Julie McLaughlin

If you’ve lived in Alberta for any length of time you are used to Conservatives ruling the roost. Federal Conservatives and provincial Conservatives win elections by huge majorities in every part of the province. Competing political parties are decimated, marginalized at best.

The Conservatives are so well entrenched in Wild Rose Country it’s hard to even imagine a different scenario. However, as they strive to control the rest of the country as they control Alberta, it’s clear they have developed quite a split personality; or perhaps just a serious case of hypocrisy. In their home province, much of what they promote as their cherished principles on the national stage is ignored, or trashed.

Take the fixed election date, which Stephen Harper’s minority government quickly introduced at the federal level after the last election. If fixed election dates are so important for federal elections, why don’t we have them in Alberta?

The Alberta Conservatives have been in power for 37 years, and yet Alberta does not yet have fixed election dates. Conservative leaders have presided over huge majorities and yet none of them have been willing to give up the advantage of calling an election when it suited them.

In the end, of course, Harper couldn’t resist trashing his own law so he could have an election when he wanted one. Still, he has set a precedent at the national level with fixed election dates, while at home Conservatives won’t go near it.

And then there’s election campaign financing. The federal Conservatives love to brag about all the money they have raised from individual donors. When legislation introduced by the Chrétien government severely limited corporate donations, the Conservatives took advantage of the detailed membership lists compiled by the party from whence they sprang — Preston Manning’s Reform Party — and went fundraising. Now they are rolling in dough and deriding the Liberals and NDs because these parties don’t have the same kind of grassroots financial support.

However, in Alberta, we have no such limits on political party donations. Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch calls Alberta Canada’s “laggard” when it comes to reforming election financing. The Alberta Conservatives are also rolling in dough, most of it supplied by their corporate friends. Who needs those pesky $25 and $50 donations from dedicated party members? They’re just a nuisance to collect.

Federal Conservative MPs love to disrupt Parliament’s all-party committees, particularly those with the power to investigate allegations of government wrongdoing. Remember their antics during the Mulroney-Schreiber hearings? And most recently their odd behaviour designed to stall a committee looking into election spending irregularities?

For the past 15 years Alberta’s legislature didn’t have all-party committees. Ralph Klein decreed that only Conservatives could sit on those committees. Needless to say, there wasn’t much disruption.

So why is it that while opposition members in Alberta weren’t even allowed to sit on legislature committees, in Ottawa, opposition Conservative MPs gleefully participated in the public roasting of the Liberals and their padded advertising accounts, a roasting that led to an election that gave the Conservatives a minority government. That’s Ottawa and this is Alberta. Different game. Different rules. Who needs all-party committees when you have complete control?

Federal Conservatives also love to preach about decentralizing government, though that’s not exactly how it goes here in Alberta. The Klein government centralized so much power that nothing much happened without an OK from the premier’s office. Municipalities, school boards, universities, health regions all fell into line.

Federal Conservatives also like to portray themselves as strict free marketeers. They insist that business make its own way in the world. That didn’t stop them from pledging taxpayers’ money to the ailing Ontario auto industry. However, at least the auto industry is ailing.

The Alberta Conservatives funnel huge amounts of taxpayers’ money into successful businesses. Take for example Premier Stelmach’s plan to develop carbon capture and storage. It will inject $2 billion into the already fantastically wealthy petroleum industry in the form of subsidies. One of the first to apply was a company owned by former Premier Don Getty. Obviously, maintaining free markets means one thing here and something else in the rest of the country.

Albertans have become used to authoritarian provincial governments. Perhaps that’s why almost 60 per cent of eligible voters didn’t even bother to vote in the last provincial election. Of course, the Alberta government is awash in oil money, so people here can afford to be somewhat forgiving about its dark side. The federal Conservatives don’t have this luxury.

The question remains: if all these cherished Conservative principles are important for the rest of the country, why aren’t they enshrined in Alberta? Why doesn’t Alberta lead the way by example when it comes to democratic reform? Instead, Conservatives in Alberta cling to power by any means possible while in the rest of the country they talk a different story. Surely it’s time for them to stop being so blatantly two-faced and practise what they preach here at home.

Gillian Steward is a Calgary-based journalist who has covered politics since the Lougheed days.