Alberta Election 2019

Results That Do Not Bode Well for Either Alberta or Canada

- Pauline Easton -

The United Conservative Party (UCP) has formed a majority government in the April 16 Alberta election winning 63 of 87 seats with the NDP taking the remaining 24 seats in the Legislature. The other three parties with seats in the Legislature at dissolution, the Alberta Party, the Liberal Party and the Freedom Conservative Party did not win any seats. This predictable result arose because of the lack of a workers' opposition with a consciousness of its own emerging out of real life, synonymous with social change, and free of all preconceived notions.

The "stop the right" mantra of the liberal social base has proven to be totally ineffective in Canada not only in this Alberta election but also in the recent Ontario and Quebec elections and elsewhere around the world. The "stop the right" liberal mantra reduces the demand of the workers' movement and the polity itself for an end to the neo-liberal anti-social offensive to a helpless, hopeless and humiliated state because the cartel party system has one aim -- to keep the people disempowered. It is not the people who decide the outcome of an election. They exercise no control over candidate selection or those elected or the agendas which are set. All of that is controlled by the state of the rich and their private conglomerates and media which deprive the people of an outlook of their own.

A workers' opposition must face with courage and conviction the fact that no matter which party forms the government to preserve what are called liberal democratic institutions, the party coming into power combines with state institutions which are anachronistic. Their role is to preserve privilege. They are totally out of sync with the needs of the times. The political party forming a government reflects the dysfunction of the whole and reveals in practice the powerful economic forces the liberal democratic state institutions serve. The corruption of the federal Liberal party in power and the corruption that created and pushed to prominence the Alberta UCP and its leader show they are birds of a feather.

Saying a UCP victory was predictable is not to dismiss the fact that this does not bode well for Alberta and Canada. The workers' opposition must face the realities of its weakness and deal with them. In doing so, it realizes in the immediate sense that the election of Jason Kenney as Alberta's new premier means increasing acrimony amongst the ruling elite and further degeneration of the cartel party system, and a continuation and possible intensification of the anti-social offensive. The unrelentingly discordant and disagreeable discourse of Kenney and others arises from the mostly foreign narrow private interests he serves. These interests operate by imposing anarchy and violence and reveal the fact that conditions no longer exist to respect a lawful authority. This means that it is up to the people to empower themselves and establish a rule of law which favours them. To cover up the striving for power and control of the international financial oligarchy, the people are blamed for being backward and reactionary. The Liberals' demand for sunny ways has the same source, aim and result as do any demands which appease the rich and their agendas no matter what quarter they come from.

Kenney's victory speech following the election serves notice of the kind of bitterness, rancor, resentment, ill feeling, ill will, bad blood, animosity, hostility and enmity that the antagonisms and striving for power within the financial oligarchy are bringing to the fore.

The Blues, Man, the Blues

A media pundit renders the situation in a way that caters to terrified liberals and social democrats for whom the matter is "the blues, man, the blues." Andrew Coyne writes, "With this win in Alberta, there are now six conservative provincial governments stretching from the Rockies to the Bay of Fundy, together representing more than 80 per cent of the country's population."

How the ruling circles represent the people and their demands is of course a key question never discussed. What is certain is that the widely publicized corruption that occurred during the merger of the Alberta Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties creating the UCP with Kenney as its leader stands second to none. Many consider that it rivals Justin Trudeau's so-called rules-based version of how things should be done when serving the oligarchs.

Within this morass of corruption and catering to the rich that engulfs what are called the liberal democratic institutions and the cartel parties, somehow the Conservatives are often portrayed as more fiscally and even at times socially responsible than their rivals. Meanwhile epithets of all kinds are hurled against working Canadians claiming they are becoming populist, anti-immigrant, white supremacist, anti-social and the like, allowing "six conservative provincial governments stretching from the Rockies to the Bay of Fundy" to come to power.

Working Canadians are concerned about having a society that looks after the economic and social well-being of those who depend on it for their living. They hold liberal hypocrisy, opportunism, and self-serving justifications for what cannot be justified in utter contempt and often express themselves bluntly in this regard. However, they also have no regard for how the likes of Jason Kenney and his former boss Stephen Harper wield power either. They reject the aim for society set by both the so-called right and left wings of the ruling class. The aim of both is essentially the same and does not include looking after the economic and social well-being of those who depend on the economy and society for their living. How else to explain the recurring economic crisis, the unresolved problems, and neo-liberal, anti-social offensive attacking the well-being of the people during the reign of all cartel parties. This fact is a matter of grave concern for the working people and why the workers' opposition should be front and centre in presenting a pro-social direction and agenda of its own creation.

The aim of the so-called right and left wings of the Canadian cartel party system is to use the political power of the so-called liberal democratic state institutions to put the assets of the country at the disposal of the international financial oligarchy and their oligopolies, which leave in their wake and even make worse the unresolved economic, social and environmental problems that concern the people. Internationally, the so-called right and left wings are united in nation-wrecking, warmongering and destruction of the human productive forces and the social and natural environment led by U.S. imperialism.

