCs, awoke to find themselves with an NDP government.
The PCs, stripped of power, and r educed to third- party status behind the Wildrose, saw an exodus of donors and a collapse of its infrastructure. The PC party existed to sell access to power; with no power to sell, it was bankrupt. Had it had any honour left, it would have thanked the voters for 44 years of support, got its affairs quietly in order, and arranged for the undertakers to give it a decent burial.
But the PCs refused to vacate the ground to the ascendant Wildrose, as a century of Alberta tradition dictated, and so extraordinary measures were necessary. Jason Kenney, liberated from duty in Ottawa by Justin Trudeau, was the extraordinary measure. On Saturday, 95 per cent of the members of both the PCs and Wildrose voted to extinguish their parties in favour of a new united party. That surely was an utter novelty in Canadian politics, aimed though at a most conservative end: returning Alberta to its tradition, namely that after the next election, the new united party will settle in for a long run in government.