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.

Red-Tory-flavored British chauvinism

Phillip Blond is the red-Tory intellectual who coined the phrase “big society.” He imagines that civil society can voluntarily take up many of the tasks modern societies have assigned to big government. As George Bush took up “compassionate conservatism” an amazingly long decade ago, David Cameron has taken up the “big society.” It allows conservatives to be hard on government spending and regulation, and to be more optimistic about people than their more pessimistic left opponents.

Blond has now lent his optimism to British conservatism’s most dangerous proposition: the idea that the 27-member European Union (starting with the 17-member Euro-zone) can be managed down to something less than it is now—that European prosperity and democracy need more independent nation-states, a less bureaucratic federation.

Defending David Cameron’s decision to not participate in building the fiscal machinery necessary to complete the Euro-zone, Blond writes, “Britain can build a Europe outside the Euro.” He concludes his column on a convoluted and utopian note:

“Britain needs to stress that it sees the euro as the great danger to Europe and, rather than bizarrely pushing for its centralization under a German economic aegis – a provision that will ensure permanent proletarianisation for the southern nations – it needs to seek and create a new EU growth pact for those who wish for an alternative outside the euro but in Europe. For the common currency area that might mean separate euro zones or parallel currencies with greater or smaller spreads in relation to the euro. Rather than letting domestic policy-needs trump any international dimension, if Cameron is clever he could utilize one to augment the other and create a euro opt-out for nations for whom saving the euro would mean their own democratic erasure and impoverishment . If Cameron can make the most of this policy opportunity he will have created a vital exit strategy for European nations from a policy and a position that has every chance of failing. And, in time, Europe may thank Britain once again for saving them from themselves.”

Click on:www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/15/britain-build-europe-outside-euro?INTCMP=SRCH

So, let’s go back just half way—to when Europe had numerous national currencies and only a few fascist governments, when it was respectable for heads of state to design “pacts” to expand co-operation, reduce national barriers to the movement of goods, services, money, workers, and innovation, and avoid beggar-thy-neighbor currency and fiscal policies, and harmonize their individual efforts to be taken seriously by the super-powers.

Federal states are complicated, difficult to explain, and easy to attack. The EU is famous for its bureaucracy. Progressive nationalists like Blond, however, wouldn’t necessarily lead Europe to less government, more democracy, or healthier markets. Progress requires stability. And European stability requires European unity—and unity is federalism’s core business, not a photo-op or a last resort.  

The German Government and the other Euro-zone members accept the need for greater fiscal integration because their federation is too decentralized, not because they like pushing each other around.

The entire European Union’s central budget consumes barely 1 percent of the public sector of the European Union. The British Conservative’s most favored-neighbor—the United States of America—has one currency, 50 states, and a federal government that manages over a fifth of America’s Gross National Product. Britain’s federal creation—the Dominion of Canada—includes a federal government that holds close to a quarter of that country’s GNP.   

Canadian progressive escapes Anti-American catch-22

Author and critic Linda McQuaig proves that you can be a trouble-maker and very funny—and not think like Anne Coulter. McQuaig is divisive and not a bully. She fights for long shots, not for those who have already won the lottery.

This week, McQuaig actually used the United States to make Canadians feel uncomfortable—a stunning tactical change for a Canadian reformer. But then again, these days, Canadian reformers need every weapon they can get their hands on.

In a column in the Toronto Star with the headline “The Great Northern Tax Haven,” she casts her complaint in familiar Canadian terms.

“While Canada’s reputation as a leading peacekeeping nation has taken a nosedive, we’re punching above our weight on the international scene on a new front — as a tax haven for the rich.”

This is an unsurprising progressive angle. Comparisons with others automatically make Canadians nervous. But what followed had nothing to do with Scandinavia.

“Barack Obama’s vow last week that he’d veto any debt reduction plan that didn’t include higher taxes on the rich — so that millionaires wouldn’t pay lower rates than their secretaries — apparently stirred no interest in Ottawa.

McQuaig concluded by teasing Canada’s federal social democrats without shifting her ground:

“Is it too much to hope that our most progressive party [NDP] would take a stand as progressive as the president of the United States and America’s second richest man [Warren Buffett]?”

Click on:  www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1060026--mcquaig-the-great-northern-tax-haven

This is a refreshing departure in left rhetoric.

Since the publication of “Lament for A Nation” by the eloquent conservative George Grant and the invention of the phrase “red Tory” by the Marxist tactician Gad Horowitz, progressives in Canada have steadily taken on as faith: that the United States is irredeemable and that the way to widen the left’s appeal in Canada was by being positive nationalists.

The British connection, the flag, home-grown capitalists and good old Tory families with their quaint affectations, magically, would be on the same side of history—benign kitsch in the noble struggle to resist the American empire. Private and public Canadian businesses and flag-waving would open up a space across the northern half of the continent for a more progressive and just society.

Nearly 50 years later, it’s clear that this strategy entailed an enfeebling catch-22. By propagating the defeatist idea that progressive change in our civilization’s dominant political culture and economy is impossible, the Canadian left has made it easier for Canadians to become smug trimmers—a Canada exquisitely alert to America’s shortcomings and infinitely forgiving about its own.

Reactionaries in Canada are not savaged by the left for what they’ve done to Canada but for hints of vulgar American imitation.

Linda McQuaig and the Canadian left should set aside the silken poetry of a Tory reactionary and recall one of the sturdy convictions of those reformers like America's William Jennings Bryan and Canada's JS Woodsworth who campaigned in harsher times. Nationalism, along with religion, makes people feel better about themselves, but it doesn’t inspire change. 

The American Dream came before American Exceptionalism, and it rallied reformers and changed—for the better—how people treat each other and set their goals for the future.

In finding grounds for hope in America, surely it would be easier to generate hope in Canada.