The Extreme Card

There are several universal constants in life. The daily sunrise and sunset…the changing seasons…death and taxes…and unfortunately, Canadian Progressive and Liberal politicians alleging that conservative-minded individuals are right-wing extremists with a hidden agenda to leave the vulnerable on the streets, allow the sick to perish without health care and to implement some sort of religious theocracy.

It’s a painfully predictable pattern. A governing party, bereft of any ideas or principles other than the maintenance of their power, sees a small-c conservative party espousing new ideas and leadership gaining traction with the general public. Unable to successfully win a debate on the issues with this new group, they resort to the tried and tested strategy of fear mongering and baseless allegations.

The Federal Liberals under Chretien and Martin successfully used this strategy for years to vilify the Reform, Canadian Alliance and Conservative Parties led by Preston Manning, Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper. Eventually enough Canadians saw this rhetoric for the drivel that it was, and elected our current Conservative Government to Parliament.

In Alberta, the Liberal ‘right-wing-extremist’ fear mongering strategy never worked.  The small-c conservative parties led by Manning, Day and Harper won continuous supermajorities of Alberta’s federal voters from 1993 till present; and they did so both before and after the merger of the Canadian Alliance and PC parties.

Curiously, the Provincial PC Party has decided to adopt the Federal Liberal strategy. Premier Stelmach is warning Albertans to beware of the right-wing-extremists (meaning Wildrose) that speak like moderates. Ted Morton, who now sells himself as a ‘moderate’ (whatever that means) has offered to graft the ‘right wing’ Wildrose defectors back into the ‘mothership’. Leadership candidates, Doug Horner and Alison Redford emphasize that they are PROGRESSIVE conservatives because they care about the vulnerable (the implication being that conservatives somehow don’t). And in the Legislature, PC after PC MLA continue to stand up and falsely allege that the Wildrose wants to slash social spending, privatize health care, destroy the environment, and end the building of schools, roads and hospitals.

Well, here are some facts taken directly from the released Wildrose policies and from the Legislative record of the PC Government:

• To balance the budget and refrain from mortgaging our children’s future, Wildrose would limit annual increases in government operational spending to the rate of inflation plus population growth (roughly 2-3% per year) while ensuring infrastructure spending is kept at roughly the same level as BC, Quebec and Ontario. The PCs have been increasing spending by 2-3 times the rate of inflation over the last 5 years, plunging our Province into structural deficit, driving up inflation and labour shortages, and draining dry almost the entire $16 billion Sustainability Fund by the next election.
   
• Wildrose would maintain a universal public health system with competitive delivery so that each Albertan will have the choice to take their Alberta Health Insurance card to any public, private or non-profit provider they choose and receive the health care they need when they need it. The PCs have decided to centralize all health care administration into one central bureaucracy, prohibit any competition or patient choice, and pour billions more into a broken system, that Maclean’s magazine reported this month, has become one of the most expensive, ineffective and inaccessible health systems in the developed world.
   
• Wildrose would ensure landowners receive fair compensation with recourse to the courts when their land is expropriated by Government. The PCs, by passing Bill 36, have given Cabinet the power to extinguish any and all property rights without compensation or recourse to the courts – and now have the power to impose any land use plans they wish on any municipality without restraint.
   
• Wildrose believes neither Cabinet nor MLAs should set their own salaries behind closed doors and that any increases be limited to the rate of inflation. The PCs gave themselves a 34% raise behind closed doors immediately following an election.
   
• Wildrose believes that we should focus our oilsands policy on eliminating tailings ponds and accelerating land reclamation; the PCs want to grant $2 billion to Alberta’s largest corporations to pump CO2 into the ground.

I could give several more pages of examples; but I ask, which Party do you feel is extreme?