Jul. 05, 2011 - Issue #820: Bestest of Edmonton
Bloom off the Rose?
Recent Wildrose Party convention reveals extremist attitudes
There's nothing like a policy convention to show you where the heart and soul of a party really lies. In the case of the former Wildrose Alliance Party (now renamed the Wildrose Party), the party's convention at the end of June was no different. The policies it passed, and the nature of the debate, showed it to be little more than an extremist fringe party—a combination of a party born in protest to Premier Stelmach, and a home for Albertans on the extreme right of the political spectrum, both socially and fiscally. Will this convention prove to have been the beginning of the end for Wildrose?
One of the policies voted down by the 500 or so members that attended the convention was that a Wildrose government would work together with the federal government to make it easier for immigrants with foreign credentials to enter the workforce in Canada. You would think that in a province that is becoming increasingly dependent on new immigrants to work as professionals and tradespeople, it would be a slam dunk to support policy expediting their ability to enter the workforce. Whatever their reason was for voting this down, many Albertans on the outside will wonder if it was a decision fueled by xenophobia and a reactionary anti-immigrant membership.
Likewise with the decision to support the elimination of the Alberta Human Rights Commission, a decision that even the party's leader Danielle Smith heartily supported. Many party insiders referred to this as the Ezra Levant resolution, as it was assumed to have been just one more front in his ongoing battle against Human Rights Commissions and legislation in Alberta and Canada. Levant and the Wildrose see the commission, and its duty to investigate and hold tribunals in cases of discrimination in Alberta, as a nuisance and a violation of free speech. It doesn't seem to have phased them that the Alberta commission hears on average 10 cases a year, and that most of them are employment-related cases of discrimination brought by workers who would not be able to afford lawyers and expensive court cases. Or maybe they get that, and that's their larger objective: to make it prohibitive for people to file discrimination complaints. Either way, it's difficult to see this as anything other than an extremist fringe position.
At the same time as Wildrose members were making it more difficult for immigrants with foreign credentials and people facing discrimination, they overwhelmingly passed a policy initiative designed to further protect the rights of one group of people: gun owners. Apparently the rights of firearms owners have been under attack for some time, unlike immigrants and gays and lesbians and foreign professionals, and the Wildrose Party will take it upon itself to reverse that trend.
The party also passed a number of health-care resolutions calling for the creation, and public funding of, private hospitals and for their insertion into the existing system—a policy which goes clearly against most of the research on the subject and the expressed wishes of most Albertans.
In the end, whatever the reasons and rationales for most of these policies, they are not the policies of a moderate mainstream party seeking to grow its base of support in advance of the next provincial election. A recent article in the Calgary Herald cites extensive evidence from party insiders that Wildrose members, staff and former executives, are leaving the party in significant numbers to head back to the Conservatives.
It is also important to keep in mind that this was a party largely backed and promoted by Alberta's oil industry, as a warning and protest against Premier Stelmach's attempts to fiddle with royalties. Those royalty changes have now all been reversed, and the person responsible for them is resigning. What is the likelihood that those oil companies, who already have enough public relations problems of their own, will continue to place their lot with a party that is proving to be well outside what most Albertans consider to be the mainstream of political thought and discussion?
In the end, much will depend on who the Conservatives elect as their new leader in the fall, and on what Wildrose does with these policies in the next few months, but from this vantage point the future looks anything but bright for Danielle Smith and her party. V
Ricardo Acuña is the executive director of the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan, public policy research institute housed at the University of Alberta.
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