Good News from the North

I’m going to ask you to try something difficult.

Imagine that the state of Texas held elections for governor and state legislature, and that – as a result of those elections – the Republican Party not only lost the governor’s mansion and the statehouse, but finished third.

Imagine, further, that the winning party was not the Democrats, but a fourth party which had never before tasted power in that state – a party with environmental and social policies well to the left of the Democrats’ positions.

Imagine, finally, that the newly-elected governor of Texas was a petite, blonde lawyer from a hipster neighborhood of, say, Austin.

Impossible, right?  Such a thing could never happen in America.

But it could happen in Canada.

On May 5, the citizens of Alberta elected a commanding majority of 53 New Democrats to their provincial legislature – considerably better than their present four members.

As a result, Rachel Notley, a 51-year-old labor lawyer and advocate for special-needs children, will be Alberta’s first left-of-center prime minister in a half-century.

Ms. Notley – everyone calls her “Rachel” – will command a 60% legislative majority, which includes a 20-year-old Thomas Dang, a computer science major at the University of Alberta.
  

The pro-business Progressive Conservatives – who have dominated Alberta for all those decades – were reduced to a small minority.  The official party of opposition will be the Wildrose Party – this is Canada, eh? – a coalition of libertarians and social conservatives.

I mention all this here for several reasons. 

First, it’s unlikely that many Americans will be aware of this sea-change.  Our polarized national media – obsessed with our own surplus of obscure presidential candidates, Baltimore, and Tom Brady’s somewhat deflated reputation – managed to cover Britain’s recent elections – but I didn’t hear a peep about Alberta.

Not even on NPR – which is rapidly losing any resemblance to a serious news network. 

Indeed, were it not for Facebook, I might still be living in ignorance of the most remarkable political story in some time.

My second reason for is the sheer, stunning unexpectedness of the event.

Keep in mind the challenge I set forth at the beginning of this piece.  Alberta isn’t Texas, but it’s as the closest thing Canada has to Texas – a Prairie province which is home to the environmental Hell-on-earth known as the Alberta tar sands. 

Alberta, in other words, is the source of the horrid gunk which promoters want to push through the Keystone XL pipeline – if that absurd boondoggle is ever built – and, when the inevitable ruptures occur, into the streams and groundwater of the American Plains.

Yet the people of Alberta – apparently indifferent to the economic power of the oil industry – have voted out that industry’s partisan defenders and elected a new leader who felt compelled, in her first day, to reassure Big Oil that her party isn’t out to destroy them.

Just tax them, and regulate them.  And take a long, hard look at new pipeline projects.

Beyond this, I’m not at all sure what to say.  I used to know a little about Canadian politics, but – during the Harper years – I lost interest.  For some time now, Canada has seemed to be drifting in the direction of American politics – and I wouldn’t wish our present political system on anyone.

Perhaps it’s time I got a new subscription to Maclean’s, Canada’s leading news magazine.  I get the feeling Rachel Notley and her party are going to be making news for some time to come – especially if they forge an alliance with British Columbia, which has the greenest regional government in North America.

There are battles to be fought, and – having lived my whole life in Virginia – it’s not easy to be optimistic.  Sometimes, it’s good to be reminded that there are places – not that far away – where English-speaking people enjoy a political system which isn’t entirely run by corporate money.

Perhaps, someday, we Americans will take our own country back – though not, I suspect, until we develop some new political parties of our own.

For the moment, though, I’m happy for the good people of Alberta.  I wish them well.

A hundred years from now, if we humans don’t prove entirely self-destructive, the widespread use of fossil fuels will be as unthinkable as human slavery.  

We’ll be using advanced technologies to get most of our power from the ultimate source of all energy on this planet – the Sun – with assistance from conservation and other renewable sources.

And some countries – the ones which have taken the lead in the great conversion from fossil fuels to sustainable energy – will be the economic leaders of the planet.

At present, the United States is still positioned to become first among those leaders, but neither American political party has offered a plan for making that happen.

Canada might now be poised to outstrip us.  If the good folks north of the border can shake off the political dominance of Big Oil – as has apparently happened in Alberta – powerful resources are in place to make our neighbors the New World’s leader in New Energy.

Too bad we're not yet prepared to join them.