As followers of Alberta politics know, the provincial Tories tend to use the Christmas holiday to make some potentially unpopular change, or release embarrassing information. Why not? The news cycle is about 20 minutes long then, and most people are ignoring even that.
This year, the Liberals wisely waited to unwrap their annual Tory gift until Orthodox/Ukranian Christmas, when attention spans are a little longer. And look what they've found under the tree:
Almost 60 per cent of Albertans support the idea of public auto insurance, according to a government survey that wasn't released for six months.More than anything else, this is the smoking gun proving that the Tories in Alberta are ideolouges, and that's as dangerous or more to the long-term good of Alberta as any particular ideology they happen to be following. The government knows Albertans want public auto insurance. They see evidence from every other prairie province that public auto insurance is cheaper for consumers. And still, they won't seriously entertain the discussion:
The poll, conducted in June with 1,000 respondents, was released at the end of December as part of background information to a release on the insurance reform process.
... Finance Minister Pat Nelson... says the government isn't in the business of doing business.If that's all the poll says, I'm a little surprised there weren't poll numbers released with exactly that spin.
"We didn't want to go back into that unless we absolutely had to," [emphasis mine - Don] she said. "That option was always there. What that poll really tells us, and what people said, was we don't really care who offers insurance, as long as it meets our needs, it's affordable and accessible, and we can have insurance that works for us.
It's telling that Nelson sees public auto insurance as the last possible option - not an equally-weighed option. It allows the Liberals to position themselves comfortably to the left of the Tories, something they've sometimes struggled to do since Ken Nicol took over the leadership.
I think this is a harbinger of doom for the provincial Tories. Successful Alberta governments have always looked beyond ideology. The "right-wing" Social Credit party stayed in government for forty years building schools, building hospitals, and paving roads. Peter Lougheed expanded the social safety net. But with ideological decisions like this, the Tories' fortunes will not look particularly rosy once the personally-popular Ralph Klein decides to collect his pension.
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