Political strife the next threat for a province under siege
Rough times mean rough politics. Alberta is in for more of both.
Calgary has been ravaged by nature and economics for five years. The city was flooding on June 20, 2013. The boiling Bow and Elbow rivers converged in the heart of downtown.
Nobody in the thick of that is likely to forget it.
The rest of 2013 was about civic survival and recovery.
Magnificently, the Stampede went on only two weeks after the flood, thanks to the leadership of people like then CEO Vern Kimball.
Then came 2014 and a surge of prosperity. Calgary rebounded along with a powerful provincial economy.
Calgary was again its old self, almost obnoxiously self-confident.
But 2015 brought the oil price crash, the hollowing out of the downtown towers, job losses that nobody could have imagined.
That coincided with growing national hostility to pipelines and the oilsands. Governments flipped in the political gale; Alberta went NDP and national voters turned Liberal.
Across Alberta, years of hardship damaged morale and turned mild political disagreements into partisan hatreds.
Alberta began to lose something — the talent for unity, the taste for compromise, the recognition that we’re all pretty much alike despite our differences.
And I fear we’ve only begun the long slide into this pit.
The political climate will grow even more brutal for the next year, as the NDP and UCP gear up for what could be the most acrimonious campaign in provincial history.
The NDP is releasing an attack ad depicting UCP Leader Jason Kenney as a puppet ordered by a zealot to slash jobs and services, while giving tax breaks to the rich.
The ad is downright cartoonish; because it is, literally, a cartoon.
All we see of Kenney is his hunched back as he’s instructed by this authority figure who re-introduces him to Alberta (“Jason, you’re new here”), with a flash of Kenney as a young antiabortionist.
The New Democratic Party pays for the ad, which will run online starting Wednesday, and be widely promoted on government-friendly social media.
Kenney wasn’t aware of the ad Tuesday, but he’s fully familiar with the theme. In response to Notley’s critical speech last weekend, he said on Facebook:
“We know that a desperate NDP will increasingly resort to scare tactics over the next 11 months. After all, the NDP lied about the carbon tax to get elected, so what won’t they lie about to stay in power?
“Fortunately, Albertans are smarter than the ‘NDP Anger Machine’ give them credit for.”
There’s an NDP anger machine, no doubt about it, but social issues like abortion and LGBTQ rights are extremely important. Kenney has a lot of explaining to do, especially after his caucus refused to utter a single word on Bill 9, the law to expand protestfree zones around abortion clinics.
And yet, it’s doubtful that the New Democrats can win the election this way, with nothing but their current record and escalating attacks on Kenney.
More fuel landed on the bonfire Tuesday, with the news that arguments will be heard Wednesday in a court challenge launched by 25 faith-based schools against NDP legislation on gay-straight alliances.
The schools wildly allege that the alliances are “ideological sex clubs.”
The case pits the schools directly against the government, which refutes the sex club charge and says the law is constitutional.
This could eventually inch its way toward the Supreme Court, providing tinder for both sides.
There was a time, only a decade ago, when Alberta was Canada’s most politically unified and cohesive province. Solidarity helped the province win many national battles.
The Progressive Conservative regime eventually collapsed in cronyism and fiscal incompetence. But these days, the unity part looks very appealing.