In the days when Reform was rising in Alberta, Brian Mulroney would often point to Joe Clark's senior role in the government as evidence that Albertans ought to be content. Highlighting Clark's centrality likely only accelerated the obliteration of the federal PCs in Alberta.
By 2011, the Clark wing of Canadian conservatism, marked as it was by political blundering and intellectual vacuity, was down to Lowell Murray, wrapping up 30-plus years in the Senate, and Scott Brison, sitting as a third-party backbencher in the House of Commons. So when Redford became Alberta premier, Albertans wondered where exactly she would position herself.
Redford's campaign has been trumpeting that it is "not your father's PC Party." It's altogether Clarkian in its haplessness, that tagline (in adapted form) being most famously used by Oldsmobile, a once venerable brand that is now defunct.
In any case, Redford is serious enough about the claim, denigrating the record of Ralph Klein, the father-figure of Alberta's PC Party. It's actually your "grandfather's PC Party" that Redford is running, skipping back a few generations for inspiration to Peter Lougheed, who first won election 41 years ago.
Generationally, Redford is part of an influential cohort of Calgary political figures. Stephen Harper would be the most influential, but also in that category would be Redford's opponent, Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith, federal Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, and Ezra Levant, the one-man media phenomenon.
Levant has characterized Redford not as the second coming of Lougheed or Clark, as she would have it, but rather as Kim Campbell 2.0. Just as Campbell championed the "progressive" rather than "conservative" wing of a tired PC Party, Levant expects that Redford will preside over the disintegration of the Alberta PCs.
The stakes are that high, for if Wildrose wins a majority in Monday's Alberta election, it is likely that the PCs will quickly wither away. After all, their best argument for relevance, namely that they alone can govern Alberta, will be stripped away from them.
I have been watching Redford's increasingly frantic campaign with keen attention and growing alarm. Calgary is my hometown, and I still identify with my Alberta roots, though now living in Ontario. I also belong to that same cohort; indeed, Redford, Smith and I all went to Bishop Carroll High School - Smith and I at the same time, though we didn't move in the same circles, and Redford several years ahead of us.
The thought occurs that Redford is not running as Clark, or Lougheed, or Campbell, but rather as Paul Martin, who inherited a dynasty and led it to defeat. Recall the frantic Martin toward the end of the 2004 and 2006 campaigns, arms flapping, face flushed, telling everyone about how he alone could protect the high holy grail of Canadian freedom: the unlimited, enthusiastic abortion licence? The claim was fantastic, given that Harper had always been cool to the pro-life agenda, not to mention that the Liberal party itself had pro-life candidates.
Redford is copying that strategy, painting social conservatives as bogeymen that she alone can keep at bay. (I wish Smith really were a social conservative, but she simply is not.)
Redford professes herself "frightened" by Albertans exercising their rights to conscience, even though her own government has defended them in the recent past - as well they should, given that conscience is the first of the fundamental freedoms listed in the Charter. She is attacking positions in the Wildrose that long have been intelligently advanced by a member of her own cabinet, Ted Morton.
Martin's fin-de-campagne mode operated on the premise that he could scare voters in Ontario and Quebec into staying with him by invoking the spectre of retrograde Westerners and rural folk massing at the city limits. Neither noble nor particularly effective, it at least had some plausibility to a mindset that had been locked for too long inside Toronto and Montreal. For Redford to adopt the same strategy - to run against Albertans in Alberta - is at least curious.
She may pull if off, for one does not underestimate the resourcefulness of a party four decades in power. Yet the end always does come, and Redford has run a campaign worthy of it.
Original Article
Source: national post
Author: Father Raymond J. De Souza
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