Revolutionary Moderation

BC, AB, SK



First from the left coast: as Shmuel of Echoland pointed out in my comments section last night, the Straight may not be in so much trouble after all. The B.C. Department of Provincial Revenue will be undergoing a face-saving "review" of the newspaper tax policy. And the review will no doubt find that the Georgia Straight is in fact a newspaper - that entertainment listings are as much editorial content as stock listings.



(This echoland is a pretty cool blog - who else links both Sully and Atrios? Shmuel is perhaps a little too focused on the more obvious extremes of politically motivated language alteration. But it's to be expected - he's (she's? - I suspect not, but "Shmuel" doesn't speak to this goyim of any particular gender) a liberal arts student, and therefore seeing the worst excesses (and I feel so much better for knowing the word "womyndatory" - that exceeds even my own English department / Women's Lit experiences)



From here in Alberta, another election sign on the horizon: the Tory propaganda machine is warming up the engine for another blitz. Hey, remember when the Tories spent a whole bunch of Provincial government money to convince you that private hospitals are a very good thing? I remember it like it was only yesterday, even though it actually went on for about six months before the writ was dropped. I found myself angry that these commercials were running during the six PM local news broadcast, a time that political advertisments during a campaign are verboten. I was angrier that the Tories were spending my money, not their own, to convince me of something I didn't agree with. And yet, I thought, the people who should be REALLY angry are the people who are already convinced, and watch their tax money burned to tell them something they already know to be true.



But either way, for or agin', left or right, red or blue, government money should never, ever, EVER be spent to convince people of a political argument. Think about it - what ads do you see from the Federal government? "Here is our web site / find out how the changes to such-and-such a policy will change your tax form / Canada sure is pretty, and filled with a virtual rainbow of people". Sure, the Liberals are convinced that the better you feel about Canada, the better you'll feel about them, and yet, most people can see that a government (not a party, a government) is well within its perview to convince you that the Jurisdiction is a good place. Alberta ads, as well as the annual provincial-government-purchased message from the Premier, has a far more specific political message. Last election, it was "Private hospitals are a Good Thing." This time out, you (if you're from here) will spend three million dollars hearing how good energy deregulation has been for you. That ad campaign will be happening even as you subsidize your own utility bill, making you feel like you haven't been hit so badly.



And finally, from the collected Alberta and Saskatchewan fronts. Ralph Klein, dissatisfied with merely buying the Alberta election a year early,is stumping for the Saskatchewan Party. And Lorne Calvert responded exactly the right way:

I have no political will, if the idea is that we should somehow, as a province, adopt the agenda that's now afoot in British Columbia or the political agenda that's afoot in Alberta," he told reporters on a campaign stop in Regina. "If that's the plan, then I'm not in. We are going to carve our own way here. I don't want to be B.C. east or Alberta-lite, or Manitoba west, or North Dakota north. I want to be Saskatchewan first.

Look, Ralph, just because you and Gordo can talk over booze problems and hospital closures, that doesn't make the two provinces One Big Province. And just because Saskatchewan elects New Democrats, that doesn't make it a vastly different place. Our political interests differ from Saskatchewan by three letters, and they aren't NDP. They are O-I-L. Otherwise, we're part of pretty much the same huge prairie expanse from Winnipeg to the Rocky Mountains.



Not that Saskatchewan shouldn't make their own way, as Calvert suggests, but to suggest Alberta has more in common with BC than Saskatchewan speaks more to Klein's political small-mindedness than it does to historic fact.