The Liberals had their post-election unofficial caucus meeting (technically true that it can’t be an actual caucus meeting as Parliament has not been summoned and only a handful of MPs have actually been sworn in yet), and the early results are that they need to be more “humble,” and address the concerns of Western Canada – somehow. Particularly because squaring the economy versus environment circle is harder in that part of the country (though really, the world price of oil is the bigger problem for them right now than any amount of environmental regulation could ever be). And like Scheer, there is this emphasis on the need for some kind of “listening tour” of the region, though I have my serious doubts about the utility of it given that the demands being made of the federal government are largely nonsensical, counter-productive, or non-starters (and many are being made intentionally so by the likes of Jason Kenney and Scott Moe because they want federal inaction on those specific items to be things they can get people angry about).
With this in mind, there were two interesting pieces out yesterday – one, a retrospective from Rosemary Barton about the recurring nature of Western anger, which has been around for decades and the fact that the Liberals have often been shut of the region in terms of seats, even worse than they are currently, and yet the country mas managed to survive. The other piece, from Jen Gerson, is a lengthy and exasperated piece that tries to shift some of the blame for the sentiments on the narratives that spring out of Central and Eastern Canada about Alberta, and how those contribute as much to Western alienation than anything else. And while Gerson makes some really good points in her piece, I did find it a bit one-sided in several respects, because it ignores some of the attitudes in the province that are just as off-putting to the rest of the country, from their smugness, their patronizing attitudes about how other regions facing unemployment should just decamp to the oilsands (which is ironic now that other regions are facing labour shortages but I don’t see a lot of Albertans eager to move there), their hostility towards Quebeckers (which many pundits raised as a factor in the return of the Bloc in this election), and this sense of entitlement that it was their hard work an ingenuity that put the oil under the ground rather than an accident of geology. And yes, I am an Albertan and I grew up with these attitudes as much as I did the feeling of being put upon by the rest of the country, or the grand mythologies we built up for ourselves about Pierre Trudeau and the National Energy Programme, and the conflation with the collapse of world oil prices that happened at that time.
Another of Gerson’s recurring themes is her insistence that Jason Kenney is simply trying to replicate Preston Manning’s attempt at channeling the province’s anger into a more productive course of action – forgetting that Manning’s Reform Party did serious damage to the institutions of Parliament, which have never recovered, or the fact that Kenney is not channeling those feelings in any productive way, but deliberately stoking anger through lies and snake oil promises for his own benefit. This needs to be identified and called out, and it needs to be done repeatedly and forcefully because Kenney will simply double down and bulldoze over anyone who challenges him over his bullshit – which makes it all the more important that it be challenged again and again. Giving him a pass because he says he’s a federalist and a patriot (while also sounding like a movie mobster running a protection racket) will only make it fester.