If Danielle Smith and Wildrose are held to a minority in the Alberta election today, blame will fall squarely on Smith's shoulders.
Her critics - who turned out in force last week, decrying Wildrose for its alleged racism, homophobia and flat-earthism as regards climate change - will attribute the 11th-hour reversal to a rash of so-called "bozo outbreaks" that marred the homestretch of Wildrose's campaign.
They'll say, quite rightly, that Smith was strangely reluctant, for a front-running politician or indeed for any politician, to level her leader's blowtorch at less-thangenius-level Wildrose candidates Ron Leech, who opined on the radio that being white gives him a leg up as ambassador to all nations, and Allan Hunsperger, who blogged last summer that gays will roast in a lake of fire, a kind of celestial cookout.
It can't have helped either, Smith's relieved opponents will chirp, that she committed the heresy of saying of climate change that "we've been watching the debate in the scientific community, and there is still a debate," drawing a chorus of incredulous boos from a live studio audience. How could anyone in the homestretch of an apparently winning campaign commit such hopeless gaffes?
Permit me to offer a dissenting opinion.
Smith is, philosophically, a libertarian. Along with that comes a belief in free speech. The idea is that people should be allowed to say what they wish, and that they should likewise individually be held to account for what they say. This is apparently a foreign idea in 2012 - that we should be allowed to state our opinions, though they may be offensive, stupid or deranged. In Canada we prefer that the angry, the hateful, the racist and the homophobe cloak their views. That's probably why the Wildrose bozo outbreaks last week were met with a series of increasingly flabbergasted-sounding headlines: What? You mean Smith didn't denounce Hunsperger? What? You mean she didn't denounce Leech?
A wise old British editor once told me something to this effect: If you don't let the nutters speak, you'll never know where they are.
This is not to say that Leech and Hunsperger are, necessarily, nutters. Their remarks strike me as having been jaw-droppingly stupid, as opposed to malicious or hateful. Now - isn't it healthy that the voters in CalgaryGreenaway, Leech's riding, and Edmonton-Southwest, Hunsperger's riding, know this about their potential members of the legislative assembly, before casting their ballots?
Here's the interesting thing: Smith has worked in the media. She knows about "gotcha" stories, and she in particular knows, because of the history of the Reform Party and its move into Central Canada, how the pack handles politically incorrect or off-colour remarks by right-wing candidates: We splash them.
We do this because we are, everywhere and always, searching for news, and news with legs always has an underlying narrative. Clearly one core narrative of Wildrose is a mirror image of the one 20 years ago, when Reform candidates were forever getting themselves in hot water for saying things that struck most of us as intemperate, intolerant, racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise inappropriate.
Smith knows all this, yet Friday she said just this, in her party's defence: "Let me be perfectly clear - a Wildrose government will not tolerate discrimination against any individual on the basis of ethnicity, religion, beliefs, background, disability or sexual orientation ... period."
Of Leech, who apologized for his remarks last week, she said this: "We believe that what happens in Alberta is when you make a mistake, you acknowledge it, you apologize for it. You move on."
Of Hunsperger, whose clanger was written in the summer of 2011 on his church blog, she said this: "He's been engaged in public service for a long time. His private, personal religious views would not interfere in his role as an MLA."
In other words: If church and state are to be truly separate, if government is to concern itself only with those things that it must concern itself with, then Hunsperger can believe anything he pleases, no matter how alien or offensive to the mainstream it may be. His notions of sexual morality should not apply to his work, any more than former U.S. president Bill Clinton's should have applied to his.
As for climate change: How can it be possible that even now, with a vigorous debate underway among climatologists about the reliability of climate models, about the still-undetermined role of solar fluctuations in determining the Earth's temperature, and about the absence of discernible global warming for the past 15 years, that any serious person can still take it as inviolable dogma that the scientific debate is past? Don't these people read?
If nothing else, Danielle Smith has shown that she has a spine, even in the 11th hour, with all the marbles riding on the outcome. I, for one, view that as a refreshing deviation from type.
