Revolutionary Moderation

Old school

The reputation of Albertans as political dinosaurs is not entirely undeserved. When I was a younger man, I idled a lot of hours in Strathmore coffee shops, overhearing the conversation of one particular group of older (but by no means old) farmers who regularly met. Their conversations followed the same few themes: The Weather, The Price of Cattle/Wheat/Barley, Our Children's Lives, and my personal favourite track, What's Wrong With Canada? The answer to the last overwhelmingly involved changes that mostly took place under the watch of Prime Minister Trudeau: bilingualism, multiculturalism, the end of capital punishment, the beginning of access to safe abortions, and the metric system.

The Reform Party lifted itself off the ground on the strength of these sorts of sentiments, though the party moved on. For a while, it was the Canadian Wheat Board and the Charter, and more recently it's been Kyoto and the gun registry. But there are lots of Albertans for whom the clock has stopped - they've added those other complaints to the ledger, but you can ask them about metric today and they can still build up a head of steam about Eastern Canada conspiracies. From everything I've seen of him as my own MP for many years, Myron Thompson is one of those Albertans.

That's why the only surprise about Thompson's forum performance is that it's getting some national traction. (Sig)1 by (prom)1, unless some tape is produced by the end of the day. Then I'm taking the significance up to two, because if there's audio, you'll hear it, again and again.