Albertans, Follow Me

This page extends his condolences to the Alberta New Democrats, Revmod Don and anyone else who lives in the province east to us who is progressive enough to grasp that the term 'Progressive' should never be attached to the term 'Conservative'. Progressive Albertans, I feel your pain about yesterday's landslide electoral mugging...er...victory for Ed Stelmach and the Conservatives, but I also feel fortunate to be in British Columbia where I don't have to accept that the Alberta electorate is always right.

Believe it or not, I tend to side with former Calgary Herald editor Catherine Ford, who was fond of saying that 'People elect the governments they deserve'. For some reason Albertans believe that in electing the same party 11 consecutive times, they will get the 'change' so strongly desired in opinion polls prior to and during the 2008 campaign. These people are either hypocrites, woefully naive, or as Ralph Klein liked to refer to them 'severely normal', and in their heavy-handed endorsement of Ed Stelmach's regime, they will get more of the same intransigence, corruption, social engineering and bone-headed right wing ideology, and they will deserve it.

Either way, these people are not worth your efforts, and I realized this a few months after I moved to Vancouver eight years ago. Despite the sinister machinations of Gordon Campbell and the BC Lieberals, I feel much happier living in a province that retains some of the trappings of democracy: fixed election dates, a referendum on changing the electoral system, voter recall, electoral boundaries set by demographic reality, legal protection for gays and lesbians that didn't have to be granted by the Supreme Court of Canada, an Environmental movement influential enough to make our government consider something resembling a carbon tax and a public transit strategy, and a Labour movement strong enough to threaten a General Strike and force that government to stop legislatively bullying front-line health care workers. It's also nice to have provincial elections where both major parties have a chance of winning, and the compassionate, progressive voters on the left who know better than 'let the good times roll' aren't resigned to banging their heads against the wall 30 minutes after the polls close.

As it appears that Alberta's boom will roll on in its familiar, haphazard, troglodyte manner, this page suggests that there is really only one strategy left for anyone who doesn't want to spend the rest of their lives under one-party rule: escape. You cannot save Albertans from themselves because your fates were sealed when the Tories started selling instant memberships to let them directly elect the Premier - legislative elections are a mere, much-ignored formality. That much control over the process makes it like Mexico under the PRI, but without the nice weather or cheap tequila.

Sooner or later, you will reach a point that your rent or housing payments in Calgary or Edmonton will equal the amount you would pay in Vancouver. If you're going to be that out of pocket, why not live somewhere where you can get a decent job, enjoy breathtaking scenery, and participate in a political culture that resembles a functioning democracy?