this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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You know, for everything that Doug Ford has done that I don't like, at least he's not Danielle Smith.
Ford is a mobster, not a religious zealot.
He's also sneakier, and lies so well it's hard to tell the truth from fiction.
If you come in with the baseline that none of them tell the truth, it's a lot easier to figure out who is lying.
Ontario is also not Alberta: Smith's cheques are signed by the oil industry, and you have to get deep into denialism to whitewash that industry, and denialism comes with a lot of anti-intellectual and protofascist baggage.
Ford's are signed by real-estate developers and small-business douchebags (and the Venn with them and organized crime on it, well, has some overlap). They're a very different crew, and they prefer to operate in the shadows. Shouty religious zealotry results in unwanted attention, which is bad for business.
I'll take it!
This isn't at all evidence-based, this is just a gut reaction and being an Ontarian I hear a lot more about what happens in my province that Alberta.
I find Doug Ford much scarier than Danielle Smith because I think he's more effective at destroying this country, more people would vote for his destructive policies than hers (which are more clearly socially regressive), and I could see him being successful at the federal level.
Higgs scares me too. I'm appalled by the devolution of trans rights in AB and SK, but politicians gunning to increase corporate power, gut the public sector, and reduce labour's power really unsettles me vis-a-vis the direction we're heading in.
That's been the Blue playbook for decades.
Trust me, Smith is still taking enough time away from attacking the trans community to destroy healthcare and then sell it to her corporate friends. Same with education. As for unions, the secret wage limits Kenney imposed were just opening the door to Smith's plans.
Smith won by just 1300 votes, if you look at the close ridings, and has done nothing but unpopular shit ever since - starting with an attack on CPP, which is a sacred cow to the most vote-y demographic. And it's still the first few months. So, yeah, she's not on track to re-election, to put it mildly.
...and yet, she'd get reelected today.
She would, and she will. Rachel Notley has stepped down because she knows she can't beat the UCP (or any single right-wing party), no matter what deranged psychopath is running it.
Worst of all, Poilievre is courting her hard - and has every intention of copying every one of her policies that can translate to the national arena.
I don't know, her numbers seem to have gone slightly downwards since the election, and like I said she barely scraped in. Keep in mind this is FPTP and most of the real rednecks are stacked in the same rural ridings.
It's more like anyone's game than hopeless.
Everything you say is true, I just don't believe in my heart that she would lose.
When she got the leadership nomination, we were cheering. "The UCP just lost the electiom by electing that psycho!"
She won by 1300 voices but that's not something to be proud of or celebrate as her being close to losing because it just shows how fucked first past the post is, she had a majority of the popular vote in the province by a good margin, if those 1300 had voted NDP instead the NDP would have had the power with 44% of the vote while the conservatives would be in the opposition with 52.6% of the vote.
It's not my preferred system either, but it's what we have. In this specific case it works to the advantage of progress and stability.
If we had party list (preferably Norway style so there's not constant snap elections) then the UCP almost certainly wouldn't exist, and we'd probably have a coalition of centrist parties, with a sizable amount of more radical opposition parties, mostly on the right but also on the left (possibly led by Janis Irwin).
Thing is, if we don't complain when it works to our advantage then there's no reason why it would change for something better. You should be celebrating the fact that for once the party that has the majority of the seats is the one that got the majority of the vote and that should be shown as an example of why a reform is necessary.