Wakey-wakey, Alberta

Phil Burpee

Phil Burpee, Columnist

Well, Premier Redford has been fumbling with the tools of government and inadvertently dropped the Writ along the way. Accordingly, the vast, flabby-bottomed bulk of the Big Blue Machine has fired up its ancient, gas-guzzling engine, trundled out of its capacious garage, and lurched out onto the highways and byways of this bright land seeking a renewed mandate. A great scrambling has ensued, and a gaggle of would-be successors to the Premier's throne are seen to be raising dust across the verdant prairies and slumbering forests as the rusty cogs of democratic process creak and grind into action.
Excitement is palpable. Albertans are swelling with pride and anticipation at the prospect of choosing their leaders - tasking the best and the brightest to go to Edmonton and oversee the wellbeing and secure future of this great province. Ah, sweet destiny. Perchance to dream.

But there's trouble in River City. The dream has become a recurring nightmare - sort of a political, real-world version of Bill Murray's 'Groundhog Day'. Because every time we wake up from election-night's boozy back-slapping, everything is just like it was yesterday - same larcenous lobbyists and hangers-on creeping around the legislature, same corporate glad-handing over single malts and plush carpeting, same growing incidence of child poverty and hunger, same looming extirpation of pivotal species in the wild lands, same burgeoning apathy and sense of disenfranchisement amongst the electorate, same grubby mitts of the oil and gas sector in the public purse, same constriction and throttling of social programming, same flight of capital to distant hedge-funds and the yachts of the mega-rich, same indolent ninnies convening in that lovely building on the shores of the North Saskatchewan River claiming to represent our best interests, even as we are frisked and robbed by various trans-global business entities and foreign governments with dubious agendas. In short, we are being played for fools.

It's not unreasonable to ask just why it is that we here in Alberta are content to live in a one party state while people elsewhere in the world struggle against monumental and dangerous odds to do exactly otherwise - that is to say, enjoy the unarguable benefits of periodically throwing out the rotten carcass of the prevailing administration for some fresh input and insight from some other outfit. And, for the most part, it doesn't really matter all that much who the other outfit is, so long as they also share a zest for democratic change. Because they too will in turn make their own mistakes and eventually begin to fester in their own pus of malfeasance and presumption, and likewise be tossed out on their ears each in their turn. This is absolutely necessary for democratic health. When a party is in power too long, it invariably begins to forget just who exactly it was that gave them the job in the first place - us. And then they start to think that the guys in the slick suits with the fancy expense accounts are the primary stakeholders, and pretty soon we end up with some horrible, degenerate and morally compromised monstrosity like the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta. How obvious does it have to get to see that these power-addled Tories are soured and debauched beyond redemption? Must they render us entirely unto a condition of loathsome pariah in this world? Do we really think we are admired? Do we really care?

The late, great Tommy Douglas had this to say about any sense of encroaching doom: - “Courage, my friends; 'tis not too late to build a better world.” Splendid! And how timely to almost any age. For there is never any better time to start that building than the present. Old T.C. was, of course, a Golden Gloves boxing champ in his youth, and was inclined to take no prisoners when it came to moral depravity and the failure of spirit. Like Jesus in the temple he would scatter the usurers and the morally-compromised like so much chaff before the Mighty Wind. It was clear in his style of politicking that moral certitudes easily and always trumped pat assumptions and easy cop-outs. If a child was hungry in the land, then those in power must answer. If a woman was made to suffer with the strains of mothering, then those in power must answer. If hard-working folk were to lose their lands and their dreams to the bank, then those in power must answer. If the least of our fellows fell into despair and want, then those in power must answer. For what else is Power if not the responsibility to see to it that those furthest from that Power are made to feel rightfully and deeply empowered themselves. To lead well is truly to follow, and to follow is to encounter the forgotten stragglers along the way. There but for the grace of our collective fellowship go ye.

