From time to time, I get emails or phone messages telling me to go back to where I came from. (Suburban Winnipeg it is, then.)
This usually happens when I have the audacity to say something in the media that offends the men who think they should be running the place. And the response is far, far worse for BIPOC and younger women colleagues.
The events of the past week have me thinking about those who claim to be the “real” Albertans, those who feel entitled to govern Alberta and what kind of political community Alberta is going to be ten or twenty years from now.
Let me start by saying that Cree, Blackfoot or Métis readers likely have a strongly-worded answer to the title question, and rightly so. All of the rest of us are settlers, whether our families arrived in the 19th century or last week.
But there are some Albertans who see themselves as the rightful rulers of the province, and the rest of us as inconvenient interlopers.
Exhibit 1: An allegation that a “large group of wealthy people” raised money to hire a fixer to try to entrap then-Mayor Nenshi into accepting tainted Russian money in an effort to drive him out of office. This was not the first episode of ‘Nenshi derangement syndrome’ afflicting Calgary conservatives - don’t forget the 2013 developers’ plan to take over city council.
Exhibit 2: A sitting UCP MLA announces that he is giving up his fight to hold onto his nomination, in the face of a challenge by Nadine Wellwood, a former People’s Party of Canada candidate. Like party leader Danielle Smith, Wellwood was a supporter of the Freedom Convoy and opponent of COVID-19 vaccination and other mandates.
Wellwood’s politics appear to be consistent with the views of Take Back Alberta, a group that organized to push Jason Kenney out of the UCP leadership and has now won half the seats on the party’s board. (Carrie Tait has an excellent piece on TBA in today’s Globe).
The very name ‘Take Back Alberta’ is intended to say to everyone outside the organization that this province is not, and can never be, theirs. No matter what your contribution, no matter how deep your commitment, if you don’t agree with the group’s extremist politics, you’re forever an outsider.
And then there’s the awkward question of from whom the province is to be taken back. I think we get a glimpse into the answer when we look at Exhibit 3 - the release of data from the 2021 Census, telling us almost one in four Albertans is an immigrant to Canada, and that a similar proportion are non-white. The number of Christians is declining while the number of Hindus and Sihks is increasing. And these trends are going to accelerate in the coming years.
Change is hard. Status loss is even harder. But political movements built around denying the reality of social and political change accomplish nothing but to sow dissent and resentment. The sooner Alberta’s conservatives wake up to this, the better off we will all be.
Why would any self respecting woman vote for the misogynistic UCP? Women are half the population.
Why would any brown person vote for the racist UCP? That’s 20% of the population.
Why would white men that believe in equality vote for the UCP?
The problem isn’t politics, for the UCP are only the fringe deviants, the problem is getting people to VOTE OUT deviants in addition to VOTING IN their preferred candidate.
Focus on explaining VOTING OUT to the ill informed and list the many reasons why not voting is a problem (that’s how ON got their Doug Ford disease to return). Use the Socratic method, eg: “do you really support Danielle Smith cutting the diversity programming when racism is on the rise and innocent people are being attacked on the street?”
I’m fascinated how Smith speaks so critically of her party’s handling of issues by Kenney. Yet retains cabinet ministers who implemented mask mandates. Indeed humiliates them by instructing them to take the opposite position. Demonstrates how conservatives mindlessly vote for party without regard to policy positions.