There were two particular stories out of Alberta yesterday that spoke of the state of the province's political culture one was that premier Jason Kenney's grassroots are getting restive, and the constituency association presidents are unhappy and starting to think about calling a leadership review on the man who engineered the founding of their party; the other was the absolute abuse of authority as five different police officers in Lethbridge were found to have illegally accessed records pertaining to the local MLA, Shannon Phillips, who was the NDP environment minister during the Notley government.  Both are reflections of Alberta's odd status as a one-party state, and how it has warped the province's sense of political reality.

The story of Kenney's leadership woes should not be a surprise.  Upon the creation of the current United Conservative Party, Kenney was looking toward restoring the "rightful" government in the province, appropriately with "conservative" in the title, and all would go back to normal once that happened.  After over forty years as a one-party state, the somewhat accidental rise of the provincial NDP as a new government threw many Albertans for a loop, and created a sense that all was not right with the world.  The price of oil had already crashed, and the people were angry.  When then-premier Jim Prentice made the trenchant observation that Albertans could not continue to demand the best public services in the country while simultaneously enjoying the lowest tax rate in the country, as oil revenues could no longer support it, they got so angry that in order to punish Prentice, they elected Rachel Notley's NDP, and immediately were overcome with buyer's remorse.  What was Alberta if not a conservative province?

Notley did not run an ideological government, and hers has been the most centrist NDP government in recent memory, given the political realities she was dealt.  She fought for new oil and gas projects and pipelines, while also doing the serious work of trying to diversify the economy, as well as to green it.  Nevertheless, she was blamed for the low price of oil (never mind that the shale revolution in the U.S. and OPEC increasing production to cause a global supply glut that drove prices down especially after the Iran nuclear deal allowed their own production to enter the market), and once Justin Trudeau was made prime minister federally, that blame got shared around between them.

But up until Prentice's loss, the leadership of the one-party state was already a precarious monster.  After Ralph Klein's departure, no leader could manage more than a single election before being chased out, and the Progressive Conservative party, bloated and corrupt, had become this amorphous monster that kept trying to re-shape itself to fit each successive leader, so that it no longer had any ideological mooring other than power, and a lot of wealthy donors kept it in power.  In a sense, Kenney's creation of the UCP from the ashes of the PC party was merely one more iteration of this amorphous mass reshaping itself to the current leader one that was sharper ideologically, but this was also part of a broader collapse in Alberta's politics, where the centrist parties crumbled to rally behind Notley, and leaving a more sharply divided political choice for voters.

This particular development also can't be seen without also noting that Alberta's politics have long been importers of American norms, from the talk radio culture, to the kinds of rhetoric that panders to prejudices and insidiously allows them to turn into divisions.  More than that, it was also an early adopter of the notion that any government that is not a conservative one must therefore be illegitimate amplified by the norms of a one-party state that had not changed governments in 44 years.  Notley's victory was derided as an accident (which, in a way, it kind of was), and conservative voices in the province which Kenney started to amplify once he made his departure from federal politics to "save" Alberta insisted that there could be no legitimacy to a government that was not conservative.

Which is where the Phillips story comes into play. The fact that five separate police officers were actively involved in monitoring her cannot be simply a case of "bad apples," or solely a reflection of the unaccountable nature of policing culture that allows such actions to be taken with impunity, because we don't get stories like this in other jurisdictions.  These agents of the state acted in a way that suggests that the notion that the government that Phillips was a member of was illegitimate and that she should be treated with suspicion as a result (especially because she was a woman and the environment minister in a province reliant on its oil and gas sector), which is appalling in what is supposed to be a liberal democracy.  44 years as a one-party state eroded the norms of how one was supposed to operate with a transition of power, and when all anyone could think of was trying to return to a "proper" state of a conservative government, it very much appears that a belief in ends justifying the means played itself out.

Where the province goes from here is something that it needs to figure out for itself, but its current trajectory is unsustainable.  Trying to return to an amorphous one-party state won't bring a return to the province's glory years, awash in oil money those days are gone and unlikely to come back.  Simply cycling through leaders won't make the province's problems go away, and the party will remain unable to go through any kind of proper renewal process that the province's changing circumstances demand.  For the health of its democracy, it needs to be reminded that changes of government every so often is a good thing, that there are norms around it to be respected, and that non-conservative governments are not illegitimate by their very nature, and this comes with the territory in being a democracy.  It needs to stop being a one-party state and be a functional democracy, for its own sake, and for the rest of the country's sake as well.

Photo Credit: CBC News