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In the 1960s and 70s, Pierre Eliot Trudeau won the hearts of many socially conservative Western Canadians by rejecting a new politics of haute-bourgeois male emotionalism. When an interviewer suggested that Trudeau was dismissive of the “deep personal need” of many Quebeckers to “exist as an independent cultural entity,” he agreed. “Go feel your own way. I’ll feel mine,” was his response to those who felt that their emotional experience should be a basis on which public policy was decided. Defending his War Measures Act, he famously responded, “well, there’s a lot of bleeding hearts out there. All I can say is ‘go on and bleed.’ It’s more important to keep public order than pander to the feelings of a bunch of weak-kneed people who are afraid of men with helmets and guns.”

Most importantly, when Trudeau was attacked by rock- and bottle-throwing demonstrators during the 1968 election campaign, he refused to be whisked to safety by security and chose, instead, to hold his ground and endure the risk of projectiles striking him. Some see this as what clinched the first majority government in four elections.

As I have written previously, one of the things that makes Francophone Quebecois leaders appealing to male Anglo voters is the very fact that they are associated with a more conventionally manly cultural accommodation with violence. Justin Trudeau’s public boxing match against Patrick Brazeau, Tom Mulcair’s physically threatening confrontation with Peter van Loan fit into a grand tradition, leading back through Jean Chretien’s chokeholds and beatings, of repressed Anglos cheering on violence in Francophone leaders that they would not tolerate in one of their own.

That’s why I was initially so surprised by Justin Trudeau’s sudden pivot, echoed in pre-rehearsed, stage-ready tweets and Facebook posts from campaign surrogates, to immediately assert that his continued feelings of bereavement surrounding his father’s death a decade and a half ago required some kind of disability accommodation by everyone else in Canada. Gerald Butts and other Liberal surrogates instantaneously reacted to Tom Mulcair’s assertion that the NDP’s multi-generation track record of standing up for Canadians’ liberty was demonstrated in their opposition to the War Measures Act in 1971. Apparently, this implied criticism of Trudeau’s dad was dirty pool and had hurt the prospective Prime Minister’s feelings. The recent emergence of medically invalid but nevertheless popular “trigger warnings” on US college campuses had, somehow, leapt across the border and now, fifteen of the past fifty years of Canadian politics were off-limits for fear of causing one rich white man to experience hurt feelings.

But I am no longer surprised. This bullshit is totally working. All kinds of random people, veterans struggling with amputations and PTSD, precariously employed minimum wage workers, racialized populations being stripped of their citizenship rights—these people, ordinary Canadians, are getting really concerned about how Mulcair was insufficiently considerate of Trudeau’s hurt feelings. How is it that the feelings of one attractive, privileged, successful, white adult male could become the object of so much sympathy that the entire narrative of the campaign changed in one day? How could Butts and the other Liberal strategists have calculated that so many Canadians whose easiest day is tougher than Trudeau’s hardest would have become so concerned about another national leader being inconsiderate of his feelings?

I think it comes from their superior understanding of the politics of expected safety and anticipated vulnerability, a politics about which I have already written, at some length, in my posts about Jian Ghomeshi, a politics that is arising from the modern inversion of a long-held patriarchal tradition.

If we understand patriarchal society to be a society dominated by older, wealthier men, we must recognize that the main threat faced by such societies is not the transition to gender-equal or matricentric societies but is, instead, the reversion to a social structure dominated by younger, violent men. Indeed, it is the threat of politically empowering young, violent men that makes patriarchal social order so secure; given a binary choice between rule by old, rich men and rule by young, violent men, most women would, very reasonably, choose the former.

For this reason, patriarchal societies must, by definition, seek to disempower and diminish younger, more violent men, in favour of empowering old, rich guys. Young men are encouraged in risk-seeking behaviour, conscripted into war, taught dangerous sports and passtimes, etc., yielding a young, male population perpetrating most of their violence on one another. In the first phases of the post-Enlightenment modern world, these aspects of patriarchal society were intensified through new social technologies like conscription, producing an enormous body-count but also, paradoxically, through the increasing empowerment and enfranchisement of young women in the world outside the home, transferring jobs like teaching and secretarial work from young men to young women.
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And this sort of thing has worked to keep our society’s basically patriarchal structure intact: the young men who survived the winnowing process of driving fast, shooting guns and drinking hard were accepted and promoted through what they understood to be an earned position as a major or minor patriarch. Older men, even if not rich, gained new forms of social power, acceptance and security having survived young adulthood and looked approvingly on institutions like conscription the way one does upon a hazing ritual through which one has passed.

