One Party Alberta

To do the comparison I will look at how both Alberta and the generic one party state of the various Communist countries operate. I combine the Communist states for simplicity, though most ran in a very similar fashion with only minor variations from state to state. The table below summarizes the axes that I will use for the comparison. I will expand on each axis below the table.

Axis 1: Spy on citizens
Governments that spy on their own citizens tend to do so for political reasons. The spying helps them keep tabs on political opponents and to generate files to aid in discrediting those opponents. Spying also helps force people into 'groupthink' as you never know who the spy is or whom they're reporting to, causing people to self-censor what they say. Spying on the populace is a powerful way of bullying people into compliance with the will of the party.

The Communist states, not to mention virtually every other dictator of the left or right, generally maintained large secret police forces to do the spying. These secret police would generally be unfettered by any notion of civil society using torture and intimidation to maintain party dominance.

The Alberta government, who have been the PC's for the past 36 years, also spies on the people of Alberta. The EUB incident is only the one we've found out about, since if they've spied on us once, they've likely done it many more times and continue to do so. The primary difference between the Alberta government and the Communist states is that the free market ideology of the Progressive Conservatives means that they hire outside 'private investigators' to do the spying, and not use a state run secret police. The Alberta government also allegedly frowns on torture as that would violate the criminal code of Canada, though I'm not unconvinced that they'd do that if they thought they could get away with it. Even without the torture aspect, the use of PI's is an intimidation strategy designed to discourage dissent with party policy. The net effect is the same as having a secret police force.

Axis 2 – Punish dissenters
Whether or not there's punishment for dissent is a key determination of democracy. Any government that either crushes or otherwise dissuades dissent is less democratic than one that allows for a variety of ideas and tolerates opposition. Dissent is vital to a thriving democracy and is repressed in in one party states where the party sees dissent as a threat to the party. In the one party state, the purpose of punishing dissenters is less about silencing the dissenter, but to intimidate others into conformity.

One party Communist, and other totalitarian states, use a variety of overt means to punish dissenters. Torture and imprisonment are only the most blatant expressions of this punishment. Official and unofficial 'hit squads' often roam the streets killing people believed to be dissenters, while other dissenters simply disappear. The media is used to ridicule anyone who holds an opposing view so that the few dissenters that do get their message out are dismissed by the public as being crazy.

In Alberta the overt ways of repressing dissent aren't used, though some may say that Weibo Ludwig was jailed for his dissent. That being said other methods of punishing dissenters are used. Ridicule in the press is the main method used in Alberta though the Tories have punished whole constituencies for voting the "wrong" way. Most of the media in Alberta is highly sympathetic to the Conservative Party, if not downright shills for the party. This allows the government to use these papers to print editorials and articles that ridicule any opposition and glorify the governing PC party. This has a chilling effect on dissent as any dissent that starts to get traction is rapidly denounced by the "free" press and quickly silenced. More on this under control of the media. The Tories also have punished constituencies by giving them lower levels of government service, the net effect of which is poorer roads, schools and hospitals. The purpose of this punishment is clear, to get people to vote for the Tories next election so the punishment will be lifted. This has been a quite effective form of dissent repression. There are societal issue at play as well with people who don't conform to the views of the PC party being spied on or ostracized by conservative minded people with the tacit approval of the party.

Axis 3 – Party controls elections
Free and fair elections are the hallmark of a democracy. Any control of those elections by a government or governing party reduces the freedom and fairness of those elections and lessens democracy in that state. One party states have the party controlling the elections so that the outcome can be affected. The control varies from dissuading oppostion voters from showing up to the polls to total control of an election to the point where only the party is on the ballot.

Contrary to popular belief, in the true one party states of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, elections were held. There was literally only one party on the ballot in these elections, all but assuring a Communist Party victory, but elections were held at regular intervals. Often in these elections there would be many names to choose from on that ballot, but they'd all be members of the Communist party. Even then, the candidate the party wanted to win would usually win as the control of the media allowed the party to push for the candidates they wanted.

In Alberta, there are, at least other parties on the ballot giving choice to the voter. So in this instance the Communists had control the Tories can only dream of. That being said, the Conservatives exert other means of control over Alberta elections in order to aid people in voting Conservative. The ways that the Alberta Tories use to control elections are: controlling constituency boundaries, controlling who are returning officers and polling officials and using government resources to campaign.

In most modern representative democracies, the boundaries of individual constituencies are set by an independent boundary commission or by an all party commission. The purpose of this is to prevent any one party from gerrymandering the constituency boundaries to favour itself. Not in Alberta. In Alberta a committee of one party, the PC's, sits down every two elections and re-draws the boundaries. The committee looks at such things as which polls voted against the Tories and then arranges the boundaries to split those clusters of opposition in such a way to prevent a non-Conservative victory. The committee also arranges the boundaries in such a way that areas of strong Conservative support, such as Alberta's rural areas, have more constituencies than more populated areas that are less likely to vote Conservative, like Alberta's cities. With this alone the Tories have been rigging elections for decades.

