Phendrana Drifts

There is a war a brewing in the Progressive Conservative blogs in Alberta, and wow is it overdue. About a month ago I was complaining to Allie that no one in the leadership race for the provincial PC's was talking about the issue I thought was most important to the party, and that was who would actually win the next election. She said why don't you blog about it, and I replied with something like I was too lazy. That caused an eye-rolling, but then my wish was answered today without me lifting a finger.

My two friends William McBeath and Ken Chapman are having it out on that very subject (although somewhat in a roundabout way). Now the appropriate thing to do would be to comment on their posts, but I would rather post here.

The crux of what William and Ken seem to be getting to is whether Alberta is looking to go more left (or as the kids these days are calling it, progressive) or more right (or as the kids on that side of the fence call it, small "c" conservative). Personally I think we could go either way, but I'm going to suggest that there are some flaws in the theories people put forward on the subject, especially as it pertains to Alberta. These myths, as I like to think of them, permeate our political culture here and I'm glad some are at least willing to talk about it.

Myth 1: The Progressive Conservative party is the natural ruler of Alberta. Yeah, uh, no. Lots of Albertans don't vote PC, in fact at the moment they constitute a majority of the voting public in the last election. The PC party could very well lose the next election, and I certainly will make no predictions on the one after that. Ken and William obviously agree with me on this, because otherwise they wouldn't be blogging about it.

Myth 2: Alberta is an inherently right wing province. Historically speaking, that is not so. The United Farmers of Alberta (who governed in the 1920's and early 1930's) had more in common with the CCF (the eventual predecessors to the socialist NDP of today) than anything else. As well, the Social Credit party that took over from them may have been socially conservative, but fiscally the Aberhart government was more "crazy" than either "left-wing" or "right-wing" (I'm not kidding - the headline in the Boston Globe half a continent away was "Alberta goes crazy", an assessment both the Supreme Court of Canada and myself shared). The Social Credit party and then government openly talked about giving the equivalent of a living wage to every Albertan and was openly hostile to large corporations and banks. Not the makings of a modern right-wing ideology.

Going closer to today, the Social Credit government of Ernest Manning was pretty right of centre, but upon the retirement of Premier Manning the Socreds went down in defeat to Peter Lougheed. Now while the Lougheed government was to the right of say the NDP or the Liberals, it was most certainly more "progressive" than the Social Credit party, and the prevailing winds went more to the left. Even closer to right now was the election of 1993 (which is a myth all on its own) where Albertans entrusted the farm to the Klein conservatives, who were at the very least not much more right-wing than the Decore Liberals. We'll never know how right or left Decore would have been, but it most certainly would have been to the right of Mitchell, MacBeth, Nicol and Taft.

Myth 3: The PC party won in 1993 because it went right. Everybody went more right in 1993. They were politicians and the prevailing thought of the day was that the government was misspending. Shifting to the right was a political necessity, but that wasn't what made the difference in 1993.

The most important cleavage in Alberta politics is not the right vs. left fight, but its geography. Klein won because he got Calgary, Decore got Edmonton, and Klein was better than Decore at getting rural Alberta. Geography is still likely the number one topic I hear most about in this leadership race too - should the leader be from Calgary again, from Edmonton or from rural Alberta.

Myth 4: The PC party lost 210,160 votes to the right. Again, not true. The PC party certainly did lose 210,160 votes, but not all of those went to the right. The Alliance picked up 77,500 votes, but that is only 13,000 more than Social Credit under the same leader got in 1997. There is a large group of Albertans who are right wing but won't vote Progressive Conservative with Klein at the helm, regardless of the year. Really, the vast majority of those 200,000 votes were people who stayed home. The Liberals and the NDP also lost votes, about 10,000 a piece. Now I don't know why some 200,000 people didn't vote PC like they did in 2001 (otherwise we'd be talking about Duncan Wojtaszek for PC leader) but I know some of the pieces: a bad PC campaign, boring issues, elector fatigue and the continuing trend of voter apathy are all components.

So what does this all mean in my mind? William suggests this is a direct result of the provincial PCs moving closer to the centre, thus alienating their traditional base. Ken suggests that politics is more art than science, and that Albertans are not willing to go so far as to endorse a American style Republican option. To a measure I think both are right, in so much as they are both saying that Albertans are thirsty for leadership and I'll go another step further and say if the PC party doesn't provide it, then future Premier Taft, or Bronconnier, or (gulp) Hinman will.

Could Alberta go more small "c" conservative - sure. William is right in that the capacity for Alberta voters to be governed more from the right certainly exists. Could Alberta go more progressive - sure. Ken is right when he asserts that Albertans are increasingly concerned with things like the environment and developing at a controlled and planned rate.

