Analysis & Commentary

Loathing Liberals: like savouring a sour candy What could possibly happen to transform the current state of Alberta politics from the unbearable lightness of nothingness to a meaningful debate about our priorities for government? The concise answer is that the Liberal Party needs to change its name. Seriously. As journalists have scavenged the desert landscape of this election campaign, they have repeatedly quoted Albertans as saying that the Tories should be taught a lesson, but they’re voting Conservative anyway. And why is that? The National Energy Program, brought to you by Pierre Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada. Now, they say a week is a long time in politics (and this election campaign proves that), so by all logic, the era of Trudeau and the NEP of 25 years ago should be a Paleolithic curiosity, but it’s not. Moreover, Brian Mulroney and the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada brought us the GST and a distinct society for Quebec (if not in the form of a constitutional amendment, largely in fact). Surely these policies were sins of equal proportion to the NEP (which, by the way, was abandoned once the price of oil plummeted and the political and economic costs soared – unlike the GST or the recognition of Quebec’s distinctiveness). And yet a majority of Albertans still support the provincial Progressive Conservatives. So how do we account for this contradiction, and why does it necessitate a name change for the Liberals when it didn’t for the Tories? Herein lies the genius of Ralph Klein, a man who once flirted with the Liberal Party himself. When Klein won the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives, the party’s grasp on power was slipping badly. He managed to re-tool the party by adopting a platform of fiscal restraint and responsibility and by the mobilization of his aw-shucks personality. He was also aided by a provincial Liberal party that took an even more hard line on the fiscal responsibility front than the Conservatives, thus enabling Klein to appear as a moderate. What with the decimation of the federal Progressive Conservatives and the rise of the Reform Party, the right of the political spectrum was sufficiently remodeled to de-link the Mulroney Conservatives and the provincial Conservatives. The insult of the NEP and its association with the Liberal Party has, however, proved impossible to assuage. It doesn’t matter that the Chretien Liberals, with Paul Martin as finance minister, adopted a fiscal platform mirroring that of the Alberta Tories, or that it signed the North American Free Trade Agreement which would never allow a National Energy Program to be considered, or that the Martin government developed a $1-billion BSE bail-out program. Nor did it seem to matter that former Liberal leader Laurence Decore’s election platform could serve as a template for Stephen Harper, nor that Kevin Taft’s election promises could be mistaken for a Lougheed campaign strategy. Loathing the Liberals is like savoring a sour candy; we never tire of its soothing bitterness. The message in all of this is that policies don’t matter so much as perception, and the perception of the term "Liberal" in Alberta is unsalvageable. If the Alberta Liberals really want to provide a credible, vote-gaining alternative, a re-branding is in order. Maybe with a different label, people will take a look inside the package. The CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites. External links will open in a new window.