Conclusion

Bucking Conservatism, Then and Now

Karissa Robyn Patton and Mack Penner

When Leon, Larry, and Karissa first proposed this collection, the Alberta New Democratic Party had held its position of government in the provincial legislature for just one year. Some hoped this collection could explain the NDP’s uncharacteristic victory in 2015. Many wanted to know what had inspired this dramatic political shift and when Alberta “stopped being conservative.” But as Bucking Conservatism hits the bookshelves, the province’s reputation as Canada’s conservative heartland has been seemingly reaffirmed. In April 2019, Alberta voters ended the brief reign of the NDP, electing instead a majority government of the United Conservative Party (UCP), with Jason Kenney as premier. The National Observer described the UCP’s entry into the legislature as a “resounding victory.”¹ Indeed, by Canadian electoral standards, the UCP’s total of just more than half of the popular vote (54.9 percent) does represent a dominant electoral performance. Still, though, 54.9 percent is by no means a huge majority, and nearly a third of Albertans (32.7 percent) voted for the NDP.² Resounding as the UCP’s victory may have been in 2019, it did not reveal anything actually resembling ideological unanimity in the province. The victory of the UCP, however, fits nicely into a broader narrative about Alberta politics and history. With Kenney at the helm, the myth of the province as a conservative monolith has returned in full force.

This image, while politically convenient, is obviously not accurate, as the introduction to this volume, along with each individual chapter, makes abundantly clear. However, insofar as the conservative myth continues to animate the general perception of the province, it is worth taking up. Even after the UCP’s victory in 2019, for example, workers and activists mobilized against the imposition of a ruthlessly austere conservative budget and thousands of environmentalists marched for climate justice in Alberta’s cities. Yet, an impression that political developments were going along in accordance with some conservative normality persisted. The prevailing narrative about conservatism in Alberta thus continues, as it has done historically, to erase and to obscure dissenting voices. This erasure of alternative stories in Alberta is lamentable. In the first place, it does a disservice to the historical study of Canada by exceptionalizing the history of the province and thus limiting its historiographical relevance. Rather more crucially, it hinders the ability of activists to understand themselves as furthering important historical traditions and forecloses upon possibilities for creating solidarity between Albertans and non-Albertans. Even further, the downplaying of Alberta’s rich alternative history enables derisive talk about Alberta elsewhere in Canada. The province is singled out as the reference point against which the rest of the country, without altogether deserving it, can feel good about itself. The history rendered in Bucking Conservatism combats this trend in more ways than one.

In the aftermath of the 2019 provincial election, and the federal election later that year, Canadian media narratives were particularly interested in developments that adhered to existing stereotypes.³ The 2019 provincial and federal elections both returned a near full slate of Conservatives to Alberta’s legislative and parliamentary seats, fuelling rhetoric about western Canada as a bastion of conservatism. For an example of this phenomenon, one could look to media coverage of a number of “truck convoys” that made their way, on a couple of occasions, to Edmonton and Ottawa in order to convey support for the provincial oil industry and opposition to the work of environmentalists inside and outside of Alberta. On 18 October 2019, one of these convoys travelled from Red Deer to Edmonton in order to protest the visit paid by sixteen-year old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg to the legislature. Perhaps for the way they conveniently fit into an existing discourse about conservatism and petro-politics, the members of this convoy received no shortage of media attention. It is a little odd, however, that the truck drivers opposing Thunberg’s visit even registered as important on a day that saw as many as four thousand mostly young climate strikers on the streets of Edmonton and in front of the legislature insisting on a livable future.⁴ Climate strikers also protested that day in Alberta’s other cities, including Calgary, Lethbridge, Red Deer, Medicine Hat, and Grande Prairie. But in a discursive context in which Alberta is assumed to be so thoroughly conservative, especially in its collective perspective on the fossil fuel industry, groups like the truck convoys easily come to represent Albertan political culture writ large.

In the case of the October 2019 climate strikes—a story that ought to have been about the obvious purchase of environmentalist politics in the province—far too much focus was placed on how Albertans, in supposedly typical form, showed up to express their displeasure with a young activist from another country. Or, from an equally erroneous perspective, the presence of a famous activist from Europe could be taken as evidence that environmentalist politics were being somehow foisted upon the province from elsewhere. In fact, dissent in Alberta is and has been “homegrown.”⁵

Less than a year after the climate strikes, Albertans once again gathered en masse this time in solidarity with local and international Black Lives Matter activists who were protesting the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020. Between June 4 and 7, stories of local acts of racism accompanied calls for defunding the police, while chants of “Black Lives Matter” and “Indigenous Lives Matter” rang out across the province. Over twenty thousand Albertans attended Black Lives Matter and Anti-Racism Rallies held in Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Red Deer, Grande Prairie, Fort McMurray, Innisfail, and Brooks.⁶ Although the years of the UCP regime may be easy to narrate as more of the conservative same by those blinkered by assumptions about conservative unanimity in Alberta, this period also offers ample evidence of the progressive, even radical, potentialities within the province’s political culture.