The ruling elite have created an illusion that somehow the so-called right and left wings of the ruling class stand for something different and that one at one time or another at another time is better or worse. Alberta's main newspapers, the liberal Edmonton Journal and the conservative Calgary Herald both supported Jason Kenney to form the next government. They received the wish they worked to promote and now have the arrogance to say the people have spoken and the NDP in opposition must hold the Kenney government to account. What is not discussed is how the powerful economic interests which wanted this outcome managed to rummy up the additional 200,000 voters who were eligible in the  2015 election but did not vote at that time and get them to vote to secure a majority for the UCP. The 63 seats secured for the UCP is a gain of 38 seats over the total held by Conservative and Wildrose Parties in 2015. The NDP vote remained the same as in 2015 which in that election gave them 52 seats and in this election gave them 24. Clearly, the NDP  "held its own" but this was no contest against the powerful private interests which put their money behind the outcome they decided must win. The warranted conclusion to be drawn from this is that the workers' movement and people's forces must set their own aims and mobilize to achieve them. They must empower themselves, not divide behind this or that faction of the rich under the pretext that one is better than the other.

Following the Alberta election of a UCP majority government, the so-called right and left newspapers of the ruling class have proclaimed  the agenda for working people following the election. In essence they say workers should reduce themselves to extra-parliamentary lobby groups and permit others to speak in their name and do their thinking for them. Sucked into this agenda, working people should forget about organizing a workers' opposition independently of the ruling elite with its own agenda and analysis of what needs to be done to defend the rights and well-being of the people and build the new.

A Way Forward

Working people in Alberta and indeed the entire polity of Canada cannot afford to stay in the trap of "left" versus "right." What exists is a cartel party system within anachronistic liberal democratic institutions over which the people exercise no control whatsoever. Bolstering this view are media assessments saying that now with only two parties in the Alberta Legislature and everyone else eliminated, Kenney's strategy to destroy the PC and Wildrose parties and create a new "brand" has prevailed.

But what will the new brand accomplish except more of the same. The in-fighting and squabbles are more intense than ever and conducted ever more stridently. Kenney's strategy and victory show the inability of the ruling elite who serve and represent the global oligarchs to set an aim for society consistent with the needs of humanity and the times. They reveal the necessity of the working class to find its own voice and set a new direction for the economy and politics to provide the rights and well-being of the people with a guarantee.

New brand or not, how will the squawking and lack of unity be overcome? On what basis can these leaders of the ruling elite exercise control even within their own ranks when the oligarchs they represent are at each other's throats to the point of threatening liberal/conservative violence against each other as we see in the U.S. and Britain as they also engage in continuous wars abroad?

The lack of unity within the ranks of the ruling class in Alberta is such that the Progressive Conservatives who opposed the Kenney takeover of their party swelled the ranks of the Alberta Party. They elected former Edmonton Mayor and Progressive Conservative Steven Mandel as leader and gained 9.2 per cent of votes cast in the provincial election. Despite this they failed to win a single seat and neither did the Liberals.

The hostile takeover of the Wildrose and PC parties virtually eliminated the PCs who had ruled Alberta for 44 years. This mirrors the so-called merger of the Reform Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party federally that eliminated the former PCs and brought the Harperites into being and power -- a foreign-inspired coup of which Jason Kenney was a major player. His ranting against foreign interference in elections matches that of the federal Liberal foreign minister as do his foreign affiliations and connections.

Let Working People Themselves Turn Things Around

Working people have legitimate claims on the economy and society. Those claims clash with those of the ruling financial oligarchy. To express and fight in an organized way for their claims, working people must oppose, and not become embroiled in, the rivalry and acrimony of the ruling elite. Their first duty is to themselves and society. They cannot allow the ruling elite to deprive them of their own outlook and ability to work out their own vantage points and struggle to defend their rights within the situation.

Take for example the pathetic attempts to blame workers for electing reactionary right wing governments when the so-called left-wing governments are virtually the same and follow similar pay-the-rich policies. What better proof do the people need of this than what the Trudeau federal government has done in its years in office? The people have been subjected to reams of words, rhetoric and grandstanding but the deeds are mostly similar to the previous Harper regime. The aim of the Liberal Party was and continues to be to render ineffective the worker's opposition to the anti-social offensive, the opposition of the indigenous peoples to the final elimination of their hereditary rights, the affirmation of the rights of women and children, the striving of the youth for a bright future and the people's claims for a healthy natural and social environment. This they have not achieved. Despite putting the liberal social base at their disposal to make sure the people's movement does not step out of bounds, the people's striving for empowerment continues to assert itself and gain strength. The striving for empowerment is the present reality that working people must embrace, nurture and use to secure the future.

Working people can turn things around by refusing the agenda set by the ruling elites and speak directly to those matters that concern themselves. Discussing and working out how to resolve the economic, political, social and environmental problems in their own favour and not in favour of the rich can lead directly to mobilizing workers in defence of their rights and a mass movement to build the New.

This article was published in

Volume 49 Number 14 - April 20, 2019

Article Link:
Alberta Election 2019: Results That Do Not Bode Well for Either Alberta or Canada - Pauline Easton

    

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