United Conservative Party

• And the environment appears to be getting increasingly hostile, with the common ground between progressives and conservatives shrinking election by election.
• After four decades of Progressive Conservative governments, Albertans appeared to swerve left in 2015 by electing the New Democrats led by Rachel Notley.

Return of the Conservatives

• The status quo appeared to return, however, when Jason Kenney’s new United Conservative Party (UCP) took back control of the provincial government in 2019.
• Under new leader Danielle Smith, the UCP retained power with a narrow majority, losing most of their seats in Calgary while tallying massive victories in rural areas.
• Ongoing Common Ground research conducted by our University of Alberta research team suggests: in some ways, yes.
• Regardless of their own political leanings, most Albertans see their community as overwhelmingly conservative and resistant to change.

Albertans more united than it appears

• This is true in both urban and rural areas, as Albertans are more united than meets the eye.
• A full 40 per cent of Albertans believe government should be spending more on social programs, while only one in 10 think the province should be spending less.
• Results from the same survey show that many Albertans simply don’t view their broader community in the same progressive terms.
• This sort of factionalism breeds instability, as witnessed in countries like the United Kingdom via Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement in the United States.

Talking to Albertans

• Over the past four years, we’ve been impressed at the level of civility and moderation displayed by everyday Albertans.
• There’s more that unites Albertans than election results and political rhetoric suggests.

• He argued in a celebrated essay that even the prosperous, post-Second World War United States was not immune to the radicalism of authoritarian populism.
• The so-called Red Scare of the 1950s was “simply the old ultra-conservatism and the old isolationism heightened by the extraordinary pressures of the contemporary world.” Seven decades later, Hofstadter’s words ring true again.

Paranoid politics

• With so much money and power behind it, this paranoid style of politics — with its enemies lists, demonization of opposition leaders and often violent language — has gone mainstream.
• But is there anything to fear from the red-hot rhetoric of the paranoid style of politics?
• In Hofstadter’s time, after all, American conservative politics turned away from fringe radicalism following the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963.
• The following year, Lyndon Johnson defeated right-wing Republican insurgent, Barry Goldwater in one of the largest landslides in U.S. history.

1. The shrinking middle ground

• We are now in a world of zero-sum political contests, with a shrinking middle ground.
• Conservative parties often force extreme referendums to maintain their grip on a deeply divided electorate.
• Republicans are now doubling down on the abortion issue, even though they’re facing pushback from some state legislatures and governors.

2. The working class isn’t benefiting

• Nevertheless, conservative parties around the world are marketing themselves as parties of the working class.
• Populists recognize the working class is essential to their success at the national level because of the “diploma divide” that now separates right and left.
• It used to be that working people recognized education as a path to prosperity.

3. The rich and powerful direct the chaos

• In a war of all against all, it’s not the wealthy who lose.
• Furthermore, once a lust for vengeance takes hold in the general public, it’s almost always being directed by elites with money and power who benefit financially or politically from the chaos.

4. Assaults on the rule of law

• The paranoid style of politics has entered a new phase with a full-spectrum assault on the rule of law — from inside government.
• Populists are lying when they argue they want to empower the rest of us by divesting judges of their authority to oversee democracy.
• As he runs again for president, he’s already telegraphing his violent desires, promising pardons for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

The road ahead for populists

• The defeats of Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro don’t represent absolute rejections of their movements.
• Despite an indictment for alleged financial crime and being found liable for sexual abuse in a civil case, Trump is still the 2024 front-runner.
• Read more:
  Why populism has an enduring and ominous appeal

  We can’t count on an easy institutional fix, like a grand electoral coalition to push the populists off the ballot.

Red lights flashing

• Nor can we count on the right to step back from the abyss of culture wars.
• We can’t even say for certain that the populism will recede in the usual cyclical manner.
• All citizens can do is offer is constant, concerted pushback against the many big lies told by populists.

• In Alberta, the United Conservative Party (UCP) government’s actions over the past four years have made it clear: the ongoing provincial election campaign is far from typical.
• Throughout its time in office, the UCP has shown disregard for the separation of powers and the rule of law.
• It’s about whether Albertans want to place their trust in democratic institutions or continue to erode the safeguards that protect us from arbitrary abuses of power.

Sweeping powers

• In the opening months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UCP handed sweeping legislative powers to the health minister, removing the ability of members of the legislature to review changes to laws and regulations.
• These patronage appointments were meant to centralize control within the UCP government over health care, post-secondary education and other sectors.
• The original version would have stolen powers from the federal government, the Alberta legislature and the courts and granted them to the premier.

A series of misdeeds

More fundamentally, the UCP has demonstrated a passing fancy for the rule of law. Since coming to power four years ago, there have been several examples:
• The sheer volume of misdeeds is shocking and Albertans shouldn’t be lulled into thinking that it’s politics as usual.
• Just because many of these episodes happened in plain sight, in front of cameras and microphones, that doesn’t make them any less egregious.

Consolidation of power

• It’s about consolidating power into the hands of the Premier’s Office by taking over mechanisms of oversight and control, removing checks and balances altogether and pretending that the rules do not apply to the UCP and its followers.
• This is a feature of UCP, not a bug.
• People contemplating casting their ballot for the UCP should understand precisely what that means.
• That’s what democracy requires of us from time to time.

• "Forgive me for quoting Jason Kenney here, but he's right, Danielle Smith's sovereignty legislation is ' catastrophically stupid '," said Unifor National President Lana Payne.
• "Bill 1 is undemocratic, far-reaching and a permanent power grab."
• Smith's Bill 1: Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act , consolidates unprecedented power in the hands of cabinet and removes several democratic safeguards and power-checks from both the legislature and the public.
• Unifor is Canada's largest union in the private sector, representing 315,000 workers in every major area of the economy.