Monday, April 04, 2016

Saskatchewan gets it right while Alberta loses its advantage

When people tell me Brad Wall in Saskatchewan is getting it right in Regina because he and the Saskatchewan Party are more conservative than Alberta at the present, I always shake my head a little at the idea that being right wing brings political balance, if that were remotely true why did not Canada do better under supposedly Progressive Conservative governments than Liberal ones more times over not at the federal level in so far as free market competitiveness. Arguably, Tommy Douglas under the New Democrats in the Land of Living Skies was just as watchful over the public dollar as his counterpart in Wild Rose Country from the Social Credit party Ernest Manning, so what gives? Populism, or the politics of the people, seems to be the glue that gets these provincial political parties their real staying power and more of a truer sense of governance for, of, and by the people than either of the other two mainstream ideologies being liberalism and conservatism.

The long and the short of it remains, a populist bottom up grassroots driven party in Saskatchewan gets it right while an elite top down astroturfed one in Alberta loses its advantage past the ideological belief of conservatism, not just an economic advantage in way of job creation or fiscal advantage in way of balanced budget, decreased deficit and debt, towards lower taxation, but a cultural advantage by supporting its own heritage provincially and leading a nation by its moral example as a value added province winning its way.

While the Wild Rose and Progressive Conservative party supporters erroneously believe they need to unite their right, most Albertans know this is not true as both parties have more differences than similarities, furthermore citizens of the province will recognize many of the autocratic actions and decisions by the New Democratic government to be quite similar to how the previous Progressive Conservative regime had run things in Edmonton for the past forty four years. Populist provincial politics has been a mainstay in the West as Reform Party of Canada founder Preston Manning pointed out many an occasion as it keeps the politician closest to its people, that same tradition maintained itself from Reform to the Alliance to the Wild Rose Party and now threatens to extinguish itself by merging like its federal brother with the topdown Tory machine. As the Saskatchewan Party was able to use disaffected Tories from the Devine regime to merge with Liberals and even New Democrats to create a brand new grassroots first entity that powered its way to victory, those grassroots vehicles federally with Reform into Alliance into Conservative, in British Columbia with Social Credit into Reform into Liberal, and in Québec where eventually a Action Démocratique du Québec into Coalition Avenir Québec into some kind of elite right wing political vehicle more acceptable and consumable product will be created in the backrooms, all disappeared giving the power back to lobbyists and special interests and far away from the hands of the public, which is the real fact and true reason why uniting the right only continues the fight with the left and does not get past the ideological battle to win the war for the people.