Neil Waugh
Wed, October 15, 2008
It could have been worse
By NEIL Waugh
No one said anything going into this thing.
In fact, even to utter a word about a Harper majority in what is supposed to be the most Tory Blue province on the surface of the known world, was at minimum good enough reason for getting your mouth washed out with soap.
Albertans must not say anything for fear of upsetting the sensitive ears of Toronto commuter-belt soccer moms who Stephen Harper reluctantly pulled on his sweater and faked a smile for.
But after all that compromising, Albertans got essentially what they started with: a hung Parliament and an Alberta prime minister unable or unwilling to implement his province's agenda.
The PM started with Preston Manning's vow of "the West wants in" and hit an electoral brick wall last night when Harper's hope of a majority died in Quebec before the polls were closed in Alberta.
The one point of light on an otherwise gloomy horizon was the electoral shaft Liberal Leader Stephane Dion's Green Shift got and the inevitable political demise of the Nutty Professor and his scary idea to use Albertans and our thriving economy as the Ottawa Liberal Party's laboratory rats. The Shaft is gone. And Dion will soon follow it out the door.
Even more distressing was the performance of Ed Stelmach and the Alberta Tories throughout the campaign.
Going in it, it was as obvious as an oil stain on a white T-shirt that Alberta-bashing would be a central theme of the campaign.
Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe as early as two years ago was running an envy ad campaign attacking the province's energy wealth.
While all five national parties had some form of gotcha in their policy documents to strip wealth out of the province, it was Duceppe who took it to new lows. The Quebec wedge issue of the campaign may have been Harper's arts-funding speech in Saskatoon.
But it was the Alberta agenda that drove the Bloc's big electoral clawback from a position going in where the BQ were being written off as irrelevant and doomed Harper's chances of a majority.
In the dying hours of the campaign Harper pleaded to Quebecers that he isn't "the devil in a cowboy hat" as Duceppe has been portraying him.
"He says that because I come from Alberta that I serve the oil companies," Harper blurted. If only it were true.
By then the damage had been inflicted and the hopes of a majority - that looked so bright on Sept. 26 when Harper had a 15-point lead over Stephane Dion in the polls - were done like dinner.
While this constant attack against Fortress Alberta was taking place, Premier Ed Stelmach's foolish strategy was silence is the best offence.
He had two excellent opportunities in the final days of the campaign to take Albertans' message back east and tell like it should be.
But his speeches in Montreal and Toronto were weak regurgitations of the old "partners in prosperity" theory, where Alberta's energy bucks trickle down to the rest of Canada.
All Albertans are really asking for is a "fair hearing." Unfortunately nobody was listening where it really counted.
When Harper hit Toronto last week to deliver what should have been his economy-saving speech, he gave a strange talk about Canada being like Noah's Ark.
It opened him up to attack that the Tories had no plan for the financial meltdown, except the Bank of Canada had already cut the bank rate, announced a program to buy up the toxic asset-backed paper and was within hours of pumping billions more into the country's banks.
A speech telling it like it really is may have given him the win he - and Albertans - clearly needed. Last night Stelmach issued a statement congratulating Harper on his "victory" and pledged to "work together to move our country forward." The best you can say is, it could have been worse.
AI