But something has been changing in the past half-century, fifteen years of which we’re not to mention for fear of hurting Mr. Trudeau’s feelings. Today, while younger and more violent men remain disempowered in crucial ways, the character of this disempowerment has changed in some striking respects. Instead of our society thinking of young men’s teens and twenties as times to cull the herd, the opposite impulse has taken hold: the teens and twenties are such a dangerous time that privileged lineages want to make sure that their sons come to no harm whatsoever. Today’s young men must be warehoused in something akin to a state of suspended animation, lest even a minor harm come to their precious bodies and minds. And we see this from the outset, with the development of playgrounds on which no child should ever be able to fall onto anything hard.

When every iota of the Affordable Care Act that actually helps anyone get healthcare is stripped away, all that will be left of Barack Obama’s great reform will be that it makes the effective age of majority for middle- and upper middle-class people twenty-six instead of twenty-one. Of course, you should be on your parents’ health insurance at twenty-six like the dependent you are, working that unpaid internship or getting that graduate degree while you wait for the older men to age out of the job that is waiting for you.

Of course, not all young people are supposed to experience this perfect safety. In fact, most are not. Working class youth, young people of colour are having their age of majority chipped-away, with successive law reforms first permitting children to be tried as adults and then applying mandatory minimum sentences to them. Whether working legally or illicitly, remittance migrants face increasingly dangerous working conditions and fewer and fewer legal tools to address them. Girls and young women are also having their expectations of safety adjusted with constant reminders that the wrong decisions about their clothing, their etiquette, their recreation will place them directly in the path of inevitable sexual violence. And, even if one behaves just right, the risk of gender-based violence is presented as normative, a reality like the weather to which everyone must simply adapt. Privileged white boys, something Mr. Trudeau is still presented as being, are to expect perfect safety, to live in a world where no object, no person, no word, no emotion can interfere with their pristine state while this future elite is being warehoused. Just as we are taught to expect young black and aboriginal men to be in prison being raped and abused, just as we are taught to expect young women to be negotiating a dangerous and narrow path through omnipresent gender-based violence, we are taught to expect that, if our social order is functioning properly, nothing even slightly hurtful should ever happen to a rich, young white boy.

What we are seeing in Canadian politics right now is people responding with anxiety to the sense that the social order in which they make plans, form expectations and negotiate power is under threat, that if Mr. Mulcair does not know how to treat young Mr. Trudeau, how can he be trusted to maintain an ordered Canadian society, one with a place for everyone and everyone in his place? While it might be all very well for him to debate Mr. Trudeau, to engage in the dancing, parrying formalities of parliamentary debate, it is clearly off-limits for him to trigger his opponent, so to speak. Like sensitivity to depictions or descriptions of certain kinds of violence, bereavement has been transformed from a universal human experience to a permanent disability that everyone around a privileged young man must alter their speech and actions to accommodate, like the emotional equivalent of a nut allergy.

This belief in the perfect safety of the privileged, young, white man has become so natural, so normative, so much a part of our mental furniture that Canadians really did feel a sense of genuine sense of emotional outrage at that pivotal moment in the Munk foreign policy debate. And this group included people who would never experience the same outrage if the identical thing happened to them, because they, unlike Mr. Trudeau, are not understood to be deserving of perfect safety.

Next post, I will link this back to the rape culture posts with which this article is converging.

We, on the Canadian left, have to screw our heads back on when it comes to the interaction between the global financial system and the making of social democratic government budgets. We also have to screw our heads back on when it comes to the very real physical limits to industrial production and extraction. We need to talk sensibly and realistically about borrowing, economic growth and the legacy of liberal economist John Maynard Keynes.

