Election fever is a type of infectious excitement, a once-in-four-years acceleration of our political thoughts and instincts. Election campaigns reignite our political selves: our awareness that citizenship is not just about wants and needs but carries a heavy burden of responsibility. We must elect those who will govern us. We must do so responsibly. We have to get it right!
Ever since the current Alberta election campaign began, whenever I turn on my computer, the machine actually groans from the size of the incoming message barrage. Hardly a morning goes by when I don’t feel cornered.
“Are you a man or a mouse? Are you going to continue to take abuse from these federal government bullies? You should be enraged to pay for your carbon use. You should refuse to accept carbon rebates as if they were gifts. Carbon is our lifeblood, our right. Oh, and federal income tax. There’s another atrocity!”
This is a lot to bear before you’ve had your first coffee.
Before the run-up to this campaign, I thought I lived in a reasonably peaceful nation. Attractive too! International polls regularly find that Canada is one of the most desired and envied countries in the world. Polls of lifestyle, security—same thing. Canada is at or near the top. Debt-to-GDP? One of the best ratios in the industrialized world.
But my email and my Fritter (the collective noun for Facebook–Twitter) say it’s all untrue. Such opinions of Canada are foolish and based on incorrect perceptions and data, on federal propaganda that never mentions the oppressions visited upon Canada’s provinces by Ottawa.
So what is it that the world doesn’t know? I need to be told, so I can cast my vote in an informed, conscientious way. I want to be a good citizen, after all.
It turns out I’m blinded by misconceptions, but none so insidious as federal insistence that I must have medicare. Free doctor visits, free tests, free surgeries and so on might look—to the naïve—like a good thing. But have we properly considered how these freebees dampen provincial entrepreneurism? How they prevent provincial governments from exercising their organizational genius?
And what about the proposal to start a provincial police force, when most of us want to keep the RCMP?
Recently Alberta’s UCP government came up with a scheme to have more surgeries done in private facilities. Deal with that terrible backlog of knee and hip replacements that built up during the pandemic. Sounds great. But hold on, if we’re dealing with extreme staff shortages in Alberta’s public healthcare system, and then a bunch of doctors and nurses go work in the private system, doesn’t that increase the staff shortage in the public system? Wouldn’t fewer surgeries get done in the public system?
“Who said that?”
United Nurses of Alberta.
“Leave that for the moment, then, and look at the way the federal government interfered in the fight against COVID. Those international pollsters who think Canada’s so nice? They clearly don’t know how Ottawa knelt on our necks while thugs in PPE rammed hypodermic needles full of untested sera into our arms and legs. Or how, under federal pressure, we were forced to insert heavy plastic shields between meatpacking employees, causing untold separation anxiety. Then consider how they forced us to wear three-ply masks that hid our beauty and scared our children! And what of religious preferences for an uncovered visage? And then there was their interference with our ability to source horse-deworming paste, a well-known COVID destroyer. The tyranny of it—galling!”
But weren’t the Canadian approaches to COVID the same ones used all over the world…? Didn’t Canada’s approach result in one of the lowest COVID death rates? Didn’t that heighten Canada’s stature yet again?
“This guy’s deluded. I’m beginning to think he’s a federally paid propagandist or socialist stooge. In any case, he should be blacklisted so no one accidentally employs him.”
I admit it. I cherish our medicare system. Tens of millions of US citizens, crushed by the cost of private care and insurance, desperately wish to have our medicare system.
“This guy! His Fritter account should be @nincompoop. Better still, call Elon. Have him removed.”
Besides, this is a provincial election, not a federal one. Why aren’t we talking about the UCP’s proposal to take Albertans out of the federal CPP system and put our life savings in some smaller, less experienced provincial pension scheme? And what about the proposal to start a provincial police force, when most of us want to keep the RCMP?
“Clearly we’re dealing here with a socialist federal government troll. His computer should be seized and destroyed. He should be muzzled. He should be sent for conversion therapy to rid him of liberal and communist tendencies. Next thing he’ll be demeaning the convoy. And that’s something we cannot stand for!”
Fred Stenson’s novels include Who By Fire, The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.
____________________________________________
