Much has been made about how you could paint a fence post Tory blue and it could get elected in an Alberta election. In part, this has to do with the attitudes some people in other parts of the country direct towards Albertans.
Just take a look at this missive written by journalist Frances Russell. For space considerations, I won't reprint the whole thing, but take a good, long look at the places I've highlighted...
$1:
Ekos’ polling shows that the current political landscape has shifted dramatically since the Harper majority victory of 2011 and could well be an aberration. Canada has been a blend of Red Tory/Progressive Conservative/Social Liberal/Social Gospel political culture since its birth under Red Tory Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald. With its core in highly Americanized Alberta and to a lesser extent Saskatchewan, Stephen Harper’s government is an outlier, the Canadian branch plant of U.S. Republicanism.
The Conservatives have been in steady decline since the last election, Graves said in an interview Monday. “Collectively, the progressive parties, centre and progressive parties, now occupy almost 75 per cent of voter intentions which I think is really quite astonishing.”
Contrary to claims Canadians are moving to the right, they’re actually going in the opposite direction, Graves continued. “They’re moving to the centre-left. Whether this is a fatigue with governing from the right – Canadians aren’t particularly right wing – or whether they’re saying that’s enough, they are beginning to desert Harper and increasingly finding (Liberal leader Justin) Trudeau to be the most likely source of renewal.”
Want to know why so many Albertans get reflexively defensive at criticism and will line up to vote Conservative even when we're pissed off at conservatives? Because of attitudes like this, that we're somehow un-Canadian for our views and voting patterns, that we're somehow backwards-thinking, that we're just plain stupid, for voting Tory. It's what we see as a patronizing, condescending attitude, that these dumb Alberta rubes don't know what's good for them, that makes us so mad to begin with. Russell describes us as "highly Americanized", as if we're somehow less Canadian because we don't always vote Liberal or NDP, and make so much of our living from the oil and gas industry.
And yet, that's the really sad irony-Alberta is not nearly as different from the rest of Canada as some of its biggest boosters or its biggest critics like to pretend. In many ways, we have enacted policies and actions that could easily have been replicated in other provinces:
-We subsidize the oil and gas industry through various tax credits and royalty rebate programs;
-We supported an increase in the amount of royalties oil and gas companies would have to pay, which only got scuttled due to the increase happening right before the 2008 crash;
-We can be economic nationalists, as evidenced by the large public support for incentives for resource companies to process more of our bitumen locally, something that even the Wildrose Alliance has come out in support of;
-The Wildrose's election chances were destroyed in 2012 because of one candidate's homophobic comments, which put a lot of people of from voting for them;
-The Wildrose promising to respect the
Canada Health Act if they are elected;
-Ralph Klein refused to use the Charter of Rights' notwithstanding clause to overturn the Supreme Court's ordering Alberta to enter gay rights into our provincial human rights code, despite the protests of some religious social conservatives;
-After he had paid down the provincial debt, Klein started putting money back into the system;
-The failure of Klein's "Third Way" proposals to introduce more private health care into Alberta;
-Alberta being the only province to give a substantial land base to its Métis Aboriginal population;
-Preston Manning openly and loudly advocating for "green conservatism" and speaking about the need for Albertans to get a wake-up call on the environment;
-Peter Lougheed raising the oil royalty rates, building a generous social safety net, spending on arts and heritage, making huge interest-free loans to other provinces and working to make the province less dependent on the ups and downs of oil prices...and Albertans supported him through all this, long before a huge influx of new migrants came here from other parts of Canada and other countries.
...Do these sound like the sorts of things a "highly Americanized" province would do?We, in Alberta, have done many of the same things and embraced many of the same ideas and beliefs as our fellow Canadians. A large part of what pisses us off and what gave rise to Western alienation in our province is in part the fact that so many federal policies have historically benefited other parts of Canada while leaving us holding the bag, and in part people like Russell imply that we're somehow less Canadian for complaining and wanting to see some aspects of the system change.
This is what gave rise to the Reform Party in the 1980s, and what Stephen Harper has been able to ride on to get such staunch support in Alberta. It also masks the commonalities we share with the rest of the country, creating the illusion that there are more differences than there actually are.
If the other federal parties, and progressives in general, want more Albertans to listen to them, they'd be better served by not implying that we're all a bunch of real-life Captain Planet villains or dimwitted hayseeds. Would
you listen to anyone who disparages and caricatures your community like this?
If not, then how do they expect us to listen to them?
/endrant