Developments between 2019 and 2021 to which far too little attention has been paid include mobilizations of public sector workers, especially nurses and teachers, against harsh cuts and governmental meddling with pensions, as well as students and faculty who have rallied against post-secondary tuition increases and drastic funding reductions. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, Albertans created grassroots movements and communicated their displeasure with the austerity politics of the UCP. Online communities like Albertans Reject Curriculum Draft, a Facebook group of almost fifty thousand Albertans, forcefully opposed the settler-centric and often historically erroneous K-6 curriculum draft proposed by the UCP in spring 2021.⁷ There was also significant public support for the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees hospital worker walkouts in October 2020.⁸ These and other efforts demonstrate that many Albertans do stand up for education, healthcare, and the public sector more broadly. The fact of the UCP government’s existence, and its preference for a reactionary politics of austerity, is not the only fact of Alberta’s contemporary political reality. Ongoing and vehement opposition to such politics is not hard to find and is substantial enough to warrant far more acknowledgement, and interprovincial support, than it often gets.

The provincial government has used this rhetoric to its advantage. If Albertans are told—by the premier, MLAs, the media, or the historical literature—that they are alone if they are not conservative, perhaps dissent is less likely. The UCP are banking on this idea and thus are surely happy to encounter and emphasize narratives that imply widespread, unshakeable support for conservative governance. And when opposition to the UCP and other oppressive institutions is not recognized in a meaningful way, the opposition appears even more subdued. Politicians like Kenney, and parties like the UCP, count on people feeling helpless in their situation, reminding them that they cannot make meaningful change until the government changes, which is also considered unlikely. The silencing of dissenting voices in contemporary media and within the historiography, therefore, makes it easier for the UCP to discourage and demean action against their policies.

The myth serves other Canadians and political parties, too, because they can use the explicit shortcomings of Alberta Conservatives to hide their own. In 2016 a popular podcast called Colour Code released an episode called “The Angel Complex” to explain how Canadians often “use the United States [as a scapegoat] . . . when we don’t want to face our own problems, and that includes the problems that we have with race and racism.” As the podcast episode goes on, the hosts ask why some histories—in particular, histories of racism and colonialism—are not included in “how we see ourselves as Canadians.”⁹ While the episode of Colour Code focuses on racism, the angel complex concept can also be applied to topics of misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, ableism, and colonialism. The rhetoric of the angel complex is problematic in many ways. It makes systemic oppression invisible by constantly pointing the proverbial finger someplace else. So, interrogating the idea of the Canadian angel complex reveals how often people use problems in other places to avoid addressing the problems in their own backyards, or within their own histories. Importantly, this is a process that plays out within Canada as well. The Prairies, and Alberta in particular, are often used as a scapegoat for the oppression and injustice that exists in Canada.

Alberta, colloquially described as “Canada’s loud, drunk, obnoxious uncle,” has earned its place as the politically conservative stronghold in the country.¹⁰ And while there has been a political legacy of conservative parties in the provincial legislature, the ideological demography of the legislature does not remotely map onto the ideological demography of the province more generally. We believe that the province is more than its reigning political party. By challenging this angel complex, we hope that Bucking Conservatism adds to a growing body of literature that reconsiders definitions of activism and conservatism, while drawing out the complexities of systemic oppression. Because, if oppression is understood as following mostly from the actions of a sole individual or community, the systemic ways that it operates within the law, institutions, and day-to-day experiences are made invisible. Using particular peoples or spaces as scapegoats to ignore these larger problems also makes the important work of local activists who are trying to tear down these systems more difficult to appreciate.

Even within the alternative histories of Alberta, some Prairie activists felt their radical efforts were not always recognized during the 1960s and 1970s. During an oral history interview with Rita Moir, for example, she remembered the “Western Express” in the early 1970s. She explained that student journalist activists from across the Prairies gathered on a train to join a large Canadian University Press gathering in Toronto. Moir remembers this trip fondly but shared her feeling that the activists on the Prairies often experienced “western alienation” from student news presses at larger central Canadian schools, like the University of Toronto.¹¹ In the 1970s, Moir’s activism and the important work of her Prairie peers was not always recognized by their central Canadian counterparts. And in ensuing decades, opportunities to explore the history that Moir is a part of have largely not been taken.

