All over but for the crying?
NDP win in Alberta would be interesting, not earth-shattering
Let’s play “what if,” shall we? What if Rachel Notley’s New Democrats are, in fact, poised to take power in Alberta, ending nearly 44 years of consecutive Conservative rule? What if the polls are accurate, this time?
What if, for Premier Jim Prentice and his government, it’s all over but the crying?
Would these truly be — as the Progressive Conservative war room was busily imputing Saturday evening on Twitter — the End Times? Will the ghosts of Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin and Hugo Chavez come cantering into Edmonton at Notley’s back, each mounted on a pale horse? Further, to spin this out a bit, could a Notley victory lay the table for an even more transformative federal NDP breakthrough in the West?
Just about anything is possible, one has to suppose. But it’s really not very likely. History, in particular that of Bob Rae’s NDP government in Ontario from 1990-1995, suggests something far more prosaic. It’ll be inexperience, incompetence, and the inevitable disappointments and compromises that come with power that characterize a Notley first term.
An excess of left-wing ideology, very soon, will not be her biggest problem.
One question, as we envision hypothetical Premier Notley getting down to work in the new social-democratic Alberta should be: Who will be her Peter Kormos? Kormos, readers will recall, was the populist, charismatic and thoroughly ungovernable Ontario MPP who appointed himself his party’s conscience about a year into its single term in government, then proceeded to thrust sticks in Rae’s spokes as he sought to rein in runaway deficits and debt.
Might that role be assumed by, say, Rod Loyola, the former provincial NDP leadership aspirant now running in Edmonton?
A video briefly circulated Saturday in which Loyola appeared to passionately extol the virtues of the late Venezuelan Marxist strongman Hugo Chavez. The clip was soon taken down. In a Facebook posting from Oct. 7, 2012, Loyola defends a long essay apparently authored by another writer, James Petras, again fervently praising Chavez and excoriating the running dogs of capitalist imperialism.
It’s vintage Marxist blather of the kind one might expect to hear at a campus gathering of International Socialists, each clutching his or her little red book of aphorisms from Chairman Mao and sipping espresso from a teensy cup, and not from a prospective MLA in a party set to govern a province that remains the economic engine of Canada, oil collapse notwithstanding.
Be that as it may, the Redbaiting that has characterized the last-ditch effort by the PCs to salvage their campaign has been singularly unpersuasive.
Hauling out a candidate’s controversial past views is less potent in an era in which voters understand power changes everything. Rae himself, in his 1996 memoir, From Protest To Power, acknowledges as much.
Second, should Notley be confronted with a diehard such as Kormos, who refuses to bend to pragmatism, nothing prevents his or her being cast into the outer darkness, as Kormos was.
Moreover, Notley would have an advantage that Rae didn’t, which is the stark clarity of the ballot question.
Disenchantment with Prentice and the PCs has emerged from across the spectrum and is as non-ideological as such a wave can be.
Notley’s campaign caught fire because of her impressive performance in the TV debate, but also because she sounds reasonable. Again in an interview Saturday morning with CBC’s Evan Solomon, she did not present, in any way, as an ideologue.
Also, her party’s platform is just vague enough in many places to give her the flexibility to set some of its woollier promises aside, as she will have to do if she becomes premier, particularly in a minority context.
This brings us to the po-
Speculation about a ‘socialist’ Alberta federally already seems overheated
tential impact of a “socialist” Alberta federally. Here again, the speculation already seems overheated.
Precisel y because t he NDP surge has been so nonideological, is tied to Notley’s personal likability and is a response to a particular set of circumstances in Alberta politics, there is little reason to assume it can translate into anything similar federally. There is currently just one federal NDP seat, held by Edmonton MP Linda Duncan. Her leader, Thomas Mulcair, will need to bring his own game.
What a Notley victor y might do, more realistically, is make the federal NDP less scary ideologically to Ontario voters who are more familiar with Mulcair than are many Albertans.
But unless this too were to somehow morph into a wave, the practical effect would be to lower the federal Liberal vote share in Ontario, pushing more seats into the federal Conservative column. Far from making life easier for eastern federal progressives, in other words, an NDP takeover of Alberta might actually further entrench their archfoe.
Taken together, it amounts to this: An NDP victory Tuesday would be interesting and historic.
But earth-shattering? Survey says no.
Canadian socialists have a way of sanding off their Chavezian edges in relatively speedy fashion, once the trendy organic cafés give way to a boardroom ... or a cabinet table.