A more recent phenomenon with the Alberta PC's is in the hiring of returning officers. In a non-biased system, the returning officers, the people who do the final ballot count, would be independent people hired by the non-partisan Chief Electoral Officer. Again, not in Alberta. In Alberta, RO's are appointed by the Conservative cabinet upon the recommendation of the local Conservative riding associations. So a significant number of the people running the election are Conservative party hacks. This means that if there's a question of a ballot being marked properly or improperly, the person doing the counting is likely to make that decision in favour of the Conservative candidate. In extreme cases it could mean that many non-Conservative votes could be rejected outright to ensure a Tory victory.

Further, the Conservatives used government resources to run part of their campaign. Campaign announcements at the beginning of the election period were made using the Legislature and Capital Health Region's facilities. There was an outcry and this practice soon stopped, but what other campaigning was done using government resources? One has to wonder. By using government resources, the Tories give themselves a financial advantage over the other parties. Where other parties have to raise funds to fight the election, the Tories got to use the provincial treasury to fund part of their campaign, until people complained about that. Further, Tory appointed civil servants were using their positions to endorse Conservative candidates. It still hasn't been determined if they used taxpayer money to do this, so the full depth of this has yet to be seen. Either way, it gives the Conservatives yet another advantage over the other parties as any civil servant who expresses contrary political decision as a civil servant would be promptly punished, unlike Ms. Bier.

Axis 4 – Party controls government appointments

In the Communist states of Eastern Europe, party membership was an absolute requirement for appointment to any state board or commission. All persons wanting to be on these bodies had to be politically pure and payed up members of the party. This allowed the party to control those boards centrally, as the boards would be good little puppets to party central.

Patronage appointments have always been a problem in Canada, and not just Alberta. That being said, the Alberta PC's have taken patronage appointments to a high art. There are hundreds of people serving on various unelected boards and commissions in the province of Alberta. It's safe to say that most of them have some tie to the Conservative party. Either as members, donors or relatives of party members. This is so that, like in the Communist states, the boards remain ideologically pure. No greater evidence of this was when the Conservatives allowed some of the members of health region boards to be elected. As soon as the elections were over, and a whole bunch of non-Conservatives were elected, the elected members were turfed and replaced with appointed party hacks. This takes patronage to a new level for sure.

Axis 5 – Party controls press
The final axis I will look at deals with the control of the press and media. In order for a free and democratic society to flourish, there has to be an unfettered flow of ideas and information. A free press is vital to that flow. Any state that can control the press has the ability to ensure that only it's message is heard by the vast majority of the population. Presented over and over by a controlled media, the population eventually starts to believe that it's the only point of view in town, killing democracy.

In the Communist states, the press was rigidly controlled. All media was owned by the government and spouted the party line at every opportunity. Sure there were news articles about the world, but they were slanted to ensure that the government looked good at every opportunity. This allowed the Communist party to exert control over the population by simply filtering the information they received. Proper filtering allowed the government to get most people to think the "correct" way.

Now in Canada we have a nominally free press. The national media, since it has to attract a diverse audience, tends to balanced reporting simply to keep readership up. It's difficult for any level of government in Canada to control the media through legislation due to the charter of rights so for the most part, the media is free. There are other ways to control media, however, and the Alberta PC's are masters of this.

The most obvious way that the Alberta Tories control the media is to use the way the media business is against the media itself. Tight deadlines and the need to get stories out quickly has allowed the Tories to feed an endless line of press releases that do nothing but praise how good a job the party is doing. Now normally in a free press this wouldn't be a problem, as the press would see the releases for what they are and comment on the releases, looking for what's really happening, even publishing stories about what the government is doing poorly. Alberta's press isn't like that. Why? It's like that because it's been trained by the Tories to be that way. It works like this, the Tories will give the medial endless stories to fill up column inches and air time with how great the Tories are, greatly reducing the workload of reporters and news editors. What does the press have to do in return? It's simple, all the press has to do to keep the gravy train flowing is to not write anything critical of the Conservative government. Failure to do so will result not only in the flow of news releases to whichever news organization doesn't play along, but that organization will find itself virtually ignored by the government. This means that those reporters and organizations that are critical of the Tories will not get interviews with Tory MLA's or ministers. They'll have to file freedom of Information requests, at $1000 a request, to find out even the basic government information. This means that any news organization that doesn't go along with the Tories is at a serious disadvantage compared to it's competitors. This is a huge disincentive to be critical of the government and this self-censorship has allowed the Tories a large degree of control over the press. This is why we have papers such as the Calgary Herald reading like a Conservative party version of Pravda. This control of the press allows the Tories to spout out their view unfettered by opposition. Thirty years of this has allowed Tory myth to replace fact, and to supplant other ideas or philosophies in the minds of Albertans.

So by looking at the five axes above, it becomes clear that Alberta is well on it's way to becoming, if not already a one party state. I say this due to the large number of parallels between the way the Alberta Progressive Conservatives run Alberta and the way the Communists ran Eastern Europe. Though they may have had different ideas when it came to the economy, politically there doesn't seem to be a lot of difference between the Tories and the Communists. I think that this is one of the major reasons that democracy is on heavy duty life support in Alberta, if not slipping into the grave.