Alberta’s new ideology: CHANGE
There’s nothing wrong with a socialist country if it’s run right
Situated between a horse pasture and a narrow highway, the James River Community Hall is a small, whitewashed building that looks just right for holding Saturday-night line dances or bingo calls. It’s a place of Sobey’s doughnuts, late coffee, stained blue overalls, wild kids, and calloused fingers.
Among the men gathered around a table here is David Lewis, a retiree who lives nearby in this town an hour northwest of Calgary.
On the long-ruling Progressive Conservatives, he says: “I think they’re a bunch of plutocrats in there, milking the system and I don’t like the idea of their high pay and their severance and stuff like that. It’s just not fair.”
The conversation turns to matters of internal mismanagement, tax hikes, debt, the deficit, the PC government’s seeming inability to set its finances straight. Someone brings up the prospect of running things a little more like Denmark, or Sweden. But aren’t those Nordic countries a tad, well, socialist?
Lewis’s response is extraordinary, even baffling, considering the company — he and the other men at the table are here for a Wildrose event, a speech from new leader Brian Jean: “There’s nothing wrong with a socialist government if it’s run right.”
The conversation reveals the emergence of a different kind of Alberta dynamic. Anger at the longgoverning party has temporarily superseded the old war between the left and the right. Change is the prevailing ideology.
It goes back to the 2012 election, when the Tories almost lost but then won an unexpected majority after painting the opposition Wildrose as scarily socially conservative.
Now, after three years of Tory scandals — and the ruling party’s stunning annexation of most of the Wildrose caucus — the same anger, trapped and preserved in a sea bed, has been polished to a shine and brought out for show: This government is just not being run right. Lewis and his friends talk of big business pulling the strings, backroom deals, and dirty politics.
Premier Jim Prentice called this election on April 7 because, he said, he wanted a mandate for his budget. But the campaign isn’t following his script. It’s become about trust, and the fact that the Tories no longer enjoy it.
Tory voters are breaking to the NDP in unprecedented numbers, according to the polls. The sentiment is summed up perfectly by conservative gadfly Ezra Levant on Twitter: “No word of a lie, if my only choices were this dirty clique, or the NDP, hand to God I’d vote NDP.”
Of course, Levant would still prefer a government led by Jean, who seemed baffled by the sudden turn of socialist support in Calgary this week:
“I know, for a long time [voters] have looked to the PC party to give them good government. And there have been years, a long time ago, where PC policy and PC leaders have helped our province prosper,’’ says Jean. ‘‘But those years are over now. Those years are over.”
To see the polls, Alberta stands on the brink of electing an NDP-dominated legislature on Tuesday. According to a survey this week commissioned by the Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald, leader Rachel Notley has the support of 38 per cent of decided voters, eight points ahead of the PCs, which could put her on track for a minority government. (The Wildrose is at 20 per cent.)
But the support splits in even more astonishing ways. Of those who cast their ballot for Alison Redford and the PCs in 2012, 30 per cent are now pledging to mark for the NDP instead.
It’s a leftist rise so astonishing and so incongruous in this longtime conservative stronghold that the rest of Canada is standing, mouth agape, watching it.
Prentice came in with high hopes last fall. He replaced PC premier Ali- son Redford, who won thanks to a centrist coalition of centre-left voters, but squandered every ounce of goodwill within two years with an unceasing series of expense and entitlement scandals.
The federal-minister-turned-banker made a few quick changes, and the Tory poll numbers swelled.
But in the past six months, the ethics commissioner has called out Prentice’s education minister for moving a few schools up the waiting list in his riding to help him win his byelection. Prentice himself orchestrated a backroom deal that lured nine Wildrose MLAs to cross the floor — the largest floor-crossing in Canadian history. He spent three months preparing Albertans for a transformational, austerity budget that instead came laden with tax increases. His 10-year plan proved so malleable that he changed it on the campaign trail.
Add to that, a series of questionable disqualifications for his own party’s nomination races cemented every fear of backroom chicanery and alienated their volunteers and supporters. Before the writ dropped, it was revealed this week, a wellliked young Tory by the name of Jamie Lall was told he was disqualified from running — ostensibly because he had a restraining order put on him by a former girlfriend when he was 22 years old.
A leaked text message, from the PCs’ own beleaguered Justice Minister and Solicitor General, Jonathan Denis, suggested Lall get a lawyer — that he was being booted to make room for Wildrose floor crosser Bruce McAllister. The whole mess summed up by the phrase: “Buddy, you are being set up.”
If the polls are right, Prentice may find himself playing the role of Kim Campbell in 1993 — a fresh face made to pay for the sins of Brian Mulroney.
“This transcends Jim Prentice,” said Duane Bratt, a political scientist with Mount Royal University. “This is the deep rot in the PC party.”
This is what happens when a party becomes a generational fixture. The party becomes everything. It’s the architect of economic fortunes, the gris-gris of success and of failure.
The party’s business becomes everybody’s business; it stretches into the boards, the not-for-profits, the law firms, the cottage-industry of government relations.
“Its tentacles stretch throughout Alberta society at so many different levels. And they decide issues within the party,” Bratt said. “Imagine a large family that solves all those issues within the family — what happens when there’s a dispute within that family?”
Everyone understands there is a risk to angering the party — and a bauble to be gained in deference and a well-timed donation. Fear and favour both breed resentment.
“Which is why people are going ‘I can’t decide between the NDP and the Wildrose. On the surface, that’s asinine. They’re two very different policy prescriptions, polar opposites,” Bratt said. What voters are actually saying, he said, is that they are “looking for the avenue that is the best available option that’s not the Progressive Conservative party.”
The Progressive Conservative enemy of 2015 is not the Wildrose, as it was in 2012. This time it’s the NDP, and certainly much of the province’s committed, conservative core is left startled and aghast at the thought of a Premier Rachel Notley — a woman who would raise corporate income tax to 12 per cent, review royalties, and forgo championing Northern Gateway or Keystone XL.
But privately, even some Conservatives gleefully delight in the prospect of a minority government — a post-PC government with training wheels. The talk is all about how Wildrose and the NDP might work together to cripple the old foe.
There is a larger battle in the offing here, too: whether the province hews to its conservative roots, or whether its demographic realities will finally begin to crack through in shades of red and green and orange. That won’t likely be decided on Tuesday, when the ballots are cast, but in the years afterward.
Then Lewis’s unstated question will be answered: whether Alberta is as conservative as people believe, or whether it’s just looking for a government that runs right.