Unadulterated Ignorance

Yesterday, Albertans voted in the Regressive Conservative Party -- otherwise known as the UCP. Geoff Dembicki writes in The Tyee:

Albertans elected one of the most socially conservative and environmentally hostile governments in its history Tuesday night, handing a majority of seats to the United Conservative Party and electing its leader Jason Kenney as premier.

In the end it seemed voters acted the way pollsters and other observers had predicted all along: by voting in a government that promised to do whatever it takes to get Alberta’s bitumen to the Pacific coast and scrap climate change policies brought in by Notley’s NDP and Justin Trudeau’s federal Liberals.

But the election was about more than oil:

Kristopher Wells, an international expert on sexual and gender minority youth issues based at MacEwan University in Edmonton, told The Tyee that Alberta currently has some of the best legislation in the world for gay-straight alliances in public schools, which create spaces for LGBTQ students and their allies to be safe and open in their sexuality. The UCP has promised to change the rules so that teachers have the option of informing a student’s parents when they join a GSA.

“Why would we go backwards on that?” Wells said. “It’s sound legislation that was developed out of concern and need by students and teachers on the ground in schools. To roll that back as many have suggested would be to place vulnerable LGBTQ youth at increased risk in their schools.”

Like Ontario, Alberta is now ruled by a collection of ignorant thugs, dedicated to accomplishing the impossible. Climate change is proceeding apace and Jason Kenny is the Sergeant Schultz of Canada:

Tzeporah Berman, a Canadian environmental activist who is international program director for the group Stand.earth, said Kenney’s confrontational rhetoric won’t bring the benefits many Albertans are expecting — a swift return of jobs and investment in the oil patch — during an era when the world is rapidly shifting to cleaner sources of energy.

“Attacking those that are concerned about the cumulative impacts on our water, on our air, and on our climate as a result of the growth of the oilsands is not going to solve this,” Berman said. “It’s a dramatic overblown shoot-the-messenger moment. No matter how much Kenney attacks civil society groups and environmental groups, it’s not going to make the issue go away.”

She predicted that a UCP government would govern “by anger and fear and not reason or logic or science” and that “this will set us back on climate policy.” Berman, a one-time advisor to the Alberta government on climate policy who frequently critiqued Notley’s stance on pipelines, went on, “While the NDP strategy was far from perfect, at least it was moving in the right direction, albeit slowly.”

Score another one for unadulterated ignorance.


Image: Redbubble

The Pathology Of Oil

The Albertan mind, Andrew Nikiforuk writes, has been warped by the politics of oil:

Oil, a commodity that nurtures dependency, has so coddled the Alberta mind that it has fostered a provincial culture of victimization as poisonous as the identity politics unsettling university campuses.

Every day the province’s oil-obsessed politicos warn Albertans that Canada is a dangerous place full of self-righteous climate activists (and some are indeed self-righteous), anti-pipeline protestors, dumb courts, stubborn First Nations, and nasty liberals.

Moreover the province’s potential for offence-taking has become as grand as Justin Trudeau’s vindictive Liberal Party of Canada. It can’t tolerate any truth-telling either. 

That pathology has been on full display during the election campaign:

The province’s allergy to criticism has grown so formidable that United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney proposes to set up a Saudi-like war room in the energy ministry to respond to any micro-aggressions and offensive material. Should it be called Snowflake Central?

Albertans have become such a fragile, oil-reliant people, reasons Kenney, that the province now needs the equivalent of university Bias Response Teams, in this case to foster “a safe and inclusive environment” for its petroleum exporters who have now claimed Alberta’s identity as their own.

(The rulers of Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Russia, we should remember, don’t much like oil critics, either. The political records show that oil relishes conflict and breeds political aggression like no other commodity, except cocaine.) 

 Kenney, a belligerent proponent of oil-safetyism, would much rather play the blame game than accept the truth that the rapid development of bitumen mining in Fort McMurray violated two fundamental principles of risk mitigation: go slow and save the money.

Peter Lougheed understood that going all in on oil was a path to disaster. But, after he retired, his successors bet the farm on what they thought was black gold. And that tunnel vision caused a collapse in the price of oil:

Over many years, Alberta’s Tories repeatedly gambled that the price of bitumen, a garbage crude that requires upgrading and complex refining, could only go higher, and they bet wrong. 

