Speaking of ghosts from the past......

Although, it was only yesterday, that Ed resorted to playing the N.E.P. card for the first (and hopefully last) time this campaign, already another blast from the past has entered the Alberta  2008 Election milieu.  The CBC is reporting  that Ron Wood, former press secretary to Preston Manning, has decided to endorse the Liberals. According to Wood, the governing Tories under Premier Ed Stelmach are tired, old, complacent and "need some time in exile." Accordingly, Wood will be supporting Liberal candidate Patrick Murray  in his Calgary-North Hill riding.

Although the Liberals are probably pretty pumped about this one, I have to say the decision to make this a national news story on part of the CBC is pretty depressing for me. Why? Well, first of all, are we Albertans really so tied to the past that the opinion of a FORMER AIDE to a FORMER leader of a DEFUNCT party still holds significant weight for us? If not, is this just the CBC demonstrating to the rest of Canada that since one crazy Reformer switched to the Liberals, maybe the rest of them (i.e. everyone in the province) will? I mean if a former assistant to say, Mike Harris, starting voting NDP, would that make the news in Ontario? I guess my point is that sometimes, (well a lot of the time) people, ideas, and mythology from the past hold way too much power over our present politics in Alberta, and this has severe negative implications for our future politics.

As much as we like to believe that Alberta is still the Western Frontier full of pioneer spirits and hardy cowboys (look at the last throne speech under Klein or Oberg's last budget speech if you want some examples of the use of these myths), we're not. Over 80% of Albertans live in cities, and even places like Brooks, Alberta, have burgeoning newcomer populations.  Since the last election over a quarter of a million new people have moved to this province. If we're going to plan for our future, we need to first acknowledge not only what it will look like in 15, 20, 35 years, but also acknowledge what it looks like right now.

It's a big problem when politicians can bring up boogeymen from the past, like the NEP or Preston Manning, and use them to successfully deflect scrutiny of their current policies. In some cases, like Stelmach's NEP bomb yesterday, it's almost comical. As Joel Kom at the Calgary Herald put it in his blog post on the subject,

Here, essentially, was a reporter’s question on Tuesday to Ed Stelmach: Liberal leader Kevin Taft charges your party is responsible for many problems in health care. What do you make of that, and can your party be trusted to improve health care if it was indeed responsible for several poor decisions, as Taft claims?

Here’s the most critical part of Stelmach’s answer that succinctly contains the message he  wanted to  get across: “I lived through the 22-per-cent interest rates and part of that was the    Liberal government that dumped the NEP on this province.”

Excuse me?

You got a question on your health care track record and platform, and your answer was to  blame a program by a federal government that is now almost three decades old.

The fact that government was Liberal is somehow supposed to reflect on Taft — even though it was almost 30 years ago and an entirely different level of government altogether.

Kom's post is interesting because he is one of a very few (the only?) person (at least, not tied to the Liberal party) to publicly make the point: that the unfortunate imposition of the NEP in the 1970s does not prove that Kevin Taft will make a bad Premier today in 2008. So congratulations, Joel Kom, good work. Hopefully more of your journalist brethren will similarly take to task the politicians that rely on these ghosts from the past to succeed in the present. For the rest of us, it's time we stopped accepting the ideology around myths and past demons as a perfect substitue for critical thought.

UPDATE: Stelmach gets NEP'd himself.

Comments

[LV]

And yet another NEP reference; this time, directed towards the Tories.

Perhaps we could start a points system for every time NEP is referenced in this campaign period? I am only HALF joking...

http://www.canada.com/edmontonjournal/news/story.html?id=d7de944b-058d-492f-ad74-7eade9ee82f0

[bf]

Aye, but this is a problem not limited to just the tories, but all politics. It seems more effort is spent trying to tear into the past and create arguments then what is dedicated to solid efforts working to make the province better.

We don't want to hear a governing party bitch about the past. We don't want to hear an opposing party bitch just to bitch.