And we have to hurry this up because, right now, we are carrying a bunch of water for Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper in their attempt to prevent the election of Canada’s first social democratic government. But don’t feel bad. As Antonio Gramsci says, this is just how hegemony feels.

Right now, the Liberal Party of Canada, whose main political asset these days is a kind of public discourse that David Axelrod has termed “the audacity of sheer audacity,” has decided to haul its last Prime Minster out of cold storage to say some outrageous bullshit. Apparently, Paul Martin, the finance minister who balanced the budget by declaring that shelter and food were no longer rights, stealing everybody’s Unemployment Insurance premiums and cutting federal participation in health care from 50 cents on the dollar to eight, has decided to lecture us on how deficit financing is the bee’s knees.

The NDP, Martin’s audacious tale goes, has lost its way, not in the usual ways, like letting petty personal jealousies paralyze a whole government and destroy a major national institution, or shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into friends’ shell companies and crime lords in the name of combatting separatism, but by suggesting that our nation should go back to balancing its books. Apparently, that’s only a principled thing to do if you’re Paul Martin; and Martin is pretty clear that he and Tom Mulcair are not the same guy.

Of course, there is some good timing from which the Liberals are benefiting. An old video has been found of Mulcair praising Margaret Thatcher, allowing some sort of threadbare case to be made that the NDP is now an extreme right party.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that criticizing the NDP during an election is the wrong thing to do. Until recently, I was on the supply side of this sort of thing. Just last year, I spoke out against Andrea Horwath referring to big business and members of the investor class as “job creators” on the front page of her platform. And, lest the party get too enthusiastic and lift the ban on me seeking a nomination, I could do that again.

But right now, I am going to offer a full-throated defense of Mulcair’s commitment to balance our national budget and, if necessary, slow the implementation of our spending program in order to do so. After all, the 1933 Regina Manifesto, the founding document of our political movement, promised a program of public health insurance yet, it took Canada’s first NDP government two decades to launch that program. That’s because not only does the Manifesto say:

With the advance of medical science the maintenance of a healthy population has become a function for which every civilized community should undertake responsibility. Health services should be made at least as freely available as are educational services today. But under a system which is still mainly one of private enterprise the costs of proper medical care, such as the wealthier members of society can easily afford, are at present prohibitive for great masses of the people. A properly organized system of public health services including medical and dental care, which would stress the prevention rather than the cure of illness should be extended to all our people in both rural and urban areas. This is an enterprise in which Dominion, Provincial and Municipal authorities, as well as the medical and dental professions can cooperate.

It also says:

An inevitable effect of the capitalist system is the debt creating character of public financing. All public debts have enormously increased, and the fixed interest charges paid thereon now amount to the largest single item of so-called uncontrollable public expenditures. The CCF proposes that in future no public financing shall be permitted which facilitates the perpetuation of the parasitic interest-receiving class; that capital shall be provided through the medium of the National Investment Board and free from perpetual interest charges.

My grandfather Harry V. Jerome, father of the more famous Harry Jerome, attended that convention representing the railway porters’ union; and you can see him in those photographs of the front rows of the convention hall. For my granddad, saving pennies in a jar was a way he understood himself to be modeling socialism for me, not the capitalism of easy credit, instalment plans, company store accounts and payday loans through which he had lived in the 1920s before the Crash.

As a man whose family had escaped North from Redemption in the American South, my granddad had deeper reasons for distrusting such instruments. The Great Migration, of which he was part, did not take place immediately after the American Civil War, when black Americans achieved freedom. Reconstruction, the era from 1865-1880 was a time in which a new economic order was in effect in the South. With federal troops from the North occupying the Confederacy, freedmen struck new deals with their former owners, deals based agreements around credit. Sharecropping, the system under which land was rented on credit that was paid back through cotton sales during the harvest was not, initially, unjust and was a system under which former slaves could and did make money.

But something changed in 1876: the federal troops went home and sharecropping began its inexorable descent into peonage. Debt and credit agreements between tenant and landlord tied black people back to the land in ways that remade most of the institution of slavery. Legislatures, courts, sheriffs and marshals that had once been friendly and sympathetic in their reading of these agreements became punitive, draconian and biased. The spirit in which those agreements were interpreted was no longer the spirit of the Radical Republicans and their occupying army but the spirit of the proto-fascist, paramilitary irregulars who ran the “Redeemed” governments of the South, known as the Klan.