Last week I had to go up to Spruce Grove to get some bee-hive supplies. I can tell you that the QE2 from Fort Macleod to Edmonton is a vast river of metal and machinery heading for places unseen beyond the prairie horizon. The outskirts of Edmonton are even more ghastly and stomach-churningly shocking than Calgary, itself already no slouch as a particular vision of hell – malls, mega-churches, beaver-puke condo complexes, overpasses, transmission lines, KFCs, Boston Pizzas, Wally-worlds - a massive, raging overbuild of crass materialism and tinsel wet-dreams run wantonly amok across an ever-decreasing non-human landscape. This is the physical representation of what is euphemistically referred to as our 'growth economy'. Growth indeed. But there is the organic growth of healthful and vigorous organisms, and then there is the other growth, that of the unbridled mass, the tumorous malignancy, the proliferation of unspecified flesh that ignores the genetic template and simply grows for the sake of pointless growth. Such is the nature of our current economy, seeking only enlargement for the sake of enlargement, and the creation of wealth merely for the creation of wealth, almost entirely divorced from the deeper contingencies of societal and environmental wellbeing. And we are 40-plus years into an administration in Edmonton that has little left to offer other than to acquiesce to the belching, farting obesity of a corporate sector now grown arrogantly confidant in its ability to engender legislation designed to further its needs and expectations. What's to be done?

Well, at the risk of sounding a tad fanciful, we could actually vote these whored-out reprobates out of office. Yes, a radical notion to be sure - actually deploying our discretionary powers as citizens of a liberal democracy - doing something other than that which we have come to anticipate as a foregone conclusion. It really shouldn't matter even if you think these dopey folks are still doing an OK job up there in Edmonchuck, although, for the life of me, I can't imagine how a person's brain would have to work to think that way. It's still time for them to go. The longer you leave a democracy in a state of inertia, the greater the risk of having it damaged beyond any but long term repair. Voter disenfranchisement, low turn-out at the polls, apathy, ignorance, attention turned to mass entertainment and celebrity worship - all these things are danger signals. They tell us that the silent putsch is under way - that our power to affect change is being slowly but surely usurped by power-blocs whose avowed interest definitely does not rest with an aware, volatile, committed and active citizenry. For as T.S Eliot famously had it, this is how our democratic world might well end - "...not with a bang, but a whimper....".

Try it. Vote for somebody different. On April 23rd don't reach for that shot of PC booze. Don't light up that Tory smoke. Resist that second helping of Blue Machine fries. Do something radical in service of our democracy - change your habits. Hell, vote for the Wild Rose if you like - try a dose of libertarian medicine - reduced dollars for education, reduced dollars for mass-transit, reduced dollars for social programming, reduced dollars for environmental oversight, reduced dollars for the arts, reduced dollars for child welfare, reduced dollars for urban infrastructure, increased power for big landowners, increased power for the oil and gas sector, increased power for the purveyors of the aforementioned 'growth', increased power for so-called 'free market' trans-global business interests whose allegiances lie with no sovereign people, increased power for the already powerful, increased power for the very mindset that would thoroughly disempower whatever sense of sense of overarching altruism still remains deep within the beleaguered body politic of the great Dominion of Alberta. Maybe that might cure Albertans of their dim-witted tendency towards reactionary voting patterns - but I wouldn't really recommend it. Danielle and her cock-a-doodle cronies might repaint a rather pleasant and amusing campaign bus and get those big wheels off Ms. Smith's bosom, but they can't paint over their essential philosophical tenet - cut the losers loose - sink or swim in the shark-infested pond - social-darwinism made to look like acceptable policy - everything we have struggled to banish from the human condition since the Enlightenment.

Look around. Consider well. There are other voices. There is currently a useless and lamentable fracturing of Centre and Centre-left representation. Traditional parties have proven incapable of setting aside their differences in order to bolster the power of the common ground. This is a shame. The NDP and Liberals deserve their rump status, slaves to their vested self-perceptions. The Greenies dither and fuss. The Alberta Party claim the shifting sands of non-specificity - a 'vote-for-us-because-we're-us' sort of amorphous schtick. I was seriously thinking of starting another party myself this time around just to add to the fun. But it's Spring and there ain't no time. One idea out there does has a refreshing take on the situation. ChangeAlberta (www.changealberta.ca) suggests that we might focus our votes on some progressive candidate 'most likely' to win, especially considering the split on the Right. The idea has merit - or at least it's an alternative to fragmentation and 'more of the same'. It's worth a look in an otherwise rollicking but depressing catfight between Alison and Danielle - two women easily smart enough to know better.

Who will be the April Fools then? Who will turn off the alarm? Wakey,wakey Alberta. Morning has broken.

Phil Burpee

March 30, 2012