Nearing the halfway point in the Alberta election campaign, the strategies, tactics and messaging of the two parties confirmed what, in the early days, were just hints..The NDP perfected a way of dealing with media organizations they disdain for asking awkward questions, questions the NDP would prefer not to be asked and never to be answered. It is simplicity itself: don’t let media miscreants ask any questions at all..This is the NDP’s answer to the Western Standard. Why have they done this? Because of alleged, undefined, and unspecified “hate speech.” If, in reality, the Western Standard had published genuine hate speech it would have violated the Canadian criminal code. But, in fact, nothing of the sort has taken place..The accusation of hate speech is just NDP babble for “questions we don’t like.”.In Calgary the tactic was pioneered by Mayor Jyoti Gondek who walked away in cowardly silence from a perfectly fair question from Keean Bexte..The real model for refusing to answer or discuss was created by the American progressive left. Here the NDP simply copied the Democrats. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, for example, refused to entertain any questions regarding the number of grandchildren President Biden had. The correct number is seven. Answering the question, correctly or incorrectly, would draw attention to the status of a child of the president’s son, Hunter..Her name is Navy Jean Roberts, and she was born more than four years ago to Lunden Roberts and sired by Hunter. Every member of the mainstream media knows this. The ones who discuss it, such as The New York Post, get excluded from White House pressers..What the left and their media allies in both the US and Canada don’t get is not just that such procedures in a notional democracy are wrong, but they're stupid as well. That's one reason why the mainstream media is so widely distrusted. It is also why the independent, non-legacy media are doing so well in both places..Ignoring questions from a skeptical media source might be analogous to sins of omission; shutting down your opponents is clearly akin to a sin of commission. That's just what the NDP did May 11 with Premier Danielle Smith. NDP operatives, later disowned, shut down a UCP media event by posing such a physical threat to Smith that her security detail removed her from the venue..If such tactics remind knowledgeable Albertans of tactics employed by Bolsheviks a century or so ago, there may be good reason. On May 12, former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi tweeted: “Communists are almost certainly not running in your riding. They’ve only got a few candidates in the whole province.” He was probably trying to be funny..In any event, what he said was true. There are three candidates running under the red banner of the Communist Party of Alberta. One is a hearty proletarian man in Calgary, the other two are Edmonton white-collar women — or do we call them “knowledge workers?”.There are also a few members of the NDP whom V.I. Lenin would not hesitate to call “useful idiots.”.Consider first NDP candidate Red Rod Loyola, who was photographed marching with the commies in Redmonton. Literally, marching at the front of a Communist Party of Canada parade. This is the same deep thinker who said wearing the uniform of the Edmonton cops “gives you the right to beat up citizens and not have to face criminal charges.” What a guy!.Or there is Calgary NDP candidate Batten who retweeted and then removed a post honouring Aaron Swartz, another communist, this time an American..And then there's the strange case of Calgary Northeast NDP candidate Gurinder Brar, whose Facebook posts included quotes and images of the Great Helmsman himself, mass-murderer Mao Zedong. These were accompanied by a photoshopped image of “Santa Marx,” who promised to take kiddies’ toys away and redistribute them equally among the masses. As with Nenshi, this counts as progressive humour..None of these people have been criticized, let alone repudiated by Notley or the NDP. Why not?.More interestingly, there were a couple of new and major policy issues that appeared over the past week..Consider first education. The NDP promised to cut funding for independent schools and for charter schools. Neither gets any capital funding, nor do home schoolers. Independent schools get 70% of instructional funding compared to public and Catholic schools; charter schools, which must teach the Alberta curriculum, but operate independently of school boards, are also funded at 70%. Home education is funded at about 20% of public school funding..This may be chintzy to private and charter schools and to home schoolers, but it saves taxpayers money. A 2019 study put the amount at $150 million a year for independent schools and $90 million for home schooling..The only beneficiaries are the teachers’ unions. Not students. Not their parents. Not taxpayers. Notley’s alternative was to promise to hire more teachers. Having had to deal with the results of mostly public high school teaching at the U of C over the past generation, I can say with certainty high school education has precipitously declined during this period. What we don’t need are more public schools..The other beneficiaries, never to be ignored, are the bureaucrats in Edmonton who will increase their control over parents and students. You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that, if the NDP can defund independent and charter schools, they can surely deal with Catholic schools the same way..As for curriculum content, the NDP education critic, the redoubtable Sarah Hoffman, promised more woke rubbish, not reading, writing and arithmetic, things that are — you know — useful..A second significant policy difference concerned pension reform. The UCP said it was studying the possibility of exiting from the Canada Pension Plan, as Quebec has already done. The NDP dismissed the idea out of hand..Years ago, when I was with the Fraser Institute, we studied the question at length. It was unequivocally good policy for Albertans. The CPP today is just another tax, which means it's nothing but a way of transferring money from hard-working and productive Albertans to the rest of Canada, mainly to Laurentians and the inhabitants of the Atlantic provinces..The cost to Albertans between the lean years of 2008 and 2017 was nearly $28 billion. In terms of percentages, Albertans paid 16.5% of all contributions and received 10.8% of payments..A question: have the residents of any other province ever said “thank you?” Why not pay for our own pensions instead of subsidizing everybody else? And one immediate effect would be to lower the amount to individual contributions..The NDP replied by saying the UCP was planning on “stealing” Albertans’ pensions. They were once again either lying or projecting. When in office the NDP didn’t quite steal Albertans’ pensions, but they did appoint a gaggle of NDP pals and direct the formerly arms-length investment arm of the Alberta government employees, called the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, to throw money at goofy environmentalist projects the NDP favoured. The UCP, on resuming office, fired the incompetent “invertors” and restored their independence..In an earlier column, I argued what's at stake this election is the kind of future province we want to live in. The events of the past week or so underlined this same option.
