Can fear of change in Alberta change Canada?

Red Tories haven’t had a good election for a generation and they had every right to celebrate last night.

However, like others who weather bad times, they can be small, too. Allison Redford had good reasons to be small last night: she was expected to lose the last standing dynasty of progressive conservatism to a conservative upstart, and she had already worked for the vanquished Joe Clark and seven failed states on behalf of the UN. So, just for the record, last night, she was a little nasty.

“Every Albertan knew that this election was about choice. A choice to put up walls or to build bridges. A choice about Alberta's future,” Ms. Redford said in her victory speech. “Tonight, Alberta chose to build bridges.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/redfords-vision-prevails-as-alberta-pcs-hold-their-majority/article2411808/

It's a gleeful iteration of a campaign of fear, but hardly a reliable guide for Western politics or the last word on her opponent, Danielle Smith.

When you’re rich and you’re thinking about throwing out a regime that’s been in office for over 40 years—and the alternative has been ahead in the polls for nearly three weeks—the alternative, not change or the brutes you’ve known for a life time, becomes the ballot issue.

Danielle Smith was crudely accused of being Sarah Palin and suspected of being easy on the Counter-Reformation and Alberta independence. These charges wouldn’t have landed, except on the CBC, if she’d had enough time to establish herself.

The last dynasty in Alberta—Social Credit, 1935 to 1971—was defeated by a Harvard MBA graduate named Peter Lougheed. He first served four years in the Alberta legislature and had the intangible benefit of carrying an honored family name that had served in Alberta public life since Confederation. Like Smith, he was also articulate, business-like, and extremely ambitious. (The moment he became premier, Lougheed became a Canadian of consequence—often praised as a statesman and, as well, suspected as a divider and extremist in Eastern Canada.)

Centrist left politics, of course, are not dead. However, their chances of making a comeback in Canadian federal politics by campaigning on fear are not validated by what just happened in Alberta.

The New Democrats, though, should feel very good about choosing Thomas Mulcair as their national leader. He didn’t have the freshest face at their leadership convention, but he has all the political experience that Danielle Smith didn’t have—and would have likely saved her campaign.

The biggest policy problem for Stephen Harper, and potentially for Canada, will be Premier Redford’s self-imposed promise of talking the rest of Canada into going along with Alberta’s energy development and fiscal priorities. Albertans haven’t gone sheepish about controlling their resource development, or soft on carbon taxes and transfer payments to Eastern Canada. Her Finance Minister has Alberta conservatives and taxpayers, not the Empire Club of Toronto, to first impress.

A Goldilocks Dollar for a cheaper version of Canada

Leadership sometimes points backwards.

Dalton McGuinty would like to go back to the circumstances he inherited when he became Ontario premier in 2003: when Ontario dominated Canada politically, possessed first-rate infrastructure, and, most conveniently, could export its goods with a 30% export price advantage—thanks to a very cheap Canadian dollar.

Yesterday, McGuinty meticulously outlined Ontario’s worn-out case against Western Canada’s “petro-dollar”:

“That has knocked the wind out of Ontario exporters and manufacturing in particular,” Mr. McGuinty told reporters. “So if I had my preferences as to whether we had a rapidly growing oil and gas sector in the west or a lower dollar, I’ll tell you where I stand: with the lower dollar.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/redfords-energy-vision-clashes-with-mcguintys-view-of-oil-sands-benefits/article2351145/

This is divisive bravado and defeatist economics. The man should settle for bland.

McGuinty can’t even divide the country. The office of Premier of Ontario doesn’t have that kind of weight anymore. McGuinty’s resentment toward robust Western development can only help Alberta’s Premier Alison Redford win an election. Simply, the country’s leadership can’t take his advice.

No Canadian federal government could get elected with a mandate to slow the export of provincial energy and natural resources and would have a tricky time constitutionally if it tried. Furthermore, artificially lowering the Canadian dollar without a collapse in resource exports would likely—and legitimately—invite US retaliation.

