Goodbye to Alberta’s PCs. And good riddance.
On Saturday, as was generally foreseen, Jason Kenney became leader of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives. This sounds portentous and impressive. But one of the things that strikes you, since Kenney is proposing to ( at a bare minimum) re- brand the Alberta PCs, is that their leaders are not exactly an honour roll of mighty statesmen. The party was successful and did good, and Albertans are grateful for its legacy. But they are, perhaps, grateful in the reluctant, compromised way one might be grateful to an exwife who was not much fun but helped the kids turn out well.
Peter Lougheed helped to change Canada’s destiny and define the compact between Ottawa and the provinces. Ralph Klein put the province on a competitive, economically diverse footing and established the fiscal health that a New Democratic government is now exploiting. But Lougheed’s electorally unsuccessful forerunners are forgotten by all but families and friends, and Klein’s successors all came to unhappy political ends.
Why, then, do Albertans speak so fondly of the Progressive Conservative heritage? I am afraid the answer is that older Albertans have chosen to forget it and younger ones don’t understand it. Peter Lougheed led a government that, owing to 1970s oil prices, had more revenue than it knew what to do with. THAT IS NOT A FIGURE OF SPEECH. Much of the art of Alberta government in the Seventies was trying to think up new, non-wasteful uses for oil money.
Most of Lougheed’ s choices turned out to be very wasteful indeed after he left office. Those budgeting conditions have occurred only a few times anywhere in the annals of Western civilization, and they are never coming back. If they did, it would now be thought insane to follow a Lougheed program — make bad infrastructure and “value- added industry” bets, throw doomed loans at resource and tech companies, flood the cities with cheapo housing.
Naturally, every politician in the province, including the NDP premier, praises Lougheed at every possible opportunity. Ralph Klein, they mention less often. Still less does anybody speak of the book- censorers and gay- botherers who made up much of his ( and Lougheed’s) PC caucus.
The exception, of course, is Kenney, running explicitly as Ralph’s heir. This is almost as funny as Rachel Notley running as Lougheed’s spiritual scion. Kenney was a major thorn in Ralph’s side as a young activist outside government. His advocacy helped the small- government bloc in the PC caucus throttle Ralph’s personal liberal instincts. If Klein were with us, seeing Jason Kenney win the PC leadership might have left him hog-flayingly angry. A lot of PCs felt that way when Klein won.
Alberta politics is full of this sort of congenital confusion. Everybody is asking where the “progressives” or “centrists” in the PC party will go now that Kenney has won the leadership. The results of the PC leadership contest suggest that there aren’t really very many of these people, or that they already defected to the NDP. They may be outnumbered by the federal Conservative voters who demonstrably stayed home in the last Alberta election, and whom Kenney hopes to awaken from their slumbers.
There will certainly be jockeying for the political middle if we end up with a straight Kenney- Notley fight. But the next election is shaping up to be, among other things, a referendum on the Alberta carbon tax. What, I ask you, is the “centrist” position on this tax? As the tax has been designed and implemented, some of the revenue is returned to lower-income households to make the effects progressive while preserving the marginal energy- saving incentives. Depending on whom you ask, and on what day, this rebate is either fairly reasonable, totally futile, objectionable in principle, or not nearly large enough.
Kenney says that if he becomes premier his first act, his Bill 1, will be the total repeal of the carbon tax. But Kenney’s “centrist” rivals for the PC leadership opposed the carbon tax too. Even the nebulous Alberta Party has been criticizing the details of the tax. It is not clear that Albertans will have a party to vote for in the next election that supports carbon taxation but opposes the NDP’s deepening deficits — which seems like a not- at- all unusual or freaky political position to be in.
Maybe what Al ber t a needs is a proper liberal party, a party of the moderate left that is not a hostage of labour unions. Maybe we need an evidence- driven neoliberal Economist Party that would give us both a carbon tax and realistic budgeting. Maybe we could use a real, hardcore guns’ n’- weed libertarian party. Lots of people outside Alberta would say we need a harder-left party to goad the timid, post- socialist, pipeline- friendly Notley NDP. And maybe we could use a party to honestly represent the interests and concerns of socially conservative Christians.
What I cannot see the need for is a “Progressive Conservative” party. After all, everyone else seems to be disposing of the PC brand. The old joke that “progressive conservative” means “f orward backward” destroyed the whole concept after all.
KENNEY WAS A MAJOR THORN IN RALPH’S SIDE AS A YOUNG ACTIVIST.