Conservatives are a desperate bunch. To remain relevant conservatives must change and move with the basic wants and needs of people and how they achieve those. However, if conservatives do change, they are not then conservative are they? Back in the day the old conservatives in Canada knew that to avoid irrelevance they had to become more progressive, hence the name change to the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada and most provincial conservatives followed suit, all in the effort of sounding more appealing to the center and right of center voter. They were somewhat socially progressive and able to give up some age old, often currently embarrassing privileges and able to accept more liberal ideas, like multiculturalism. Progressive Conservatives were staunchly economically conservative, still very much capitalist and class oriented with the wealthy and corporations seen as the drivers of economy given huge tax reductions as well as deregulation and less government spending. At some point hard conservatives, who were much more socially conservative as well as economically, broke away from the Progressive Conservatives on the western Reform platform of Preston Manning. It was very much a West vs East divide. This split, of course, ensured liberal majority governments for some time as no matter how one looks at it the bulk of voters are in the East, Ontario and Québec. The conservatives had to come back together if they wanted a chance at power and avoid growing irrelevance as even the New Democratic Party under Layton saw significant growth and conservatism recognized they could become the third or even fourth party in Canada. The Reformers and Progressive Conservatives, the right and left within conservatism, got together and hammered, and I don’t use that term lightly, out an agreement. Largely created by the strongmen of the Reform party (Stephen Harper) and a few sacrificial lambs of the Progressives (Peter MacKay) a new party emerged, the plain old, and I use that term intentionally, Conservative Party of Canada. Canadians had grown tired of the Liberal majority governments over those tumultuous years, but could only give the Conservative Party under Harper consecutive minority governments. Through those years to today the erosion of confidence in conservatism has continued. 

The struggle for conservatives to remain relevant is made even more difficult as change in society and economies goes on without them, try as they might to prevent it. Fractures among their own supporters appear regularly as they long for positive change socially and a more stable economy, but somehow attempt to hang on to old ways of thinking and doing. Some leave the fold and begin to try new ideas. Conservatism becomes more and more alarmed and the more radical elements, old Reformers on the national front and Wild Rose, for example, in the Alberta provincial front, try to flex their muscles. The real warts of conservatism break through concealment and begin to be revealed.

So, Conservatives prey on the fears of average citizens with bad images and omens of what the present does, and the future could, look like. They do stupid things like court the extreme right radicals (yes, fascists, neo-nazis, separatists) because they need as many votes as possible, they throw tax money around the feet of economic moguls (oil industry in particular in Alberta) to preserve low level jobs and invest even more in things industry and the stock market won’t invest in. They are the first to tell you that government has no place in business and yet are up to their waist, if not shoulders and neck. The conservative ineptitude of dealing with a changing world is there for all to see, at all levels of government as they shill like used car dealers for past ideals we can’t even imagine any more. The things they want and talk about in the back rooms they can’t out in public for fear of being condemned as exclusive, racist, white supremacist, anti-immigrant, christian ultra-religious, elitist based on wealth, anti LGBTQ, anti-women’s rights over their own bodies. They base their platform on choice and individualism and then don’t give you any and deliberately attack selected groups. An amazing slight of hand, divide and conquer if you will. By doing so they risk alienation, so they go after smaller groups, usually unilaterally, at the least notable time and with excuses of streamlining procedures or claiming to do what is in the vague notion of ‘public interest’. These regressive, even Orwellian, practices will fail long term. History has shown this repeatedly and it remains true and inevitable, even in the most restrictive parts of society, religion and politics, that to remain relevant the conservative must absorb the least liberal ideas left behind by the liberals as liberals continue to embrace the future becoming even more liberal with time. That’s in the political realm, but what we are seeing in Alberta is really in the economic realm and the struggle between private and public interest where politics and government are seen as a burden and obstacle to private interests but as essential in the protection and extension of public interests.

Here in Alberta one can feel the fear, the desperation, within political conservatism, the damage being done environmentally, socially, economically to all Albertans is being felt dramatically. But, among most people there is an optimism and feeling of opportunity, a relief even, that out of the ashes of brainless rags to riches to rags again economic conservatism and dependence on a single commodity, that has been our albatross for generations, can come a broader, brighter, safer, more durable, more balanced, more broadly profitable, more settled way of life and living. And rather than be the butt of national jokes and global consternation, we could be a place truly envied by the rest of Canada as well as the world.

The shenanigans going on here in Alberta are endless. Follow the political money from company CEO to MLA to Premier to Harper and big money consultants and around again in a tight little circle. Taking control of public lands and giving it to private business is only part of the game here. The Harperites want nothing in public hands, not land, not health care, not education, nothing. The smaller and more irrelevant government can be made to appear the better, allowing for ever more private business control of society. That’s what all this in Alberta is about right now. Its not political liberal versus conservative for to the economists politics is a diversion a waste of time and energy as it were. What we have here is an ideological/economic war between public interest and private interest. It’s as though our little backwater is the last part of the Wild West ready to be ‘civilized’ and a hoped for springboard from which these completely private interests go national and then global. The folks running the United Conservative Party, and subsequently our government, have the collective business acumen of a walnut, but that’s not their game anyway. Extreme, total, privatization is. They have moved away from ‘conservatism’ to something else entirely. The UCP of Alberta is doing it’s level best to eliminate any notion of ‘public’, public land, public service, public demand, they are very anti union and professional organization, anything to do with groups of people. In these folks’ minds everything should be individual, privately owned and pursued. It’s Ayn Rand, Von Mises, Frederich Hayek stuff of which Harper and Manning are firm believers with premier Kenney leading the UCP in Alberta as the battering ram. If it’s pulled off here it will be attempted in Saskatchewan and Manitoba.The backroom big money brokers and Mr. Harper want this UCP as the political vehicle to run over any notion of public interest. That’s the real end game. And when it’s all private the handful of winners at the top will rule the rest of us. And they will do whatever it takes to make it work. Government edicts and backroom last minute deals and announcements are how it’s done. They make everyone run playing catch up as they make pronouncement after pronouncement, each one with private interests superseding if not nullifying the public interest, and this puts them in the driver’s seat. The only thing that may stop them in the future is an election, but their hope is they will have done so much that most of it will be irreversible whether they win or lose.
I have followed Harper for a couple decades now, where he got his ideas from (the ‘Calgary School’ at the UofC where he was introduced to Preston Manning), who his teachers were (like Tom Flanagan the ultra-conservative), who their teachers were (accolites and graduates of the Chicago School of Economics who had moved on to Toronto) and where they came from and who taught them (at the Chicago School and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman), and their teachers (Friedrich Hayek from the Austrian School of Economics who was heavily influenced by Von Mises. Hayek was opposed vociferously by both John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith) and so on. So, the dots can easily be found and followed leading us to here and now, in Alberta, the latest battleground between Hayek and Keynes/Galbraith, private interests and public interests, the former wishing to minimize government to its controllable bare bones to enhance private interest, the latter using government to enhance the public interest.