Alberta needs to prepare for a new wave of extremists

The Alberta NDP—and “nearly all social democratic parties around the world (!)— barely qualifies as centre-left anymore?

Is that really true, or do I detect a smidgen of radical-left resentment that the “Workers’ Party” has broadened its appeal to voters a bit closer to the centre of ‘centre-left’? Last time we saw that ugly reaction was when Mulcair failed to become the first NDP Prime Minister back in 2015, thence charged —unfairly, I think, by dashed expectations—with “dragging the party to the right,” as if a capital sin. While presenting a balanced-budget platform hardly qualifies as “right-wing”, petulant Dippers summarily dumped the Opposition leader who mopped the Commons floor with governing HarperCons for four delicious years, doing the heavy lifting which ultimately defeated the unloved neo-rightist regime, put the NDP at the top of popularity polls for the first time ever (and since), won the second-highest number of seats in party history and retained a substantial number of Quebec seats where, just two mandates before, la Belle Province was a perennial Dipper desert. Punishing Mulcair was unfair, thankless, pettish and as reactionary as any peevish conservative resentment we’ve even seen. In any case, the NDP has been reduced to a single seat in Quebec and only 25 seats in all of Canada, post-Mulcair—right back to the party’s traditional position where, apparently, its ideologues want it to stay.

Mulcair put trite ideological analysis, one of the Dippers’ consistent, groaner calling cards, aside in a rare circumstance when the NDP had a reasonable shot at winning federal government: it would have been irresponsible for any leader of any party not to squelch idealism for practicality when such an opportunity presented. His subsequent scapegoating wasn’t founded on any high principle —balanced budgets aren’t intrinsically partisan, it’s how they are achieved which differentiates parties on the left-right spectrum, and Mulcair’s approach was progressive enough to qualify as ‘left-wing’—modest tax increases for the wealthiest, for example. Rather, it was high ideological dudgeon from the extreme left of the party which successfully prosecuted Mulcair’s ouster, puritanically purging any leader who dares even face toward the centre, no matter how far away in ‘rightward’ direction it is, let alone approach it by any distance whatsoever —a misguided absolutism which, ironically, is typically conservative. Dipper ideologues would do better to recognize that the partisan spectrum is simply a figurative symbol and a scale of practically no precision at all. Indeed, the silly metric by which Mulcair was fired would rather tar his persecutors as ‘rightists’—if their blatant conservatism be defined they way they do it.

Is the “grassroots organizing” the author recommends to Albertans (and, I guess, social democratic movements around the world) intended to “drag the NDP back from the right,” back to its safe, static redoubt of marginal relevance where it awaits a passing opportunity to which it can attach like a patient but hungry tick? I don’t think so, there’s lots of good wisdom in encouraging ordinary citizens to get more involved with politics, particularly that the electorate hold vastly more in common than in contention, and that citizens can cooperate to arrive at policy compromises and ways to get them done politically without constant ginning of uncivil cultural war.

I think most Albertans have already started rejecting partisan rote. Indeed, they rejected the long-running PCP in 2015—which itself began, in 1971, by comparing more flexible and fresh to a calcified Socred regime but, after 44 years, had itself become as calcified and hubristically presumptuous. Further, many, if not most Albertans are getting the hang of not being nearly as absolutely partisan as the UCP demands they should be—that being one of the main reasons the UCP is now so unpopular. Obviously many erstwhile conservatives voted NDP in 2015 and, although there were a variety of reasons for doing so, the fact that the NDP retained the most substantial loyal opposition Alberta has seen for a long, long while when it was defeated, four years later, and the NDP’s much superior popularity (if an election were held today, the NDP would certainly win), both suggest erstwhile conservative voters have either converted to socialism (conservatism’s communitarian cousin), Red Tories can now tolerate Notley's more centre-left NDP, or—probably the most influential factor—many Albertans recognize the need to scrape the UCP’s Soldiers of Odium off their boots.

In other words, plenty of right-leaning Albertans (like farmers) who sympathize with the employer side of the relationship with employees accept the legitimacy of this balanced economic arrangement, just as many left-leaning voters understand that unions need employers to employ their members. Only demagogues recommend the destruction of either side, and only the most chauvinist dullards get so demagonged.

Finally, one of the most outstanding commonalities in Alberta’s partisan politics, IMHO, is the fact that neither of the “rivals” or “complementary opposites” or “cooperating compromisers” has adopted a robustly green platform. Indeed, the UCP’s cantankerous moribundity rather demonizes any environmentalism whatsoever, betraying that the party which was born old is panicking in its desperate throes while, on the other hand, the NDP has been roundly condemned by Greens who, in their own desperation, try to shoehorn themselves into the game. It’s fair strange that in a province regularly perceived as an environmental bad boy, the Greens have been so perennially frustrated at the polls.

That might be a Green thing: Greens have consistently registered single- or low double-digit support across the country. But it might be a Prairie thing: Greens have scored significant gains in provinces on East and West Coasts where provincial Greens have formed loyal opposition (PEI) or held the balance of power in a minority parliament (in BC and nearly so in NB). Even Ontario elected a Green MPP—right in the heart of normally conservative farm country in the southwest, no less. (Quebec has a Green Party which, like its Alberta sister province, has never won a seat in the provincial assembly. But Québec solidaire, a sovereigntist left-wing party with a strong environmental platform has ten MNAs —out of 125, total.)

The proliferation of parties in Alberta over the past decade rather illustrates tumult on the right end of the spectrum, most of these parties consisting of reactionary firebrands who managed to get booted from Alberta’s most far-right parties, the defunct Wildrose and current UC parties. (The same phenomenon has manifest at the federal level.) Former Reform Party leader Preston Manning styled these sentiments as “grassroots” but I suspect the author here means something quite different than the hide-bound rural SoCons whom Manning proselytized. Nevertheless, whatever the reason the NDP won its upset victory, the political intelligence quotient has continued to develop since—and probably because of the partisan convulsion of the UCP which conspicuously aped tRumpublicanism —now just slightly more discredited than the UCP, the CPC, the PPC and the truckers’ UWR and “freedom” convoys which the CPC’s PP and the PPC’s MB endorsed.

When I noticed Alberta farmers starting to grumble about the petroleum industry (Weibo Ludwig, jailed for terrorist bombing of sour gas installations, was a farmer of the farthest religious right one can get), I was puzzled that a grassroots environmental movement hadn’t been inspired. Jessica Ernst’s lawsuit seeking remedy for her rural water well which appeared to have been ruined by gas fracking nearby was quite inspiring, even though it eventually ran out of funds to take it to the SCoC. Instead, Danielle Smith and Jason Kenney turned those farmers into radicals and anti-vaxxers.

When I see some Green MLAs in Alberta, I’ll be convinced grassroots have grown into fodder responsible and contributory socialist and conservatives may occasionally graze upon.