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If you want to understand how the left has lost its way when it beats the drum for big deficits to finance big, generous programs, it is in this way: we have lost sight of the danger of making deals with powerful people when the arbiters of the meaning of those deals are against us.

The reason leftists should not borrow from private lenders and right-wing governments; the reason leftists should not issue bonds that are to be rated by Standard and Poors and the various other private bond-raters whom even Germany’s conservative chancellor Angela Merkel indicts for their market fundamentalism and extreme-right politics is so simple that it does not even rate as a question of economics. It is just plain stupid to make agreements with people who are against you, especially when the jury of appeal for the meaning of those agreements are people who are even more opposed to you. This is not an Economics 101 lesson; this is the lesson you learn when you play Monopoly with your older cousin at the age of eight.

I once had the good fortune to enjoy a nice beverage or nine with the former finance minister of a social democratic government and talk about her experiences of meeting bond-raters in New York after her government began work on launching a childcare program. The economists at the table informed her bluntly that their jurisdiction’s credit rating would suffer a punitive downgrade if such a program were launched. So she quickly pivoted to explaining how her government had crunched the numbers and how, once established, the macroeconomic effect of the program would actually increase government revenues and repayment rates in the medium term.

The bond-raters and bankers were completely uninterested. Had she not heard them? They didn’t like socialist governments launching new entitlement programs. So why was she continuing to talk? These lenders and raters were financially secure, representing America’s “too big to fail” club on the eve of the second Bush presidency. This was not a conversation about what was profitable. This was not a conversation about what made economic sense. This was a conversation about what kind of society should exist, what kind of values people should live by. This was a conversation about ideology, not an essay in bean-counting.

Now, had this finance minister been a liberal and not a socialist, if her long-term romantic relationships were with Fortune 500 CEOs and not trade union leaders, if their kids were in the same college or prep school classes as the arbiters on the other side of the table, maybe things would have gone differently. Because even when social democrats manage to perform like Tony Blair or Mike Harcourt and mouth the correct words about sharing the values of the global capitalist class, questions of class, culture and lineage provide the structuring substratum for the conversation. A member of a multigenerational liberal lineage, representing a venerable liberal party can be understood as trustworthy in ways that a socialist doing downmarket right-wing populism is viewed with as much credibility as any other sort of apostate braggart, inevitably requiring concessions and abasement on the grand scale.

The delusional belief, on the part of the alleged left of social democratic parties, especially in Canada and the UK, that bond-raters, bankers and the investor class work to maximize profits and will choose good business over spite shows the extent of capitalist ideological hegemony. If you think those guys are honest brokers, the Kool-Aid Man is about to burst through your duodenal wall. There can be no more convincing sign of just how far up capitalism’s ass we have stuck out own heads than the members of various left fronts and socialist caucuses ranting about how, because Keynesian economics works, Standard and Poors will see what a good business case there is for borrowing to recreate a national housing program and will totally not bring down the hammer on the Canadian economy.

Even as we watch the global investor class destroy the Greek economy and, hence, any chance of getting paid their money back and, any chance of a healthy enough Greek economy for their other private investments to pan out, entirely out of spite, as some effort to make a global example of Greece, we cling to the outrageous proposition that those who hold the levers in present-day global capitalism are fair and dispassionate brokers who will happily facilitate the creation of a national energy program administered by an avowedly socialist party. And it is not like we need to look as far away as Greece. The efforts to destroy Ontario’s NDP government under Bob Rae, the capital strikes, the credit rating downgrades, the punitive FTA lawsuit against public auto insurance: we lived through those things just one generation ago.

Those who oppose socialism remind us all the time that “socialism never works,” by which they mean, “we will prevent socialism from working, through a program of interest rate hikes, capital strikes, media denunciations and dirty tricks.”

