Jen Gerson in her article "The Myth of Alberta Conservatism" (The Walrus, Feb. 4, 2019) misses the mark.
She wrote that "The Reform Party was but one of many relief wells that have been created over the province’s history: Alberta maintains a reputation for wild political upheaval and experimentation unparalleled in any other province for a reason. The United Farmers of Alberta, the CCF, Social Credit, Ralph Klein, Reform—even, arguably, the provincial NDP win in 2015—were all born of the same wildcat energy."
This is hardly true, if she means the same people expressing the same sentiment who simply shifted from one party to another to relieve the so-called wildcat pressure.
How do I know this?
Because different electoral districts elected the people who formed the Klein government than formed the Notley government.
Edmonton Strathcona elected NDP consistently for these periods.
Calgary Elbow just as one example voted Progressive Conservative in both 2015 under Prentis and in 2001 under Klein.
In Calgary Varsity 1300 voted NDP in 2001. I am betting that many of them were among the 5000 that voted for the NDP candidate in 2015 which was enough for a NDP victory in that district at that time. 8000 voted for the Conservative candidate in 2001, a group that probably overlapped to a great extent with the 5700 who voted for the Conservative candidate in 2015.
From 2001 to 2015 the NDP vote increased from 80,000 to 600,000. This seven-fold increase in votes increased their seat count by a factor of 12. Between those two elections (somewhat picked at random) the NDP took an additional 520,000, while the Conservative party took 200,000 less votes, but still 400,000, many of which it can be imagined supported the P-Cs in 2001.
Many votes changed but many such as majorities in Strathcona and Elbow stayed the same.
Really what happened in 2015 was a right-left thing -- enough additional were unhappy with the Conservatives' short-sighted self-serving polices that they voted for leftward (pro-people) change, and the First past the post system that our elections suffer under, which had previously artificially rewarded the Conservatives and held the NDP from its fair share of representation in the legislature, now turned in the NDP's favour.
And what the heck? --she writes "Alberta maintains a reputation for wild political upheaval and experimentation unparalleled in any other province for a reason."
We don't have that reputation at all. In the 1940s and before we did do some pretty cool things but since then very little. Heck, we have changed government only three times since 1949. When Rachel won in 2015, it had been almost been 80 years since the Social Credit were elected and in that time we had changed government just once.
Since the finding of oil in north Alberta in 1947 Alberta had done very little to occasion a reputation for experimentation unless giving our resources over with very little return to U.S. oil companies is a form of experimentation you think important.
Gerson made other remarks that bear countering.
Gerson: "Alberta became a province in 1905, when the federal Liberal government carved up the North-West Territories, creating Alberta and Saskatchewan (and, a year later, the Northwest Territories), to undermine the Conservative Party and better maintain political control of the two provinces."
Alberta becoming a province was not a Liberal plot -- it was a long-coming move to give responsible government to a well-populated part of the NWT. Citizens of Alberta had been calling for province-level responsible government for many years. Their elected representatives after a hard fight had wrested control of the territorial government from federally-appointed councillors. But the territories was and area so large that effective democratic government was impossible. A division of the territory and granting of provincehood had to be made for efficiency sake.
So is she really saying that provincehood was a Liberal plot and if Conservatives had their say Alberta would still be a corner of a federally-administered territory without a provincial legislature elected by the people? It is very possible that many Conservatives would like that sort of arrangement with almost totalitarian powers emanating out of Ottawa. That is if they are in power in Ottawa, of course.
Instead of seeing provincehood as a plot we shold see it as an honest government giving Albertans what they wanted. Despite what Conservatives may think, it is no crime to give in to intelligent democratic sentiment. Sometimes democracy really is best. Really no one should be elected who gets less votes than his opponent (this is targeted at Trump by the way) and no government should hold power without a proper mandate (hence my calls for STV).
When Gerson discussed the UFA government, she wrote "The province’s public finances grew increasingly shambolic, ultimately leading to an infamous default on its debts in 1936." It is important to point out that that default occurred after election of Aberhart's SC government.
And was it infamous? Whom did it harm? Mostly some investment banks in Eastern Canada. Most working families did not have money to invest in Alberta bonds. And payment on the provincial bond was more postponed than defaulted - The government finally made good with the investors in the 1940s when the province's finances improved.
Gerson wrote: "Aberhart couldn’t follow through on Social Credit’s most ambitious goals—the province simply wasn’t wealthy enough to hand out money during the Depression. But Ernest Manning could. By the ’50s, the government was cutting resource-dividend cheques for all its citizens."