[Art Berman] recently documented how combined Canadian and U.S. unconventional oil production from the tar sands and Permian Basin “surged in 2014 and caused oil prices to collapse.” As prices fell, producers — including OPEC — rejected any production cuts.

Unfortunately, that tale has not been made public during the Alberta election.

Image: Vervantis

The Alberta Election

Things are getting interesting in Alberta. Last week's leaders' debate provided a clear contrast. Robin Sears writes:

Rachel Notley may not flaunt the swaggering charisma of a Trudeau, but as she demonstrated in this week’s leaders’ debate, she sure wins on character. She conveys as well, a deep determination to fight for a politics of values, as she laced her opponent over and over for his wobbly handling of some very insalubrious candidates. Putting her opponent’s name in the same sentence as charisma or values-driven leadership increasingly produces sardonic guffaws.

Her opponent, United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney, often sounded like an overconfident policy wonk angrily spouting stats in a student union debate. Political insiders score debates on direct hits and good recoveries. Real voters look for clues as to character: “Is this a leader who will fight for me and my family?”

The problem is that Kenny's overconfidence should not be confused with competence:

A fascinating study of gender differences among leaders, asks “Why do so many incompetent men become leaders? (and how to fix it).” A respected organizational psychologist, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, says one factor ranks higher than most: we are too easily deceived into confusing confidence for competence.

A tough, swaggering leader is assumed to be a competent leader. No prizes for guessing who wins the overconfidence stakes — men overestimate their abilities twice as often as women. Narcissism, overconfidence’s first cousin, is 40 per cent more likely among men.

Her campaign strategists knew from the start that Notley wins the likability, authenticity stakes by a country mile. They have been trying to persuade voters that she has been an indomitable fighter, managing through the greatest economic challenge the province has seen since the Depression; that she led a government true to its values, especially on the jobs versus climate divide.

Her opponent would have voters believe he could have forced the price of oil higher, and single-handedly overruled Ottawa and the courts to get a pipeline built. Bizarrely, he claimed he would stage a referendum to kill Canada’s equalization formula. A silly claim: Equalization is a federal statute embedded in the Constitution.

Conservatives have been claiming for decades that they are competent. The evidence of that lie is everywhere.

Image: CBC

Can She Stay In The Driver's Seat?

                                                   http://www.kimberry.com/

Jim Prentice, the turn around and he's gone premier of Alberta, used to be a member of The Trilateral Commission. Michael Harris reminds his readers that the commission is:

a body set up in 1973 by establishment types worried about an “excess” of democracy creating a “governability” problem in the West. Those were the days of the energy crisis, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, environmental protests and a peace movement that ended up forcing a halt to the Vietnam War. Today, those same forces are in play. Back then, the Commission concluded that people — particularly young people — had to be more passive and obedient to established authority if “democracy” was to survive.

The problem, as the commissioners saw it, was that democracy got in the way of profit. Prentice's proposed budget put profits ahead of people:

When Prentice told Albertans to “look in the mirror” to understand what had caused the province’s financial crisis, it was his Marie Antoinette moment. Prentice’s budget offered austerity to the masses and another all-day sucker to corporations.

And no, the math was not all that difficult to figure out. For years, the PCs had been lining the pockets of the oil companies with obscenely low resource royalties that weren’t even competently collected. In fact, Alberta failed to collect nearly $2.5 billion in royalties every year since 2009 because the provincial government bungled the math. Premier elect Rachel Notley called it: This election saw Albertans take back their government from the people who believed they owned the place.

What happened this week in Alberta was a glaring reminder that things should be the other way around. The people who both Stephen Harper and Jim Prentice work for were told to leave the driver's seat and sit in the back of the bus:

Rachel Notley, giant-killer, is the polar opposite of what both Prentice and Harper represent. A labour lawyer and union activist, she attended her first anti-war demonstration in the early 1970s at the age of nine, with her mother. She said she was amazed by what people could accomplish when they came together. Some forty years later she and her party have pulled off the greatest political upset in Canadian history.

The very people Harper has vilified, Notley embraced. In her victory speech, she thanked public servants, teachers and health care workers. She thanked Alberta’s Indigenous people for “the trust we have been given tonight.”

“The government belongs to you,” she said as her supporters cheered. “And you will be treated with respect.”

Now we will wait to see if Notley can stay in the driver's seat.