Histories of the struggles and triumphs of dissent, activism, and resistance in Alberta confront the angel complex and broaden our definitions of who counts as an activist. Recently, historians have established the importance of recognizing activism beyond marches and sit-ins.¹² While these are important sites of dissent, as Beth Palmer argues, histories outside the highly visible action (specific to abortion in her case) in Vancouver and Toronto provide insight into “a more practical side of abortion activism in the 1970s that is easily overlooked.”¹³ These scholars have ignited a historiographical wave that recognizes various activisms, such as letter writing, service provision, educational and consciousness-raising efforts, and community building, in the historical narrative. In doing so, they have created more opportunities to explore a history of activism in spaces rendered “conservative.” And there are so many more stories to tell, especially when it comes to activism in rural places and within immigrant communities, as well as the experiences and work of Black activists, lesbian activists, and disability rights activists. The chapters in Bucking Conservatism add to this shift and will hopefully encourage others to look deeper into the history of activism in the province.

Bucking Conservatism’s glance into the activist history of Alberta also reveals what Grace Ouellette describes as “parallel but separate” streams between the activisms of Indigenous people and White settlers during the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁴ As Leon Crane Bear, Corinne George, and Tarisa Dawn Little explain in their essays, Indigenous resistance and community organization existed for decades before the time period covered in this book. We recognize that the lines between activist issues are not cut and dried.¹⁵ Indeed, Indigenous people participated in many advocacy initiatives; however, community organizing often centred on the systemic colonialism that Indigenous people faced daily. There were instances of Indigenous-settler activist collaboration during the 1960s and 1970s, such as the solidarity formed between settler and Indigenous activists captured in Tom Radford’s essay “Death of a Delta.” Nevertheless, White activists during these decades fought for reproductive rights, political and ideological shifts in government, and homes and cities without pollution. Indigenous activists often fought for the same causes but had the additional burden of fighting to keep their children, retaining rights to their land, maintaining sovereignty, and lobbying for basic amenities and better living conditions on reserves, as well as fighting for citizenship and status rights. The systemic colonialism Indigenous people faced daily, therefore, necessitated additional activist labour not required of their White counterparts during the 1960s and 1970s.

The recent growth in histories of activism and dissent on the Prairies is particularly exciting for historians of Alberta. The proliferation of these kinds of investigations, which can be understood as “counter-histories,” does more than simply draw attention to political culture(s) beyond the conservative one that we have been told is firmly entrenched and widely accepted.¹⁶ These histories prompt a concomitant questioning: If the myth of shared and unanimous conservatism is only just that, a myth, then how should Alberta be understood? The point here is not that it is impossible or wrong to talk about Alberta as a place in which the ideological influence of conservatism is strong. Generalizations about political culture are often useful and necessary. However, too often in the case of Alberta such generalizations are not accompanied by sufficient caution or nuance. This lack of critical engagement routinely causes generalizing to become myth-making. And the myth, once established, is very difficult to dislodge as by force of repetition it takes on the character of fact. De-exceptionalizing the historical political culture of Alberta and moving beyond the myth enables the development of insights relevant for Canadian historiography more broadly and can contribute to the dismantling of a conservative monopoly on the practice of government.

Among the obstacles to a more balanced politico-cultural understanding of Alberta is the tendency to equate provincial electoral results with the actual political outlook of the province, not just in the media, as we’ve discussed, but in scholarship as well. Clearly, from the mid-1930s, Alberta’s electoral history has been dominated by parties on the political right. With the exception of the NDP government of 2015 to 2019, provincial elections have returned majority conservative governments for decades. The Social Credit Party and the Progressive Conservatives carried the banner for nearly eighty uninterrupted years, and the United Conservatives resumed the position in 2019. Conservatism is undeniably a powerful ideological force in Alberta. But scholars have often reproduced this point without identifying precisely, or correctly, how extensive Alberta conservatism has been in areas beyond electoral politics and governance. Prairie historian Gerald Friesen, for example, has described Alberta—“and I do mean all Albertans, not just the government”—as a uniquely entrepreneurial and individualistic province serving nationally in the role of “the tempestuous little brother or sister who is not going to be hushed, thank you very much.”¹⁷ In another case, the political scientist Jared Wesley wrote in 2013 that, because of a mechanical process of hegemonic reproduction enabled by the provincial electoral system, “continued rule by the Progressive Conservatives, or some other right-wing party, seems inevitable in Alberta.”¹⁸ Conservative rule turned out not to be so inevitable after all, but the more important point is that scholars, like the media, have at times displayed a willingness to discuss Albertan political culture in too-simple, or near-mythical, terms.¹⁹

The period of conservative electoral dominance in Alberta emerged precisely when Canada and other western democracies were witnessing the normalization of social democracy and Keynesian economic governance in the aftermath of the Second World War. From the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s and beyond, Social Credit premiers William Aberhart and Ernest Manning encountered an exceptional mixture of global, national, and provincial conditions that rendered conservative politics practicable in Alberta just as they were becoming impracticable in much of the rest of Canada. That is, while the interwar crisis of the Canadian state was ameliorated by the emergence of a “national consensus which produced a modified version of the ‘welfare state,’” Alberta bucked the trend.²⁰ The postwar decades in Alberta stand out in comparison because, while Manning governments spent heavily in the areas of health care and education thanks to windfall revenues from the development of the oil industry after 1947, this spending was done in such a way as to minimize its redistributional function.²¹ When universal health care appeared on the national political stage in the 1960s, for example, Manning was among its most vociferous critics.

