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When I wrote this prior to the provincial election of 2004, there were no Liberal MLAs representing Calgary in the Alberta Legislature. Shortly afterwards on Election Day, however, three were elected.
"Never hate your enemy," the Godfather (Al Pacino) warns his hotheaded nephew (Andy Garcia) in Godfather III, "it affects your judgment."
"Hatred comes from the heart; contempt from the head;" said the German philosopher Schopenhauer, "and neither feeling is quite within our control."
"Hate," said Victoria Wolf, putting it about as simply as it can be put, "is not a good counselor."
Indeed. Whether it comes from a fictional crime boss, your wise old grandfather or a successful CEO at the peak of his power, the advice to avoid letting hatred cloud your judgment is sound.
So why, I often wonder, do so many Albertans let people with a deep and abiding hatred of everything liberal counsel them on how to vote?
Yes. The National Energy Program (NEP) was a bad thing. It really was.
And yes, Pierre Elliot Trudeau (PET) did give us the finger. But he's dead now. He really is.
He's been dead for awhile now and, given the rate of decay of the human body in a coffin buried beneath the ground, I don't imagine there is much flesh left on his bony little finger now.
I don't image that his rotting corpse will rise from the dead this Halloween to chop off our oil revenues and feed them to his ghoulish minions in Central Canada.
One year short of a generation later, the only thing that remains from the NEP/PET crises of 1980 is a grudge fuelled by a hatred for all things Liberal.
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How strange.
How very strange that otherwise rational people, otherwise sensible people, otherwise -- well -- pretty darned smart people allow themselves to be counseled by hatred for characters and events long since dead and buried.
How very, very strange.
Here's something to think about. The Klein Revolution, the very revolution that makes so many Albertans so proud today, the political revolution that led to banishment of the deficit from our Garden of Eden grew out of a moment in time when the provincial Liberal Party was on the verge of breaking through.
That's right. The Klein Revolution was at its most revolutionary when the Alberta Liberal Party was at the pinnacle of its power.
But as the Liberals fell apart, so did the revolution. As opposition in Alberta diminished, so did the government's commitment to change. As the threat to their power receded, the government's commitment to the Klein revolution dissipated and eventually vanished.
Today, there is little difference between how the government of Alberta manages its business and how other provinces -- led by Liberal and NDP governments -- manage theirs.
Government spending is up in Alberta. Way up. Golden handshakes are up too. Taxes are going up and accountability is headed for the darkest corner of the basement.
The government of Alberta has no incentive to govern well because so many Calgarians, counseled by a hatred for the ghost of Trudeau, refuse to elect sufficient opposition members to keep the government honest.
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Here in Calgary where they hold 100 per cent of the seats, the government has absolutely no incentive to work harder on our behalf.
They have no incentive to earn our votes because there is no threat that a majority of us might actually give our votes to someone else.
Common sense counsels us to balance powerful government with a powerful opposition, but hatred counsels otherwise.
Sound judgment tells us that government without opposition is a bad thing; but hatred counsels us to elect every candidate that the government cares to put on the ballot.
Try as we might, once we get inside that voting booth most of us Calgarians cannot force our pencils to mark an X beside the name of an opposition party candidate.
Clear thinking and detached objectivity might tell us otherwise, but hatred tells us that voting against the government, voting to give our government some opposition is a bad thing.
And so, counseled by hatred of all things liberal, Alberta enters upon its 34th straight year of one party rule and continues to be the only province in Confederation to guarantee government MLAs jobs for life regardless of performance or ability.
Because hatred counsels us that there is no alternative.
© Brent Johner. Unpublished, October 2004. Reprint rights available.
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