Has Anything Really Changed in Conservative Alberta Politics?

This CBC interview in 2009 about the religious fundamentalists influence on conservative government policy in 2009 caused me to quit the Progressive Conservative Party.

I am sharing this CBC radio interview I did back in 2009 on the Noon Hour call-in program. It points out the powerful influence of the radical evangelical religious influence on the conservative Alberta governments. This fundamentalist Christian religious political influence has been around Alberta for a long time, all the way back to Bible Bill Aberhart and the Social Credit days.

In 2009, the rise of the Wildrose Party was making the Stelmach government nervous. The Christian fundamentalist religious elements were exerting some extremist policy-making power within the Stelmach PC caucus when I did this CBC interview. It continues to this day, as we see the disproportionate rise of UCP tax dollars increasing for private faith-based education initiatives at the expense of the public system.

These 2009 changes to the Alberta Human Rights legislation empowered parents to harass and abuse teachers over any classroom content around sexual orientation and religion without explicist advanced parental permission. A parental complaint against a teacher could then be escalated into a Human Rights hearing targeting the teacher.

This legislation was the final straw for me. It led me to give up my membership in the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta. Jason Kenney completed the far-right shift by eliminating both the PC and Wildrose Party and forming the even more politically abusive United Conservative Party. And now that is about to fragment again over Alberta Separation.

The split won’t be between moderates and extremists. The moderates will stay away or maybe drift toward the more centrist Progressive Tory Party. The split of the UCP will be between the Libertarians and the Christian Nationalist Fundamentalists. The Libertarians want to take Alberta out of Confederation. The Christian Nationalists are OK with separation, so long as we end up with an American MAGA-style theocracy.

As for the majority of us in the Sensible Centre, we need to step up and do more than denounce the UCP policy and ideology. We need to defeat them so soundly that they disappear as a political force. We can have an effective disruption to the UCP political agenda by an overwhelming defeat of the pro-separatist referendum question and the other nonsensical separatists supporting the UCP-sponsored referendum questions.