Now, some people will argue that it is really quite unfair that global financial elites are so mean and arbitrary and are willing to forego billions of dollars in potential profits and interest payments just to prevent social democratic parties from gaining too much power or legitimacy. I agree. Here’s my plan for what to do when somebody is planning to do something really unfair: come up with a scheme to stop or mitigate the effects of them doing it. But what I keep hearing from all kinds of alleged leftists is that the correct plan should be to pretend that the unfair thing isn’t going to happen and then act surprised and outraged when it does.

It’s almost as though those people don’t want the responsibility of taking power at the national level. Or something.

In my new role of NDP moderate and regime apologist, I have to say that I am baffled by the sudden vociferousness of people marking the Tom Mulcair​ leadership as the moment the NDP abandoned socialism and joined the Third Way. The reality is that, depending on which province you live in, this event took place some time between 1989 and 1997.

The NDP joined the global capitulation of social democratic parties that culminated in the election of Tony Blair’s New Labour earlier than most SDPs did. In many ways, Mike Harcourt and Roy Romanow could be credited as the true founders of the Third Way; and Audrey McLaughlin can be seen as the first national NDP leader to focus more on limiting rather than building the power of Canada’s federal government to build a fair and equitable nation.

The reality is that whereas Jack Layton’s left turn ended in the middle of the 2004 federal election campaign, the party under Mulcair unflinchingly marks the high water mark for advocating old-style social democratic programs and policies. While I do not agree with all of them, like the Energy East endorsement, for instance, it is undeniable that Mulcair’s party is offering the most comprehensive social democratic national vision the NDP has offered Canadians since the 1988 election.

So, why all the whinging now?

I would suggest that current whining about the NDP abandoning socialism for neoliberalism comes from very problematic places and helps to reveal what has sustained the New Democrats, as a party, in the generation since the Cold War ended and global financial elites no longer needed to tolerate the existence of NATO-member welfare states as a bulwark against the Soviet Empire.

The New Democratic Party survived from 1989-2011 based on lineage and culture. Those connected to the party remained connected to it through family ties, union ties and ties to the non-profit QuaNGO sector that expanded vastly under Third Way ideology. In provinces where, to privatize services, shrink the state and deregulate and depress wages, Third Way governments delivered new programs or transferred delivery of old programs to state-patronized non-profits, the NDP-aligned institutional sector grew, as did the loyalty of those in the caring professions to the party. Family and extended family lineages, reinforced for a minority through access to trade union seniority or QuaNGO jobs, held onto their loyalty to the NDP not just through nostalgia, social memory and the making of a shared past but through governmental and trade union financial patronage.
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Relatedly, the party survived, especially in the West, through the cooptation of the right-wing populism practiced by Margaret Thatcher, Richard Nixon and George Wallace, one that blames some element of the working class for the ills suffered by the rest of the working class. For the Third Way governments in BC and Saskatchewan, this group was welfare recipients. Draconian laws were enacted throughout Western Canada, cracking down on “welfare cheats and deadbeats,” and there was little difference between those of Tory Ralph Klein in Alberta and those of New Democrats Mike Harcourt and Roy Romanow. In this way, working class people distant from union, QuaNGO and other party-aligned patronage networks were offered a watered-down right-wing populism that lacked the financially suicidal character of its genuinely conservative competitors.

So, why is it that a minority of long-time NDP supporters and activists are so upset that Tom Mulcair, like most NDP leaders in most elections since the early 80s, is refusing to say he will raise taxes on individuals? Why are people so upset with Mulcair’s anemic climate justice platform, when the BC NDP ran for re-election in 1996 and 2001 trumpeting a five-fold increase in hydrocarbon extraction in the province’s northeast? Why are people so unimpressed with the most robust national energy, childcare and housing policies the party has offered since Audrey McLaughlin stepped down in 1994?

Perhaps it is because, for what remains of the long-term NDP base, our most left-wing leader in a generation is not “one of us.” If what makes you a New Democrat, increasingly, has come to mean your descent from an old NDP lineage, your association with a QuaNGO or trade union patronage system, your access to a union job or your belief that the NDP will crack down on the indigenous and/or chronically unemployed Canadian underclass on your behalf, then Tom Mulcair and his crew are not New Democrats.

