Opinion: What has political discourse in this province come to?
By Medicine Hat News Opinon on October 19, 2019.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
Vote for who we tell you to, or we might separate.
That is the petulant refrain of Alberta’s ruling class since it became evident that Conservative leader Andrew Scheer is unlikely to form a majority government after Monday’s election.
Barring a major upset, the seat tally will be either a plurality for the Conservatives or Liberals.
But given the Tories intransigence – particularly regarding the carbon tax, which every other major party supports – they won’t be able to maintain the confidence of parliament.
The Liberals, New Democrats and Greens – who will have a functioning majority in tandem – will then form government, whether through a formal coalition or giving support to a minority government.
The UCP and its supporters are screaming bloody murder, demanding to know who the leader of the provincial opposition will vote for and declaring all non-Conservative options as “anti-Albertan.”
This notion that Alberta’s interests can be reduced to a barrel of oil is incredibly shallow, short-sighted and out of touch with reality. But it’s inflammatory and that’s the purpose it’s meant to serve.
This is simply not how a civilized democratic society conducts itself. Who Rachel Notley decides to vote for is nobody’s business but her own.
Scheer is on a supplementary fear-mongering spree of his own about the possibility of a Liberal-NDP coalition, who he says will increase the GST, despite neither Liberal leader Justin Trudeau or NDP leader Jagmeet Singh having ever made such a proposal. Never mind the $58 billion in cuts the Conservatives are actually proposing in their platform.
This outright hysteria reeks of desperation, but it also shows the current Tory leadership’s outright disdain for basic tenets of democratic governance.
How are two parties who collectively have a greater share of votes than the Conservatives teaming up to govern at all problematic?
It’s unfortunate the Tories – particularly those in Alberta – have spent the past four years making it impossible for them to collaborate with any of the other parties by being wholly inflexible in their reactionary dogma.
If Scheer wins a plurality of seats but no majority, and the parties who believe to varying degrees on the need to take action on climate change take charge – a very distinct possibility – expect him to refuse to accept defeat.
Regardless of how Scheer feels, the most recent governing party gets the first crack at forming government in a minority situation. In this case, the Liberals.
Scheer, who was speaker of legislature under former prime minister Stephen Harper, knows this.
But he’s decided to borrow from the playbook of like-minded world leaders, such as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, claiming that he alone is the legitimate representative of the people’s will, regardless of whether the majority of the country buys what he’s selling.
Like his UCP comrades in Edmonton, Scheer is deliberately manufacturing a crisis of “Western alienation” that he says can be solved by voting for his party alone.
If the majority of the country disagrees, then we must separate. (In that case, does left-leaning Edmonton get to separate from Alberta?)
Whatever the results of Monday’s election, I fear our political discourse in this province has been irreparably damaged.
(Jeremy Appel is a News reporter. You can contact him by email at jappel@medicinehatnews.com)
It seems wholly unlikely that Medicine Hat would consider separating from the province of Alberta in this instance, regardless of the scores of workers being laid off or facing layoffs within the natural gas sector. It’s surprising that so much business is still centred within the area given that oil and gas revenues continue to be doing so poor, and even more surprising that more high profile homes for those working within the industry aren’t on the market.