As important, McGuinty is repeating a creepily reactionary idea about how Ontario should grow and be treated in Canada. Specifically: if the dollar isn’t nicely aligned to serving the interests of Ontario’s traditional manufacturers, it surely must be out of whack—off serving those philistines in the West.

In this equation, Ontario’s interests are boiled down to be the interests of Ontario’s export manufacturers and their old ways of doing business. Other Ontarians and other Canadians—and their purchasing power in the world—are of negligible account.

There is something deceitful and illiberal about trying to talk down the value of the Canadian dollar to make Canadians in Ontario manufacturing richer by making other Canadians poorer.

Can you imagine the Governor of Michigan or the Mayor of Chicago blaming their economic woes on the US dollar and strong export sectors elsewhere in the US?

Imagine ambitious American politicians asking Ohioans to sell less food to the world or asking Californians to cut back on the $billions they earn selling films and music internationally!

The United States has been holding its own—around 20% of the world market in manufacturing for the last 20 years—without the help of a US dollar that has been thoughtfully aligned to serve the interests of its manufacturing sector.

Dalton McGuinty should accept that Canada has no better alternative: accept the benefits, along with the demands, of a Canadian dollar effectively at par with the US dollar and get on with his job.

Alberta’s new pan-Canadian energy illusion

Pique and fear can make history in politics, and that’s what’s going on in Premier Alison Redford’s new Alberta Government.

The creation of a North American energy market has driven investment and politics in Alberta over the last four decades. It was the vision that guided Alberta’s push for a more decentralized Canada and for better constitutional protections for provincial energy projects. It was at the heart of the Free Trade Agreement of 1988, which established Canada-US investment protections. Undoubtedly, it has helped make Alberta the youngest, most prosperous urban region in Canada.

However, two immediate—if not permanent—challenges to the status quo have emerged.

This continental vision is the brand of a 41-year-old Alberta government. And its new leader, Alison Redford, feels compelled to make “sweeping changes” before the next election. Further, continental integration has been made to look naïve by its American partner. The Obama government has temporarily blocked Alberta’s oil export expansion by delaying the Keystone Pipeline project—a project that is necessary for the expansion of Alberta exports, at world prices, to Americans and Asians as well.

In responding to these two challenges in Tuesday’s Alberta Throne Speech and in various interviews, Redford and her ministers have outlined an east-west pan-Canadian energy alternative that should make retired Central Canadian nationalists blush.

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/throne-speech-leaves-vague-timetable-for-reshaping-alberta/article2330092/

Behind Redford’s rhetoric, however, is a long-shot proposition: in order to escape the whims of Washington, other Canadian provinces and the federal government will support the creation of an east-west energy grid and make federal government subsidies available for strategic provincial energy projects.

At the center of her “Canadian energy strategy” is an ambitious, dollars-and-cents dream: the Harper government of Canada and the Clark government of BC will do whatever it takes, and use all necessary political capital, to get the alternative to The Keystone Project—the Northern Gateway project—approved and promptly built across British Columbia. The Globe and Mail reports:

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/alberta-seeks-way-to-pay-for-bc-support-of-pipeline/article2330389/

Unsurprisingly, federal government sources are not volunteering any federal monies to sweeten Redford’s pitch to British Columbia.

Possibly, both oil pipelines will be built and, possibly, if environmentalists have their say, neither will. However, the idea of throwing untold billions at building an east-west energy grid simply to be “free” of the Americans makes no more practical sense for Alberta now than it did when it was championed in the East and rejected in the West by previous Alberta governments.

Doing what makes the most sense continentally still makes the most sense for Alberta.

A pipeline down the Midwest to the Gulf has more commercial champions along the route, would give Alberta reliable secure access to Asian markets, and, most likely, would entail far fewer environmental, regulatory, and NIMBY risks as the proposed route across British Columbia and along is exquisite coast.

When continentalists in the West have been thwarted by politics elsewhere, historically, they’ve upped their game rather than switched sides. That’s still what the interests of the West deserve.