The first clue that the recent three-hour carbon tax rally in Calgary was a farce was when stern-faced security guards evicted the Raging Grannies from the antiseptic halls of the Westin Hotel.
Proof that they were “NDP provocateurs” as described by rally organizer and MC Ezra Levant was that they were singing, “O Canada, we stand on guard for thee.”
Which was more satirical, Ezra's name-calling or the choice of song?
Perhaps it was that the crowd was one-quarter the size of the rally a week previously at the legislature grounds in Edmonton that produced a subdued event.
Perhaps it was the venue of the rally.
The grand ballroom of the Westin lacks the gravitas for politics of the legislature grounds in Edmonton, or the Palliser Hotel in Calgary, where Peter Lougheed and Pierre Trudeau both spoke during the energy wars of the 1970s, and where Earnest Manning and his bride-to-be Muriel Preston broke the news of their engagement to William and Jessie Aberhart at dinner.
There was an attempted dark side to the rally. Few took it seriously and it didn't work.
Radio reporter Haley Jarmain was threatened.
“You're dead,” a man taunted her but didn't say why. She tweeted the threat but did not broadcast it or report on her station's website.
When the effigy “Carbon Tax” was hung from a hockey stick, it looked like a puppet from a Punch and Judy stage, not an ominous prop from a political showdown.
The chants of the crowd lacked the controversy directed at Premier Rachel Notley at the legislature grounds rally a week earlier.
Instead of “lock her up,” the crowd in Calgary urged each other to “vote her out.”
There was genuine buffoonery when Bernard the Roughneck called Notley “a moron.”
And Wildrose MLA Derek Fildebrandt called the Climate Leadership Plan “the CLAP.”
George Clark of Albertans First and the phantom “kudatah” last spring said the “Alberta Elections Act required the premier to consult us before imposing the carbon tax.”
Clark cited a clause in the Elections Act as proof. He was in the majority of one.
George Chad of Red Deer-based Oilfield Dads said, “You (Notley) may have the power to do so, but that doesn't make it right. Let the people have a referendum on major bills and taxes being passed.”
Chad apparently didn't get the memo not to be serious.
No Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership candidates came and no one spoke for the Unite Alberta (united the right) movement.
Only three federal Conservative leadership candidates spoke – Kellie Leitch, Brad Trost and Chris Alexander. None of these are in the mainstream.
The chief impression that the event left was that there are several political messiahs come to Alberta this Christmas to save us from the carbon tax. So many that not all could attend the rally. Lucky us.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