However for those who regret not being around in the 1950s when Albertans got free money, you should know that Manning did not issue cheques to all Albertans -- only to adults who had lived in Alberta more than ten years.
The monthly cheques were not very substantial -- only $20 per month.
The cheques came out of government coffers and were derived in part from resource royalty taxes but also from personal income tax, corporate tax and profits from profitable government enterprises. They were not even called resource-dividend cheques -- they were called citizen participation cheques - harkening to the Social Credit's concept of an active citizenship and group effort at the social level, very different from the individual free-enterprise attitude of conservatives.
(Now if the Alberta government wants to emulate Alaska and issue cheques to Albertans due to their shared ownership of the province's resources, I would applaud it and do believe that it would make our province a bette, more prosperous place, providing needed buying power in the hands of the ordinary families and reducing poverty. But to do that the government would have to get more from oil companies, go deeper in debt, tax more from working stiffs and/or the wealthy or cut services. The government does not want to do the first three and the fourth - which it is probably going to do anyway - will be disaster for many. So I don't hold much hope that Conservatives will repeat Manning's bold step of the 1950s.
And you should recall that Conservatives fought Aberhart hard due to his promise of, and attempts to, issue free money. Privately-owned newspapers criticized his government incessantly and his government passed a Fair reporting law. Conservatives, civil servants and the courts opposed this, and privately-owned newspapers were free to continue their anti-government broadcasts.
Gerson: "Lougheed drastically increased resource royalty rates and expanded the scope of government. In 1974, his government even purchased an airline—part of a broader effort to diversify the province’s economy away from the oil-and-gas sector. Lougheed embraced statist policies that, to modern economic sentiments, seem far to the left of what the NDP would attempt today."
He bought PWA when it was losing money and as soon as government management made it profitable he sold it again. Buying an airline already operating is not going to diversify anything - government purchase of an existing operation is no way to diversify. Industrialization, such as the starting of new businesses outside of oil, would be diversification.
Yes he used statist policies to do everything but improve the lot of workers in the province. That is a difference between Lougheed and the NDP.
Lougheed did not create the so-called "Alberta Advantage" of low taxes for corporations and the wealthy but he helped lay its base. Alberta's minimum wage was nothing to crow about back then for example.
Gerson: "One of Lougheed’s greatest legacies, however, is his forceful opposition to Pierre Trudeau’s National Energy Program. In the 1970s, Alberta was producing enormous quantities of oil while the rest of Canada was reeling from successive oil crises. The NEP, introduced in 1980 over Alberta’s strenuous objections, created an export tax designed to force that province’s oil to be sold to central Canada at a discount from the world price...."
Conversely Alberta was insisting that Central Canada would pay the world price or more for Alberta's oil. Alberta was likely being a mouthpiece for the U.S. oil companies that dominated our oilfields and who couldn't give two cents for Canadian interests?
Why should Central Canada have bothered to sign on to such a deal? if it would be paying the same price as the world price why bother?
And now some Albertans are miffed that Quebec does not want to buy Alberta oil. We had our chance to establish a mutual-benefitting trade with our fellow Canadians in the 1980s and turned it down, so what do you think we can expect in return now?
Gerson is fair enough to write "the energy crises of the ’70s gave way to the great oil glut of the ’80s. But in the minds of Albertans, Trudeau was the prime culprit in the crushing recession that followed. There is hardly an Albertan alive who doesn’t remember hearing stories about people losing most of their savings or their house, or both. The term jingle mail became common parlance; it referred to the sound that keys to abandoned houses made as they were mailed to the bank when mortgages became unsupportable."
The first sentence cannot be stressed enough - world prices of oil dropped at that time and that caused Alberta's recession. You see we had turned down selling our oil to central Canada at a Canadian-made price and were exposed to world price fluctuations.
Our exposure to world price for oil is caused by the fact that we are engaged in selling Alberta's oil to others - we produce far too much for our own use so we ship it out for others to use to produce added value and for them to turn it into valuable products instead of doing it ourselves, ensuring steady jobs for Alberta and added wealth for ourselves.
Not to mention that by the 1980s we had used up the most part of our easily accessible conventional oil in the province and now have to seek it in more difficult places and turn to expensive dirty tar sands.
We can't seem to sell our own (and Canada's) resources off at minimally-refined resource prices quickly enough and then we complain we're getting screwed - and object when the Canada government wants to slow the sell-off and keep resources for future generations. The government does not use those terms but the effect of limiting tar sands development today for climate change reasons has the same effect - of reserving Canada's fuel resources for future generations, and of course oil will be more valuable in a future where it is scarcer than it is now.
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