political earthquake in Canada

[calimac]

Oil country gets more types of earthquakes than the literal kind caused by fracking. Recent news makes anything that could happen in the UK election today into a relative snore. In Canada - a country prone to political earthquakes, where the rules of party balance that have held sway for decades may be suddenly swept away - they've had what may be their biggest political earthquake ever, and on the provincial level. The NDP just took Alberta.

I cannot emphasize enough what a big deal and what a surprise this is. Imagine if Bernie Sanders had been elected Governor of Texas; that's about the closest equivalent. Not only does it overturn all the rules of Albertan political culture, but it also means that, for the first time in living memory, the tar sands will be under the control of politicians who believe that stewardship of the planet means something other than sucking all the oil out of it.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

It's certainly one in the eye for that scumbag, Harper! :o)

It gives hope for us hereabouts.

Crosses everything..........

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

What little I've read about this indicates the change in government was the result of a major corruption scandal in the previous government, so I wonder how long this change will last.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

From looking at the news stories about Alberta, it looks as if one of the big factors was budgetary crisis, resulting from a fall in oil prices cutting into provincial revenues. The Conservatives seem to have presided over an established way of cutting up the pie that doesn't work so well now that the pie is shrinking.

So it rather seems that they were a petrostate that was betting on our having reached peak oil, and expecting to profit from being one of the last places that had oil to sell. Now that the supply of oil has expanded and the price has fallen, that bet's not paying off, so they're taking a look at policies that would restrict the supply and make oil expensive again. That seems like it might be a truly classic case of progressive policies going hand in hand with rent-seeking, right up there with Hollywood firms that infallibly support progressive causes while lobbying for draconian copyright laws.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I've been wondering for days what to say in response to this, and then I saw your comment to a sartorias post in which you said, "But going on about surgeons is just being pissy."

That's about how I feel about this. There's no particular connection between progressivism and "rent-seeking". That's a characteristic of capitalism, not generally considered a high progressive value. And it's capitalism at play in Alberta, even though the capitalist entity is a government: a corporation that had control of the tar sands would pursue such a policy with far greater alacrity.