Monday is a once-in-a-lifetime election in Alberta - literally. You'd have to be 63 to be old enough to have voted in the last Alberta election that the PCs didn't win.
In this space I have made the case for the conservative alternative to the PCs, an upstart party called the Wildrose, led by a bright, 41-year-old woman named Danielle Smith. My second choice would be Alberta's NDP because they, too, are criticizing the PCs for overspending. That's how far left the PCs have drifted.
But in the name of balance, let me play devil's advocate. Let me make my best case for Alison Redford, the premier and PC leader. Here goes:
I believe that Alison Redford deserves to be Alberta's premier and leading citizen.
I believe that when she left Canada, and applied for citizenship in South Africa, it was just a moment of disorientation, and she really, truly believes Alberta is the best place in the world, and she's running for premier because she loves it, not just because the South African government rejected her application to become a citizen there.Alberta is her second choice. But I'm sure whatever South Africa offered her has been forgotten, like an old flame.
I believe Redford's slogan - "real life leadership" is exactly right. Because nothing says "real life" like her work as a jet-setting lawyer and bureaucrat for the United Nations.
I believe that Redford's clear promise to scrap the censorship provision of the province's human rights act has just slipped her mind. I don't believe her promise to restore free speech - made to me on my Sun News TV show - was just a cheap trick to get my endorsement, which it did.
As the author of the book Ethical Oil, I am excited about Alison Redford's promise to support energy companies. The fact that she flew to Toronto to give a keynote speech about how awesome wind turbines and solar panels are shows she's futuristic, not out of touch with the province's core industry. And the fact that her TV ad about the oil patch had pictures of a Chinese offshore oil rig, instead of the Alberta oilsands, was surely a typo - not a sign of her cluelessness about the industry.
She is very futuristic. Like her campaign ads that boasted her party isn't "your father's PC party." To prove the point, she denounced former PC premier Ralph Klein's fiscal policies.
No, it's not your father's PC party. But maybe it's your grandfather's party. Redford wheeled out 83-year-old ex-premier Peter Lougheed and 77-year-old ex-premier Don Getty for their endorsements.
I agree with Redford that voting for untested candidates in the Wildrose party is risky. On the other hand, the fact that the PCs are running 40 candidates who have never been MLAs before isn't a sign of their inexperience. It's a sign of their freshness. Like reheating leftovers for 41 years in a row.
Like Redford, and her Toronto-based campaign strategists, I am positively terrified of Danielle Smith and what she might do to, uh, women. Or gays.
Like Redford, I am pretending her PC party itself isn't full of anti-gay, anti-abortion social conservatives, including Redford's token conservative, Ted Morton.
When Morton wrote in the National Post in 2003 that he would invoke the charter's notwithstanding clause to oppose gay marriage, I'm sure he was just talking that way to smoke out anti-gay bigots. I'm sure he didn't mean it.
I like that Redford won the important endorsement of the Toronto Globe and Mail. That will turn some heads in places like Beiseker and Drayton Valley.
I'm joking. I like Alison Redford for one reason only - and it's the same reason I like Kim Campbell. She is the undertaker who will finally inter the PC party that should have been fired years ago.
http://www.sunnewsnetwork.ca/sunnews/straighttalk/archives/2012/04/20120422-120558.html
