Politics used to stand for something,:being a Conservative, a Liberal or even the NDP used to matter and often was something you could tell just by looking at the haircut.:
- Stringy grey hair on a woman: NDP,
- Using more hair product than your wife: Liberal,
- Bragging about how cheap your haircut was: Conservative
Yet it seems that the various ideologies have all failed to keep pace with the chancing times and demographics in Alberta and arguably Canada.
If irrelevance and being completely out of touch are a strategy then demonstrated no place more clearly than in the Liberal and Conservative campaigns in the provincial election.
Calling an election a year early and having a leader of a party quit the day before the writ is dropped and another the day the vote is counted shows just how completely out of touch the campaign organizations were.
We live in a Costco vs. Wal-Mart, made in China world, brand loyalty is a thing of the past.
People do not elect governments they defeat them, or as in the case of the PC party, they do everything possible to defeat themselves and let the voters do the rest.
The various discussions this week about uniting the right are frankly a waste of time. Nobody beyond federal insiders much remembers the whole failure of the federal Reform/Conservative movement to grab hold.
Conservatives become far too conservative to agree with each other and often spend their time trying to "out right each other" where they might choose to worry less about being right and more about what is correct.
Conservatives become far too conservative to agree with each other and often spend their time trying to "out right each other" where they might choose to worry less about being right and more about what is correct.
It is largely the enflamed ego's of those like Jonathan Denis or Kerry Towle who crave the spotlight so badly they can't even go away quietly.
I agree with Redford, she isn't responsible for the conservative defeat, she played a part for sure, but she had a hell of a lot of help after she left: Prentice, Denis, the aforementioned Towle, Smith, Anderson and an entire legislature full of people the public did not regard as trust worthy, they defeated them and in their place elected barista's, fork lift Drivers,
marxists, death metal actresses and school teachers.
marxists, death metal actresses and school teachers.
What is being said that the conservative movement is too deaf to hear? A death metal actress wins an election she had no intention of winning; it does not speak poorly of the actress, it should shame the conservative movement when they realize the low regard the public genuinely held them.
Yes, a lot of NDP MLA's won the lottery on election night, mostly because the right wing parties were too busy chasing their ideological tails to understand just how fed up the voting public was: "Anyone is better than these clowns" is exactly what happened.
It is the height of arrogance to suggest that creating a viable conservative movement is going to cause even the slightest murmur of concern in the NDP camp or amongst the public, 95% of whom do not align with political parties and never will.
The NDP do not care if the right unites: they know that most voters understand that the only thing worse than a government deficit is a personal deficit. Harping about fiscal responsibility and not borrowing money to fix roads and build schools is not going to win support sufficient to accomplish anything.
People want roads and schools and as long as there is a remote chance the thing will be paid for before it's worn out they are good with the borrowing.
What people are not good with however are backroom deals to charge more to haul dead people in hearses, lies about airplane manifests or pave the roads in your own constituency first when you are transportation minister. These things are self serving and corrupt and if they aren't corrupt they look like it.
If the unite the right movement wants to begin with any kind of chance of accomplishing anything at all, they best begin with a cleaning of the right, purging everyone who was ever in cabinet and discarding the faceless power brokers who caused this mess.
If I were a predicting man, I would say the guy best positioned to form a right of center government in 2019 is Greg Clark, not Brian Jean or Rick McIvor. If you want to know why: look east to the place that's hard to spell but easy to draw.
