Average Albertans replacing political pros
Government finally closer to the governed
The brouhaha that broke out over an NDP MLA’s somewhat indiscrete Facebook photos following the stunning crush of the governing Progressive Conservative party points to a gross trend in politics in the social media age.
Kids are warned from the minute they’re old enough to type that everything they put on the Internet will be there forever — so, for goodness sake, don’t post anything that could harm your career down the line.
Deborah Drever, the new MLA for Calgary-Bow, was forced on May 6 to take down her Facebook page after people tracked down photos of someone flipping off the Canadian flag, plus her in a bathing suit, and also posing beside a shirt with a marijuana leaf.
If there’s a good way to teach harsh lessons quickly to fledgling politicos, it’s certainly to take their previous lives and manufacture a controversy about it. It also might be enough to convince someone who’s lived a textured life to stay away from politics.
Here’s what the response should’ve been: Who cares?
If you do, you shouldn’t.
The criticism of Drever fits in with a narrative that the NDP is going to have to combat in the coming weeks: Is the party too inexperienced to govern? Were there too many people nominated to run for the party who really ought not to have been there? Indeed, did these people win solely because of a vote split on the right and not their own merits? Well, they’ll figure it out. There’s an adage about governance, attributed in a few different forms to William F. Buckley, Jr., the great patriarch of American conservatism and the founder of National Review: “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.”
That applies just as well to the business leaders and lawyers that Albertans seem to have been previously contented to have tell them how to live.
And that — booting the bums out in favour of regular folks — is in some respects exactly what Albertans have done. Good. A professional political class, as was seen in Alberta, and as it is in Ottawa, isn’t a good thing because it distances government from the governed.
Americans (and conservatives in general) are often accused of anti-intellectualism for this stance. There is a very thin veneer of truth, because many of the programs that conservatives and libertarians decry come from the ranks of the intellectual elite: various programs of social engineering over booze and tobacco, to name but two. They trust their neighbours not to meddle in their lives, but someone wealthier or better educated than them, perhaps not.
But the criticism is disingenuous, because it’s not anti-intellectualism so much as a genuine belief that the average person is just as well-equipped to run a democracy as someone with a lot of money or a fabulous job. People sneer at it, as if a version of Plato’s philosopher kings is somehow better than average Albertans forming a government.
But back to Drever.
Frankly, every 26-year-old ought to have a couple questionable photos out there. If you don’t, you’ve done the last decade of your life wrong.
It’s not that previous generations of politicians were any different, but rather that the details of their lives when they’re off the clock aren’t nearly as accessible. And so it’s a uniquely modern scourge in some ways, and the impulse to level criticism ought to be resisted, and perhaps the variety of experience and opinion ought to be embraced.
Brandy Payne, a Calgary yoga instructor who also won a seat, fielded criticism about her qualifications in advance of the election.
“What’s great about our caucus and our government is that we have such a variety of folks, with a bunch of different backgrounds, and because of that diversity we’re able to better represent the people of Alberta,” she told the Calgary Herald. Words of wisdom. The NDP no doubt has an uphill battle building a government from the ranks of inexperienced MLAs. That’s very true.
But that’s a better spot to be in than the same old cycle that has been entrenched in Alberta politics for four decades.
The NDP no doubt has an uphill battle building a government from the ranks of inexperienced MLAs. But that’s a better spot to be in than the same old cycle that has been entrenched in Alberta politics. — Tyler Dawson