National Post (National Edition)
Revolutionary? More like consistent
“I think we might have made a little bit of history tonight.” — Alberta premier-elect Rachel Notley
By now, anyone who tuned in to Tuesday night’s Alberta election coverage has at least a cursory understanding of the province’s electoral history: the province had only been governed by four parties since it was created in 1905. Each one was in power for a long period of time, before being swept away by another, nominally conservative party. The question now is whether the NDP’s decisive victory on Tuesday represents a new era in Alberta politics.
To many, the thought of the NDP sweeping Canada’s conservative heartland was akin to Texas legalizing gay marriage and nationalizing its oil industry. The idea that a province that has virtually exclusively elected conservatives both federally and provincially for a generation could wake up one day and think giving socialism a try is a good idea would seem to represent a massive shift in the electorate. But is it?
The oil boom has brought and influx of immigrants into Alberta from across the country and around the world who bring their own ideas, beliefs and political backgrounds. It’s likely that newer Albertans helped pave the way for the NDP’s historic win, by painting the party as less scary than some might have thought.
But Alberta has always been a province of immigrants and has somehow managed to absorb them into its dominant political culture. I don’t think the revolution we witnessed in this election was any more historic than previous upheavals in Alberta politics. This is a region of the country with a long tradition of populist movements ushering in drastic political change.
Many small-c conserva- tives may think it crazy that anyone would cast a ballot for the New Democrats after socialism’s failure in Eastern Europe, and after the NDP’s own brand of market socialism produced such abysmal results elsewhere in the country. But the Prairies have never been a stranger to crazy.
After Alberta and Saskatchewan were split from the Northwest Territories in 1905 to create two separate provinces, both were run by Liberal governments originally installed by the federal party. Fed up with scandal and a lack of voice in the legislature, a group of farmers banded together as the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) and ran the Grits out of office in Alberta in 1921. Saskatchewan was largely governed by Liberals until 1944, when the CCF (now NDP) came to power.
From this point on, the neighbouring provinces went in decidedly different directions. Saskatchewan, the home of Tommy Douglas and medicare, has been an economic basket case for much of its history, until the Saskatchewan Party started turning things around. Alberta, on the other hand, fared much better, but has still seen its share of bad ideas.
Before Social Credit formed government, it was the personal crusade of one William “Bible Bill” Aberhart, who combined British economist C.H. Douglas’ nonsensical economic theory of social credit with his own religious fundamentalism, to create a political philosophy he hoped would save Albertans from the effects of the Great Depression.
Much as the modern Progressive Conservative party was taken over by progressives — culminating in the election of former Premier Alison Redford — who felt that shifting the policies of the incumbent party was the only way to achieve meaningful change in the province, Aberhart originally tried to get the UFA government to enact social credit policies by promoting them on his popular radio show and getting members of his Social Credit League into UFA locals.
Having failed to convince the government to adopt his ideas (largely because many of them involved monetary policy changes that were clearly unconstitutional for a province to enact), Aberhart used his stardom, anger over government scandals and the UFA’s inability to free Albertans from the strains of the an economic crisis (the Great Depression) to ride a wave of populist anger into office in 1935.
Sound familiar? After years of scandal, ineffective leadership and an economic downturn caused first by the financial crises and then by the sharp drop in oil prices, Albertans finally said they’d had enough of the PC’s 44-year reign.
That the NDP’s policies of increasing taxes on businesses and the wealthy, and throwing the oil industry into turmoil by launching another royalty review and making a concerted push to reduce greenhouses gasses, will be bad for the economy does not really matter. Nor does the fact that the Dippers drove neighbouring B.C. and Saskatchewan into the ground.
All that matters is that the PCs were out of touch with Albertans and it was time for a change. Few could have predicted the NDP would be the party to lead that change. But it is not out of line with the province’s past. When the PCs came to power in 1971, they went from six to 49 seats; this week, the NDP managed to increase its seat count from four to 54. When Alberta changes government, it does so in a big way. This is prairie populism at its finest.
It seems crazy that Alberta would lurch from PC to NDP in such a dramatic way. But the Prairies have
never been a stranger to crazy