Alberta Conservatives were basking in the glory of the 40th anniversary of their first electoral victory under Peter Lougheed yesterday with reams of laudatory coverage in Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News) and a huge military parade in the city’s central Bitumen Square…
No! Wait! That must be one of those other long-in-the-tooth regimes that have been part of history so long no one can quite imagine not having them hanging around any more, even though they don’t much resemble the way they started out.
There was no military parade, there were no massed choirs of schoolchildren singing “In times dark and stormy, when Great Lougheed led us,” and the big event took place the night before yesterday in a dignified old Edmonton hotel. But you had to wait around until yesterday if you were a mere member of the proletariat to read the effusive coverage in Pravda (the Calgary Herald) and Izvestia (the Edmonton Journal).
Other than that, it was pretty much like we described. They even wheeled out Lougheed, now a sprightly 83, to explain that while he successfully campaigned to topple the Social Credit regime in 1971 on the grounds 36 years were too many, the same political calculus does not apply to Conservatives today.
“That was then and this is now” weren’t the words that he actually said to the Edmonton Journal, but they seem to express the sentiment he had in mind pretty well.
Lougheed, who retired in 1986, did tell the Journal’s scribe that he counts his party’s greatest accomplishments as the creation of the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, Canada’s 1982 Constitution and the fact the party has managed to reinvent itself every few years. He should have added building modern public hospitals in every corner of the province and nationalizing a major airline that was about to leave Alberta and take its jobs away with it.
Alas, nowadays most NDP premiers wouldn’t have the wherewithal to do some of the things Lougheed did with aplomb, and the party he led to power has long ago abandoned his principles.
As for his Big Three accomplishments, the Heritage Fund isn’t up to much these days, and Albertans are right to wonder where all the money collected in energy royalties since 1986 has gone. Alberta Tories of both federal and provincial stripes have been complaining about the Constitution and doing their best to undermine it ever since. Only the reinvention process remains intact, and the jury is still out on whether it will work one more time.
Well, let’s rephrase that. Of course it will. Just as Alberta conservatives once stopped calling themselves Ernest Manning Social Crediters and reinvented themselves as Capital-C Conservatives, there’s the possibility that this time they’ll reinvent themselves as the Wildrose Alliance.
Indeed, as the weary proletarians outside trudged home from their jobs, which are paid less if they happen to sling liquor, the well-lubricated Tory elite inside the Macdonald Hotel included a lot of Wildrose Alliance supporters and at least one who now works for the Alberta Party as the provincial establishment hedges its bets.
Former Lougheed cabinet minister Dave King (the Alberta Party guy) lauded Lougheed for his “belief in a legitimate role for government in society and his pragmatic, non-ideological approach to policy.”
Well, there’s precious little of either of those qualities now in the Conservative Party — and there’ll be none if the likes of far-right ideologue Ted Morton or even supposed frontrunner Gary Mar emerge victorious in the race to replace Premier Ed Stelmach.
And there’ll be absolutely none at all if the government should happen to fall into the hands of Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Alliance, a party that’s so ideological it makes Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s neo-Conservatives look like a font of practical rationality.
Indeed, the Wildrose Alliance is so ideological it would hand pretty well everything over to the private sector, regardless of how disastrous were the results, and would stand by applauding if a major company decamped for another jurisdiction — it’s a global market, don’t’ ya know? And as for the Constitution, well, they’d start by tossing out the Alberta Human Rights Commission in an effort to subvert it, and heaven knows where they might go from there.
More likely, of course, the Tories will in fact manage to reinvent themselves under their current party banner, at least enough to fool voters for one more election cycle, and the Wildrose Alliance may form a not-so-loyal opposition.
Indeed, putting aside celebration and getting back to political business, the six Conservative leadership candidates will be hard at work at that very theme of reinvention this very evening in Red Deer at the Capri Hotel, a much less-distinguished hostelry.
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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