The question is not "could" - that's not leadership. Where should we go?

There is an argument on both sides for how we should be governed, and the candidates for leadership and the three opposition leaders will all make their arguments. But politically, where is the ripe fruit?

Well, a couple of thoughts. Where is there the most growth potential to appeal to as a political party? That is a question of who doesn't vote but could be convinced to vote today, who votes for someone else but could be convinced to vote differently today, and what demographic changes are occuring for the 2011 and 2015 elections?

Who doesn't vote today? Well, the non-voters are not social conservatives. Social conservatives already turn out, and very much are a force to be reckoned with here in Alberta. The people who don't vote are youth and women. There are other cleavages, but those are the two that pop out in my mind. So when picking a leader on purely crass political advantage, I'd say a party is thinking strategically if it picks a leader who appeals enough to those two groups to actually get them off their butts and into a polling booth. Ask my wife, I have no idea how to motivate women, and ask my boss, I am pretty short on ideas on how to motivate youth. But a good diversity policy and post-secondary policy would go a long way in those categories.

Who votes today but for the other teams? More people vote centre-left and ultra-left in Alberta than vote ultra-right. But more importantly, let's go back to geography - who geographically speaking doesn't vote PC. Edmonton. Could they vote for the PC party? Well they sure did in 2001. What would it take to put them in the PC column again? If the Liberals look at this same equation and decide to target Calgary (which I would do if I were them) you fight fire with fire, telling Calgarians that the PC government has been good for Calgary, while you get your capital region leader or lieutenant to focus on Edmonton. Leader is better than lieutenant.

How are Alberta demographics changing? Alberta is getting older, and while that often means small "c" conservative, who is to say for sure? The generation about to retire are the same people who went to Woodstock. I don't mean to suggest that they are going to vote en masse for the Liberals or the NDP, but they will be more progressive than the older voters of 10 years ago, and likely more progressive than the older voters of today. What Alberta is doing is importing thousands of people from Saskatchewan, BC and Ontario, and those individuals will likely have no problem by in large voting for someone other than the PC party. On an additional note, and often forgotten, is that the 20 year old who doesn't vote today will be 30 come the 2015 election. And if all they've heard about the PC party throughout their youth is gay-hating, poor-bashing, heartless bastards, when they get around to voting when they're 30, they won't be casting a ballot for the PC's. Fair or not fair, deserved or underserved, the PC party must change its image as a social conservative, redneck, white and male party if its going to survive beyond the next election or two.

Darn it, this is likely my longest blog post, and after giving constant amounts of advice to others to keep their blogs short, witty and not boring I go and write a long, dry and boring post. C'est la vie.

The short and end of it is that Alberta is ready for a new leader - as awesome as Ralph is, I don't think they are going to turf the PC party for tossing their beloved Premier but if the PC's don't pick someone who appeals to more Albertans, someone who will really lead the province, they are going to get punished at the polls. The trend lines in my mind don't point socially conservatively, and I think Stephen Harper's performance over Stockwell Day points to that. Indeed, Ralph Klein's victory over the socially conservative Laurence Decore speaks to it as well.

And when I say punished, I don't mean they will lose eleven seats, I mean they will discover how much fun having an office in the Legislature Annex really is.

Reflecting on how the last five years have gone, my heart aches and my mind spins. The world is far more complex, far less safe and much more worrying. I must confess I have retreated from the world and its global problems in that time - the problems seem far too large to assault head on. Of course, this also leads me to ignore certain news items in favour of Paris Hilton's arrest for driving under the influence, which she handled far better than Mel Gibson.

That said, compared to the world which I studied in university, this new world seems much more difficult to wrap one's head around. It doesn't help that the tools to study the world and its problems (i.e. the media) suck so badly, and are entirely inadequate for the task.

Five years ago, after terrorists brought down the twin towers, crashed into the Pentagon and drove a plane into a Pennsylvania field, the President of the United States stated that you were either with us or against us. At the time, I agreed with that statement, and was filled with hope that the world would change for the better, the developed world would finally pay attention to the poor of the world, and change their destructive practices. Needless to say, that is not what happened. Speaking of that quote, I would suggest to the President that I was with him, and it was he who left me through the invasion of Iraq. And since that time, he has not done anything to restore my confidence in his administration or lead me to think that he is making western civilization any safer or addressing the base problems that led us to that terrible day five years ago, or the horribly unsafe world we live in today.

It does seem a fitting time however to pull my head out of the sand of domestic education policy (and of course Ms. Hilton's antics) and start looking outward again. My focus of making the trains run on time domestically while the rest of the world burns in hate, terror and poverty should not be the legacy I leave my children and their kin.

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