I’m a lifelong Albertan, and let me tell you, things are always crazy in my home province. We’ve usually had political dynasties that lasted decades each. The last one was the rule of the Progressive Conservatives, and it lasted more than 40 years.

In 2015 we finally elected the New Democratic Party, the somewhat social-democratic, increasingly centrist party that has delivered on plenty of its social-democratic promises but enraged its environmentalist base and many but not all First Nations supporters by pushing for new pipelines and getting into protracted verbal battles with the NDP government in British Columbia and promising to exit the federal government’s climate change plan.

And while all that’s happening, the two major right-wing parties in the province have transmogrified into a single, ultra-right-wing entity called the United Conservative Party or UCP, and to make things absolutely clear, many of its candidates are calling for the destruction of public medicare, and many members are connected with White nationalist media and White extremist movements.

To talk about Alberta politics on MF GALAXY, once a year I sit down with David Climenhaga, the “award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet, and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions at the Toronto Globe and Mail and Calgary Herald. He holds a Master’s Degree in Journalism from the Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa. His 1995 book, A Poke in the Public Eye, explores the relationships among Canadian journalists, public relations people and politicians.” Climenhaga blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca.

Climenhaga and I met to talk about:

• UCP leader Jason Kenney’s cavorting in India, and the UCP’s not-so-secret agenda to privatise health care
• The ultra-right-wing renegade Maxime Bernier who split from the federal Conservatives to form his own party
• What policy the Alberta NDP should have pursued to bolster its hopes for reelection, or at least a permanent progressive legacy, and
• The strategy that right-wing extremists have used to drag mainstream conservative parties closer and closer to fascism.

 

Albertapolitics.ca

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