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Alberta Elections, Wildrose Party, Progressive Conservatives

I got da Wildrose blues



As blues singers might famously lament: Woke up this mornin’ sun didn’t shine was worried and moanin’ ‘bout this country o’ mine saw another election kept dat mean woman in was such bad selection, oh lawd, what a sin.
That pretty much summarizes my feelings about what happened in Alberta last night, where pollsters predicted that the Wildrose Party, a libertarian group devoted to small government and low taxes, had an excellent chance of ridding that province of the long-ruling Progressive Conservative Party (emphasis on Progressive) at the polls. Instead, Alberta’s voters gave Allison Redford, better known as ‘Premier Mom,’ another majority mandate to continue changing Canada’s last bastion of free and independent thought into yet another nanny state, much like the rest of Canada. As Mark Steyn recently wrote, “in the end, free societies get the government they deserve.” And it looks as though Alberta has gotten the government it deserves in rejecting Danielle Smith’s Wildrose libertarianism in favor of Allison Redford’s cradle-to-grave gulag. What’s so interesting about this election is that Redford was deemed to be running against Albertans, whom the rest of Canada had stereotyped as knuckle-dragging, homophobic planet-polluting rednecks.

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The pundits are having a field day backpedaling and stretching their imagination to explain this stunning upset. Many blame some Wildrose members’ inherent social conservatism for the loss, rationalizing the upset, as a reaction against some intemperate anti-gay and some pro-Christian sentiments. Others venture to opine that Ms Smith should have muzzled her caucus and forced them to keep their opinions to themselves. But libertarianism is one of the values that Wildrose brought to the table, namely the ability to say unpopular, even stupid things freely. Clearly, Alberta’s voters didn’t care for those values and chose instead the values of ever larger, ever more expensive government with ever more control over its people. Since Premier Ralph Klein retired from office in 2006, leaving Albertans a huge budget surplus, he’s been replaced by two big-government interventionists. The first was the hapless and incompetent Ed Stelmach, who managed to drive Alberta back into deficit and now Alison Redford, who seems less hapless and incompetent, but is also likely to be a lot more destructive in implementing her Progressive policies. Redford is a dyed-in-the-wool global warming believer who will in all likelihood bring in carbon tariffs, which will give her more money with which to buy votes and leave less in the pockets of Albertans in the process. She’s also promised to eliminate the ability of individuals to live by their conscience, so that doctors opposed to performing abortions will be forced to do so and marriage commissioners who, for religious reasons, do not want to perform same-sex marriages, will also be forced to do so. The Alberta elections were my last smidgeon of hope in one part of Canada that hadn’t been seduced by the politically correct toxin now infecting our nation. Last night’s election showed me I was wrong, which gives me the blues.


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Klaus Rohrich -- Bio and Archives

Klaus Rohrich is senior columnist for Canada Free Press. Klaus also writes topical articles for numerous magazines. He has a regular column on RetirementHomes and is currently working on his first book dealing with the toxicity of liberalism.  His work has been featured on the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, among others.  He lives and works in a small town outside of Toronto.

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