My Gido would be proud today.i I’m… less persuaded.
Yesterday evening, in a crushing defeat that sent them from 1st to 3rd, the ruling Progressive Conservative (PC) Party of Alberta was dethroned after 43 years in power. They’ve now been replaced by a wet-behind-the-ears NDP that’s promising to increase corporate taxes and increase social program and health care spending because 50% of the budget going to the disease industry wasn’t enough !!1ii
Of course, 99% of the derps in my generationiii aren’t affected by an increase in corporate taxes, so they see little folly in raising them, plus the fact that very few of them have actually worked with the lower classes or truly sick people for any period of timeiv and therefore mentally persist in the Narnia wherein more social programs are more better because reasons and failing isn’t your fault. But whatever, “no one could’ve predicted,” right ?
Based on the reactions of the friends with whom I watched the televised results last night, the streams of hip-hip-hoorays! on their social media accounts, and the over-the-moon online reactions re-posted by the TV network, it’s clear to see that the redditards and socialistoids of my generation overpowered the sager minds with sheer volume, just as they did with Obama. And as with the Mulato-In-Chief, we can expect about as much change from NDP Leader Rachel Notley,v as we can we can from Janet Yellen, which is to say, not terribly much at all. What, you thought that voting for a new party was disruptive or some shit ? Like the Uber of politics ?? C’mon.
The truth of the matter is that 99.9% of Alberta’s bureaucracy isn’t moving an inch, “the people” are expecting change tout suite and will be very fussy when (not if) they don’t get it, the NDP’s new MLAs are awfully inexperienced and will be susceptible to far grosser mismanagement than the forged-by-fire PCs, and the NDP actually ran on a pretty centrist platform that wasn’t markedly different from what was currently being offered no matter how different the colour of its clothes may appear.
My assessment of the situation, as someone who’s no longer idealistic nor naive enough to show up at the polls, is that little will change. I honestly don’t think the NDP will make that much of a difference to this province. If anything, they’re being set-up to fail so that Albertans will come crawling back to some flavour of conservativism, maybe the Wildrose Party of Alberta, after a few years of mismanagement.
Update: In another example of “it’s a small world after all,” turns out that Rachel Notley articled with my father’s firm in 1993/94. Heh! Who knew I came from such a long line of socialists ?
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- Nick William D (1920 – 2009), my paternal grandfather, served two terms as a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in Alberta, from 1952 to 1959. He represented the Willingdon riding for the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), the predecessor of today’s New Democratic Party (NDP) of Alberta and the local equivalent of the Worker’s Party for Free Leninists. He was the only MLA from the CCF to serve two consecutive terms in the 1950’s.
At the time, against the ruling Social Credit party (the previous dynasty to the PCs), even with only two seats in Legislature, the CCF formed the official opposition. Fighting for farmer’s rights and the nationalisation (or provincialisation) of all utilities and resources wasn’t overly popular with the city folk.↩
- Though you’ll have to take my word for it on the NDP’s platform because their webpage yields
Liquid syntax error: Error in tag ‘subpage’ – No such page slug site.signup_page”
Derp much ? Fuck, if they can’t manage a website… ↩
- 18-35 year-old urbanites who are big on social media donchaknow.↩
- And if they have, they’re on the dole and don’t want the feeding trough to stop !↩
- Rachel Notley may be a fallguy or may be a Fiorina but at this point it’s too early to say. Though don’t get me wrong, she definitely ran the most persuasive campaign, even if she’s ignoring my heed to her predecessor Jim Prentice vis-a-vis raising taxes.↩