Original Article
Source: the star phoenix
Author: Michael Den Tandt
Her critics - who turned out in force last week, decrying Wildrose for its alleged racism, homophobia and flat-earthism as regards climate change - will attribute the 11th-hour reversal to a rash of so-called "bozo outbreaks" that marred the homestretch of Wildrose's campaign.
They'll say, quite rightly, that Smith was strangely reluctant, for a front-running politician or indeed for any politician, to level her leader's blowtorch at less-thangenius-level Wildrose candidates Ron Leech, who opined on the radio that being white gives him a leg up as ambassador to all nations, and Allan Hunsperger, who blogged last summer that gays will roast in a lake of fire, a kind of celestial cookout.
It can't have helped either, Smith's relieved opponents will chirp, that she committed the heresy of saying of climate change that "we've been watching the debate in the scientific community, and there is still a debate," drawing a chorus of incredulous boos from a live studio audience. How could anyone in the homestretch of an apparently winning campaign commit such hopeless gaffes?
Permit me to offer a dissenting opinion.
Smith is, philosophically, a libertarian. Along with that comes a belief in free speech. The idea is that people should be allowed to say what they wish, and that they should likewise individually be held to account for what they say. This is apparently a foreign idea in 2012 - that we should be allowed to state our opinions, though they may be offensive, stupid or deranged. In Canada we prefer that the angry, the hateful, the racist and the homophobe cloak their views. That's probably why the Wildrose bozo outbreaks last week were met with a series of increasingly flabbergasted-sounding headlines: What? You mean Smith didn't denounce Hunsperger? What? You mean she didn't denounce Leech?
A wise old British editor once told me something to this effect: If you don't let the nutters speak, you'll never know where they are.
This is not to say that Leech and Hunsperger are, necessarily, nutters. Their remarks strike me as having been jaw-droppingly stupid, as opposed to malicious or hateful. Now - isn't it healthy that the voters in CalgaryGreenaway, Leech's riding, and Edmonton-Southwest, Hunsperger's riding, know this about their potential members of the legislative assembly, before casting their ballots?
Here's the interesting thing: Smith has worked in the media. She knows about "gotcha" stories, and she in particular knows, because of the history of the Reform Party and its move into Central Canada, how the pack handles politically incorrect or off-colour remarks by right-wing candidates: We splash them.
We do this because we are, everywhere and always, searching for news, and news with legs always has an underlying narrative. Clearly one core narrative of Wildrose is a mirror image of the one 20 years ago, when Reform candidates were forever getting themselves in hot water for saying things that struck most of us as intemperate, intolerant, racist, sexist, homophobic or otherwise inappropriate.
Smith knows all this, yet Friday she said just this, in her party's defence: "Let me be perfectly clear - a Wildrose government will not tolerate discrimination against any individual on the basis of ethnicity, religion, beliefs, background, disability or sexual orientation ... period."
Of Leech, who apologized for his remarks last week, she said this: "We believe that what happens in Alberta is when you make a mistake, you acknowledge it, you apologize for it. You move on."
Of Hunsperger, whose clanger was written in the summer of 2011 on his church blog, she said this: "He's been engaged in public service for a long time. His private, personal religious views would not interfere in his role as an MLA."
In other words: If church and state are to be truly separate, if government is to concern itself only with those things that it must concern itself with, then Hunsperger can believe anything he pleases, no matter how alien or offensive to the mainstream it may be. His notions of sexual morality should not apply to his work, any more than former U.S. president Bill Clinton's should have applied to his.
As for climate change: How can it be possible that even now, with a vigorous debate underway among climatologists about the reliability of climate models, about the still-undetermined role of solar fluctuations in determining the Earth's temperature, and about the absence of discernible global warming for the past 15 years, that any serious person can still take it as inviolable dogma that the scientific debate is past? Don't these people read?
If nothing else, Danielle Smith has shown that she has a spine, even in the 11th hour, with all the marbles riding on the outcome. I, for one, view that as a refreshing deviation from type.
Original Article
Source: the star phoenix
Author: Michael Den Tandt
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