They don’t even act like New Democrats. No double-speak and cheap shots against indigenous people, no demonization of the chronically unemployed, no signals that the new regime will be run by the multigenerational party lineages with names like Notley and Woodsworth, no sign, even, that the career courtiers, like Brian Topp, and their hangers-on are part of this new crew. Not to mention the suspicion of Catholics, francophones and Quebeckers endemic in any Canadian party with Western roots.

Most troublingly, by standing for the kind of activist federal state that Svend Robinson stood up for when his party foolishly endorsed the Meech Lake Accord, the Mulcair leadership is offering an implied criticism of those who never questioned or spoke out against the ugly expediencies and terrible betrayals of the 90s and 00s. What, he is effectively asking, if being a New Democrat lives not in patronage, lineage or culture; what if it really does live in policy and principles? If that is the case, many of those expressing first-time qualms with the party after a generation of betrayal and capitulation, may actually be turning against Mulcair because, just by running on an old school 1980s social democratic platform, he is implicitly suggesting that maybe it is they who are not the real New Democrats?

I am a conservative. My political allies are conservative. But we don’t know we are. And so we make mistakes. Lots of mistakes.

By “conservative” I mean that my politics are centred on a nostalgic defense of an irreversibly collapsing social order that was already in decline when I came of age politically. I believe in twentieth-century Cold War welfare states with universal social programs, large middle classes and a commitment to social equality.

We New Democrats are the only true conservatives in Canada, cowardly, nostalgic and willfully blind. Often too frightened to open our eyes and see that not only is the old, industrial, unionized, universalist Canada collapsing, the material and political conditions that enabled it to exist in the first place are no more. Welfare states were creatures of the Cold War, polities whose social contract was necessitated by the Communist Threat. It was necessary for global capital to make a lie of communists’ claim that capitalism magnified inequality, impoverishing, brutalizing and marginalizing the majority, rendering them less secure, physically, materially and socially.

That need has passed. There is no global order challenging capitalism and so its expensive advertising campaign trumpeting its socially just, redistributive nature can be dismantled, either slowly, by Third Way parties or quickly by neoconservative parties.

We true conservatives, as distinct from the radical, triumphant social movements and parties of the far right who have taken on the name “conservative” as a means of obfuscating their agenda of radical social change, know what our job is: slow the dismantling of the welfare state and mitigate the excesses of the market to the extent that the investor class, financial institutions and bond raters permit.

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Because the Consortium is part of the institutional framework of the Canadian welfare state, we naturally assume that this body exists to safeguard the public trust and maintain our democratic institutions. It does not. The Consortium is just the three Cold War-era Canadian TV networks, two of which are private, for-profit corporations, and the third, the beleaguered CBC, dying of a thousand cuts, its board stacked with Harper appointees.

In other democracies, debates are run by organs of the state, charged with fair and equal election coverage, based on transparent values encoded in law and regulations. If Canada truly had a system of fair election debates based on our democratic values, such debates would be administered by the Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) or Elections Canada. But that is not the Canadian way. Big communications companies run our election debates based on the needs of their shareholders, not of Canadian voters.

If Canadians on the left really are to snap out of our conservatism and stand for something other than things getting worse slower, these debates are as good a place as any to do so. Instead of defending the Consortium controlled by Bell-Globe and Shaw-Global, the media giants who endorsed Jim Prentice’s re-election bid, let us call, instead of an end to leaders’ debates where big money calls the shots; let’s call for debates under the aegis of Elections Canada’s Elections Advisory Committee or a new committee of the CRTC. Let’s talk not just about defending the older, gentler plutocracy of the Canadian state; let’s call for something better than a corrupt, broken Cold War theory of electoral fairness.

In recent months, New Democrats have begun to shake off our conservatism with our commitment to bold and novel social reforms and new programs like the national child care plan. Let’s keep that up and use our position as the official opposition to set out competing terms to Mr. Harper’s for a national leaders’ debate, rather than simply defend a broken status quo.

