Notley’s ‘conservative’ approach no accident
If you thought Alberta has three major political parties in the legislature — the NDP, the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose — you’d be wrong.
At least that’s not how Premier Rachel Notley sees it.
She’d say there are the NDP, the Conservative party and “the other conservative party.” The term “Wildrose” has apparently vanished from her vocabulary. So, too, the word “progressive” when talking about the PCs.
Here is a quote from Notley on Friday taking to reporters: “There’s a fundamental difference in terms of the vision that we introduced in the last election and what was being introduced by both the Conservatives and the other conservatives.” The “other conservatives?” This was not a slip by the premier; here she is a few minutes later in the same scrum: “If you look at the positions that the Conservative party and the other con- servative party have taken …”
According to ofcials in the premier’s ofce, Notley wants to clearly spell out the diference between her “progressive” New Democratic government and the other guys. Or, more to the point, she wants to lump them together as “conservatives” — and in Notley’s world, being conservative is not a good thing.
I suppose you could say Notley is trying to help unite the right — in her own unique way.
This is all part of the narrative Notley has been spinning since the 2015 provincial election. She’s all about borrowing, and spending, to keep government services running and public-sector workers working during the oil-slump recession.
Her opponents want the government to borrow and spend less (although both the PCs and, you know, the other conservatives, would also be running deficits if they were in power, but they say their deficits would not be approaching $11 billion this year, as is the NDP’s).
Of course, we don’t know what life would be like under the Conservatives or the Wildrose if they had won the election. If we take them at their word, government spending would have been cut dramatically. They would have made the recession better.
If we believe Notley’s peek inside these alternative realities, government services would have been slashed and thousands of public-sector workers would be unemployed. The “conservatives” would have made the recession worse.
Notley isn’t just taking aim at the “conservatives” of Jim Prentice and Brian Jean from 2015. She’s digging back to the Conservatives of Ralph Klein, whose answer to an economic downturn in the 199os was to slash government spending, cut transfers to municipal governments, kick 30,000 welfare recipients of benefits, increase health-care premiums, hike university tuitions and chop hundreds of public-sector workers.
“If we look at some of the dramatic cuts that actually were made by the government that was recently defeated over the course of their tenure I think it’s important to remember that we see what happens when hospitals are literally blown up,” said Notley. “It’s not helpful.”
It’s a message that will resonate with anybody who remembers Klein’s hospitalbusting budgets. But people have short memories. And there is a mythology surrounding the Klein years that is regularly stoked by conservative politicians, whether they be PCs or Wildrose. Or federal MP Jason Kenney.
On his cross-province tour for the Alberta PC leadership, Kenney likes to imply he’s the second coming of Ralph as he bashes the tax-and-spend NDP. “They are even raising beer taxes,” Kenney tells his audiences with a smile. “I guarantee you Ralph Klein wouldn’t have done that.” Guess what? He did. In 2002, while Alberta was going through a post-9/11 rough patch, Klein raised taxes on tobacco and alcohol, including a 40-cent hike to a dozen beer.
Klein tried to argue these were “user fees,” not taxes, because people could choose not to drink or smoke.
A tax is a tax — and calling it something else won’t change it. Just as the Wildrose is the Wildrose — and calling it “the other conservative party” isn’t likely to change it, either.