With an historic provincial election less than a month away that will undoubtedly set the policy tone and trends for years to come, the Albertan spoke with a political science professor for this special series to discuss the state of our democracy, the case for and against electoral reform, and how people can be more engaged between elections
SUNDRE - While much fanfare is generally made throughout election campaigns at all levels of government, democracy does not just happen once every few years at the ballot box.
An adage even argues that voting represents the bare minimum a democratically-active citizen participates in.
Offering some thoughts on what people might consider doing between trips to the ballot box to continue supporting causes that matter to them, University of Alberta political science professor Jared Wesley said a couple of avenues to consider include either getting organized and becoming active with community advocacy organizations or even joining a political party.
The latter, however, does not always seem to appeal to many Canadians – especially Albertans, Wesley said, adding many people in the province lament how the party system does not reflect them.
“And that’s because a lot of Albertans don’t get engaged in party politics,” he said. “They think it’s a dirty sport; they think partisanship is a bad thing. But the reality is that Alberta democracy – like Canadian democracy – is inconceivable without political parties.”
But when it comes down to it, anyone who wants to be more engaged in how provincial affairs are conducted must choose.
“If you want to get involved, you have to either join a party or find a way to influence a political party that may be on its way into office,” he said. “If people are really interested in getting engaged, there are definitely roles for folks in activist and community organizing kinds of functions to place influence on the system from the outside.”
Either course of action is crucial to maintaining a healthy democracy.
“Equally important (to advocacy work), we need people who are willing to lean in, get involved in party politics, and hopefully make parties a little bit more reflective of the general population,” he said.
“Because right now, we see people that are really engaged in what some people call factional or tribalistic politics, where it’s about my in-group and this very, small, well-defined group of people who are not really reaching out to the broader electorate. That’s because people aren’t forcing them to.”
Wesley acknowledged when asked that this was in part a reference to the Take Back Alberta movement, which has seen roughly half of the UCP’s constituency association boards throughout the province usurped by a surge of citizens who ultimately brought down former Premier Jason Kenney’s government and paved the way for the exceedingly narrow victory of Premier Danielle Smith, who last fall secured the party’s leadership with only 53.8 per cent support after six ballots.
But there at various points throughout the province’s history has also been examples. After all, Alberta was for decades essentially “a one-party dominant state,” he said.
“That one party – the Progressive Conservatives most recently – was actually a pretty big, big tent party that had a bunch of different people from different walks of life, different parts of the province, that came together because they wanted to reach common ground with one another,” he said.
“That kind of consensus building within political parties is necessary in first-past-the-post systems,” he said. “Because first-past-the-post itself is designed to be pretty adversarial. But you can’t have one party representing all interests; parties need to aggregate those interests, and to the extent that some parties are filled with only one type of person, they’re not performing that kind of aggregated function that we need them to.”
The PCs that for 44 years ruled the province essentially unopposed until the NDP’s unexpected 2015 election victory ceased to be when the party merged with its former rivals from the Wildrose to become the United Conservative Party in 2017.
One tactic the ruling UCP seems to be shying away from as the party strives to shore up support in what is poised to be a close election, is the politicization of the public services from health care to education, or the arguable demonization of unions and just about anybody who works for the government.
That kind of rhetoric has resonated in Alberta’s political undercurrent for years, with former Premier Ralph Klein’s then-PCs infamously making drastic cuts to health care and education that prompted what critics called a brain drain of educated professionals, and more recently the Kenney UCP’s efforts to turn the public against what the party attempted to paint as overpaid health-care workers.
“The Kenney government certainly tried, and quite frankly failed miserably,” he said about efforts to disparage public workers and the unions that represent them.
“The biggest indicator of that, was just how poorly their handpicked conservative candidate did in the Calgary municipal election. And conservatives throughout the province did particularly poorly in those municipal elections because they tried to orchestrate an anti-union, an anti-public service campaign, which was misguided considering we were in the middle of a pandemic and most Albertans came to appreciate the role of job security and public servants.”
And the current government seems to have been taking notes.
“I haven’t seen as much of that disdainful, anti-union, anti-public servant rhetoric coming out of the Smith government; perhaps they’ve learned their lesson,” he said.
Such rhetoric, he added when asked, seems to have become less prevalent than in the past.
“With the pandemic being a big exception, Albertans are actually more interconnected than we’ve ever been before. Just about everybody knows a public servant; just about everybody knows somebody who’s in a union position,” he said.
“Our research shows that as a result, (if) you start slagging somebody who’s in the public service, (then) someone else will say, ‘I have a cousin who’s in the public service, and you’re wrong.’”
Wesley also said he gets the impression that on average, Albertans have through the course of the pandemic come to develop an even deeper appreciation not just for the role of government in responding to crisis but especially the public service in vital areas such as health care and education.
“So, any politician that tries to go down that road to slag the public service and public servants, will find a rough ride; at best, those appeals will fall on deaf ears. At worst, they may actually turn around and bite them,” he said.
That about face in the UCP’s tactics on the issue was the outcome of people organizing and mobilizing to make their voices heard. Albertans might have a stubbornly independent streak and a can-do entrepreneurial spirit, but they also recognize the value of working together.
“Our research has consistently shown that Albertans are what we call bridge builders with the rest of Canada; they want their governments to get along,” he said.
“They don’t want to build a firewall around the province; they actually want to have more of a voice in a national matters as opposed to taking more control locally,” he added.
“So, proposals to withdraw from national institutions like the Canada Pension Plan, the RCMP, or the Canada Revenue Agency, are not nearly as popular – in fact they’re very unpopular – compared to initiatives like getting more federal jobs out west, or reforming parliament and the senate so that we have more of a voice and influence in Ottawa.”
