Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

I am not a born-and-raised Albertan, but my family and I have lived in Edmonton now for the better part of 7 years – through COVID, through Jason Kenney, and experiencing the time of wildfires – from Fort MacMurray to 2023.  I came from Treaty 1 territory in what we now know as southwestern Manitoba. Brandon, my hometown, is much like the smaller towns of Alberta – the “not-Edmonton-and-Calgary” part of the Alberta population. I grew up in the heart of conservatism. Economic well-being, fundamentalist Christian / evangelical values, and a slightly stand-offish attitude to immigrants and our indigenous landlords.

But being here in Alberta during an election is frustrating because no one is talking about the elephants in the room: not the NDP, and certainly not the UCP. When the smoke coming from the central and northern Alberta fires filled the skies over both Edmonton and Calgary, no one dared to say that perhaps the burning of our world was indeed from our own behaviour. The way we consume and produce energy in Alberta is absurd. That is one elephant in the room. 

The other elephant in the room is that Albertans don’t seem to vote on values – they vote because they are tax-averse. Albertans seem to haaaaaate taxes.

Instead of addressing these elephants in the room during this election, the UCP and the NDP have talked about the symptoms of our real problems – the elephants – instead of addressing absurd energy usage and the constitutive role of taxes. You may recognize some of these symptoms: inflationary cost of living increases, and underfunded medical and education systems.

But Albertans are failing to talk about the elephants in the room – and it doesn’t take any imagination to connect the cost of living and the failing of the public sector to the hatred of taxes and to absurd energy usage. In both cases, Albertans feel entitled to their resource-fuelled wealth, which they have enjoyed since, like, forever. 

And this is why the current election matters: the UCP (not only led by Danielle Smith) but as a core component of the federal Conservative Party feel really entitled! Since they hate taxes, and underfund both the health and education systems of Alberta which constitute our collective well-being. So the conservative values I grew up with – the collective responsibility, which requires something of me as a citizen, is just absent from the UCP.

An example: our hospital system is in crisis because it has been drastically underfunded. We hear about it constantly, and I have seen it with my own eyes. No beds were available for my daughter when she had pneumonia, and people dying in the emergency waiting room – hospital closures. This came with the first UCP budget, and they are promising to go toward privately delivered, publicly funded options – and they are reducing the public funding.

At least the NDP holds some real conservative values. They believe in investing in the services and programs that constitute our collective well-being as Albertans. The NDP at least gets us closer to addressing the elephants in the room.

The UCP will keep ignoring the elephants in the room. They are entitled, selfish, and don’t really give a damn about Alberta, or Albertans. The smoke is out of sight because it rained, but we better understand that it is going to come back worse.