The entrepreneurial themes, free market rhetoric, and elevation of the individual subject that have fuelled conservative politics in Alberta may have looked unique as they emerged in the period after the Second World War, but ideas and practices of this kind have a long history of dominance across Canada, from the nineteenth century to the period of neoliberalism since the 1980s.²² Stressing the dominance and the uniqueness of conservatism in Alberta can thus be misleading, isolating the province’s history within the broader study of Canada’s past. Indeed, the ideological and political differences between Alberta and other, ostensibly more progressive places in Canada are almost entirely matters of degree rather than kind. And insofar as Albertan conservatism is not as singular as most discourses suggest, provincial histories of resistance should capture the attention of anyone interested in the history or the present of counterhegemony in Canada. The chapters in this book need not be seen as narrowly provincial. Rather, the dissenters of this volume were participants in historical traditions that are also national and even international. Moreover, the preceding chapters represent only a few of the many activist histories of 1960s and 1970s Alberta. We hope that the essays and reflections gathered in this collection will inspire much more future research on activist stories in the province.

Resisting the myth of a wholly conservative Alberta is important not just for its scholarly and historiographical implications but even more so for its political implications in the present. Especially given the ongoing catastrophe of climate change and the ruthless austerity on display from governments in provinces across the country, interprovincial solidarity is urgently needed but too often, at least with Alberta, difficult to find. Because of the assumption that Albertans are so deeply and so widely conservative, an outlook notably associated with support for expanding the oil industry, people in other provinces disregard the possibility of solidaristic connection. Ongoing instances in the tradition of bucking conservatism thus might not get the recognition or the support they deserve. Such instances today include the work of groups like Idle No More and Sisters in Spirit vigils, both national movements fighting for land and water sovereignty and confronting the epidemic of violence against Indigenous women and girls in Canada, respectively.²³ But there are also local groups such as Neighbourhood Bridges Edmonton, which support community-building and activist initiatives among persons with intellectual disabilities; Climate Justice Edmonton, which have organized opposition to pipeline construction and oil sands expansion; the Alberta Advantage, a Calgary-based socialist podcast that offers brilliantly polemical analysis of Alberta’s past and present (not to be confused with the Alberta Advantage Party, a group of disgruntled Wild Rose Party members); the Pro-Choice Society of Lethbridge & Southern Alberta, which advocates for safe and judgment-free reproductive and sexual health; the anonymous Handmaids in Lethbridge, who wear red costumes inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale while silently protesting anti-abortion rhetoric in the city, spurring a province-wide movement; the many local chapters of Black Lives Matter across the province who raise awareness about anti-Black racism in their communities; Defend Alberta Parks which fights proposed provincial legislation that would close over 165 provincial parks in order that the land would be available for future resource extraction; and Indigenous Climate Action, an Indigenous-led climate action group that fights for Indigenous sovereignty, land, and water rights and promotes Indigenous-led climate justice.²⁴ These groups represent important and effective dissident movements in the country.

We both grew up in Alberta – like many of the contributors in this collection. And living in the province shaped who we are now; it is where our political consciousness – our feminist, socialist, environmentalist, anti-homophobic, anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-colonial consciousness – grew and developed under the big prairie skies. As history students, we sought a history that we could identify with and in too many cases we were left wanting. As emerging historians today, we hope that Bucking Conservatism disrupts that historiographical tradition. Additionally, we hope it offers a kind of handbook and source of inspiration for activists, and that it might help to establish a sense of belonging in a historical community for those who continue to fight and resist conservatism in the province.

In the days ahead, we hope this collection shows that Albertans can do more than wait for the next election. Resistance, dissent, and activism come in many forms and in many spaces. What is more, we hope that the stories of activism here stress the significance of community building. The conservative voices that the media and the historiography emphasize have found each other, they have organized, and they are loud. They hope to overwhelm the province by their loudness and by the furious pace with which they roll out the conservative political program. But while it is possible to feel overwhelmed individually, through solidarity and community it is possible to fight and win. The activists and other buckers described in this collection made change, sometimes small and sometimes not so small, in their own lives and in the lives of others just by the mere fact that they had other like-minded people around them. Find your people, build your community, and organize in solidarity with others. Continue to break down the myth that living in Alberta means you are resigned to a past and a future of conservatism.