Tomb

Those who groan at the insipidness of the American presidential nominations would seem to have every justification: debates that are either scripted or vacuous; media coverage that is either cynical or sycophantic; the astounding waste of money and resources; the presence of at least one genuine ignoramus among the final constellation of candidates.

Yet, for all its faults, the presidential election has something going for it that the Alberta election sorely lacks, and that is the pervasive sense of hope, which is rooted in the real possibility of change. There is every reason to believe that the coming American election will see power change hands, that the incumbent party will be sent packing. That fantasy is harder to entertain in Alberta.

The last time that power changed hands in Alberta was in 1971, when the Conservatives grabbed the wheel from a power-drunk Social Credit party. The most recent power shift before that had occurred in 1935, when Social Credit knocked out the United Farmers of Alberta, who had themselves been sitting in the driver’s seat for 14 years. The last time the Liberals won an election in this province it was 1917, and the preferred mode of transportation was the horse and buggy.

Now there’s a thought for Kevin Taft: the last time his party won power in Alberta, Russia was still ruled by a Tsar. Since then, the Liberals have never lost an opportunity to lose an election.

The principal advantage enjoyed by democratic societies is the ability to clean house, to “sweep the rascals out,” as the saying goes. However, if the transience of power should be taken as the requirement, rather than merely the occasional side-effect of electoral democracy, then Alberta barely qualifies as a democracy at all. Instead, we are something slightly less than a real democracy — a “quasi-democracy,” perhaps? Or even, if you please, a “single-party state”?

At any rate, the incredibly high degree of political consensus would seem especially ironic in Alberta, of all places — a province that trumpets the values of fierce independence and rugged, frontier individualism. As Aritha van Herk characterized us in Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, “Albertans are mavericks, people who step out of bounds, refuse to do as we are told, take risks.” Confronted with the ballot box, however, the Albertan maverick apparently shrivels into an enfeebled creature, a highly suggestible lemming who rarely steps out of bounds and who never, ever takes risks.

The truth, of course, is somewhat more complicated than this “lemming analysis” of electoral behaviour, and relates to the fact that Alberta politics almost always play out in dialogue with Ontario. Our own single-party consensus is fundamentally opposed to a much larger (and potentially threatening) ideological consensus emanating from the resented political centre. It is not, therefore, that Albertans are secretly a bunch of closet totalitarians — but that our singular political position is fundamentally in opposition to much deeper social-liberal consensus at the national level.

In this respect, Alberta is consistently the voice of dissensus, the opposite of consensus, which would seem paradoxically to confirm van Herk’s characterization of the Alberta maverick. “Albertans behave like unpredictable tornadoes or stampeding cattle when it comes to voting and politics,” she says when questioned about this observation. “They all go in one direction regardless of whether it makes sense, and then all of a sudden, at the strangest and least predictable moments, they'll swerve in another direction, sweep out the party in power and sweep in another. The radical suddenness of that change is very disconcerting, and its occasion in the past may be an indication of why the province has for the last years voted Conservative — I think Albertans are secretly nervous about their own recidivism.”

“But,” she adds, “this election may prove different.”

Just how different is anyone’s guess. The Conservatives are looking vulnerable and increasingly irrelevant under their flimsy leader. Gore Vidal once remarked that elections are won by abstainers, and nothing exemplifies that quite like the rise of Ed Stelmach, man of the soil, who is somehow more convincing on the topic of daycare than the environment.

However, if you buy my theory, the provincial Conservatives might face a greater threat from the presence of a Conservative government in Ottawa. Our collective bile, you see, is probably at a relative low. It has now been two full years since we’ve seen Paul Martin’s gelatinous face on the nightly news, and many Albertan Conservatives will find it difficult to tap their inner reservoir of resentment, which normally fuels a trip to the polls.

Even in our quasi-democracy, then, there is perhaps some room to manoeuver. The Social Credit party governed this province for 36 years. At this moment, the Conservatives have managed to do so for 37. It is hard to shake the nagging feeling we all might be better off if they did not make it 38.

Ira Wells is a writer and doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto. He has written for the Calgary Herald and the Toronto Star.