On its own, the sudden election of the NDP a majority provincial government in Alberta, vaulting from 10% of the popular vote to 41% and four seats to fifty-three is a story with national implications. It goes without saying that this election will have a profound effect on Canadian politics and is likely to have major realigning effects on our federal party system and on federal policy issues.

Usually, I sound a note of caution in response to claims of major national political realignment in response to a single election result. But this time, I am doing the opposite. I want to suggest that the impact of the NDP’s sweeping provincial victory on national politics, and, in particular, on the coming federal election may actually be greater than pundits anticipate.

And that is because of a phenomenon that a Twitter commentator noted when trying to explain the continuation of the NDP surge through the final week of the campaign: “Albertans don’t vote. They stampede.”

Many observers may not yet have noticed a distinctive property of Alberta voters: since entering Confederation as a province in 1905, the province’s parliamentary delegation to Ottawa has been defined by the sitting provincial government. Residents of other provinces unfamiliar with Alberta electoral history might think that I am making an overstatement when I say that the single most important factor in determining what party Alberta voters send to represent them in parliament, over more than a century of elections, are the preferences and alignment of their provincial government. So, for the next few paragraphs, I am going to drown you in statistics.

From 1905 until 1921, Alberta was governed by the Liberal Party. And in the 1908 and 1911 elections, over 50% of Albertans voted Liberal and Liberal MPs won 67% and 75%, respectively, of the province’s federal ridings. But, in 1917, the wartime national unity government of Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden won a strong majority, as it did throughout English Canada. Then, in 1921, the province was swept by the United Farmers of Alberta, a party strongly associated with the national Progressive Party. The UFA held office until 1935. Continuing the trend of the Liberal era, Progressive/UFA candidates were the majority of the delegations Alberta sent to Ottawa in every election: 1921, 1925, 1926 and 1930.

In 1935, provincial voters swept the United Farmers from office and replaced them with Social Credit. And axiomatically, beginning in the 1935 federal election, Albertans sent Social Credit majorities to Ottawa in every election for a generation: 1935, 1940, 1945, 1949, 1953 and 1957. This changed in 1958. The populism of Conservative leader John Diefenbaker captured the imagination of English Canada and permanently changed the character of the Progressive Conservative Party. While Social Credit did recover and become Alberta’s second-largest federal party in the 1962, 1963 and 1965 elections, capturing between 23% and 29% in each, the divided loyalties of Alberta voters reflected the divided loyalties of the Social Credit government, many of whom were more sympathetic with the federal Tories than with the increasingly crankish and anti-Semitic federal Socreds.
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In 1971, Albertans threw out Social Credit and elected the Progressive Conservative dynasty that was defeated just tonight. And, in lockstep with their new provincial government, Alberta voters began delivering crushing victories to the PCs federally for a generation. Indeed, the 1972, 1974, 1979, 1984 and 1988 delegations Albertans sent to Ottawa were unanimously Conservative.

This one-party hegemony at the federal level came to an end in 1993 not because Alberta voters began to diverge from their provincial government but because, as in 1958, that government came to be divided between Progressive Conservative loyalists and Reform Party sympathizers, the latter group quickly becoming the majority. As the Reform Party grew and changed at the national level to incorporate former Progressive Conservatives, first as the Canadian Alliance and then as the Conservative Party, it continued to enjoy the confidence both of the Alberta provincial government and Alberta voters who delivered overwhelming majorities of the province’s seats to these parties and, beginning in 2004, to the reconstituted Conservative Party of Canada, which won over 60% of the vote and over 90% of the seats in the province in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2011.

Which brings us to the present.

What will be keeping Stephen Harper up tonight is this question: will Alberta voters do what they have done every other time they have defeated a provincial governing party and granted a sweeping majority to a new political formation in the past 100 years? Will the new government of Alberta be given what Alberta voters always give their provincial government: a massive delegation of MPs to back them up in Ottawa and send the whole country the message that Alberta has changed?

Let’s hope that, while much can change in Alberta, some political traditions remain strong for the province’s next century in Confederation. Because if this realigning election in Alberta is anything like the province’s other three, 1921, 1935 and 1971, Edmonton-Strathcona MP Linda Duncan will have at least seventeen new Alberta NDP MPs joining her in Ottawa this fall.