UCP and NDP need to reach out to other voters

By Lethbridge Herald on October 25, 2024.

LEAVE IT TO BEEBER
Al Beeber – Managing Editor

I’ve always believed journalists are supposed to show impartiality in politics. While we certainly have the right – and a democratic obligation – to vote we need to keep our political leanings private lest anyone accuse us of bias.

And we all know how often on social media, at coffee shops and watering holes and in letters to the editor,the media is accused of bias. 

Most of those accusations are unfair, the attacks coming because people object to the tenor of a story that doesn’t reflect their own particular viewpoints.

But there are times when bias does happen. I’ve seen it and heard reporters express openly their political affiliations which has been evident in the coverage of a few reporters over the years. And the operative word is ‘few,’ because most journalists in my 44 years plus in the news industry have strived to be fair.

Those of us who write columns will express our political views – if we have them – in a forum such as this which is clearly an opinion column but we’ll also go the extra mile while covering politics to make sure we are fair, giving balanced perspectives of political issues from a range of viewpoints. We need to, we have to.

When I was in my 20s, I spent a lot of mornings at what was known as a coffee klatch with two Ontario politicians who were cousins of the motel owner whose lobby a few of us would gather in every morning including our paper’s advertising manager, the Fort Frances mayor, a houseboat company owner, a teacher and former hockey coach, and others.

Those two politicians, Pat and John Reid, just happened to be Liberals, Pat who represented his riding in the Ontario legislature and John his in Parliament. During the mid-1980s, Pat and I did a lot of talking about issues affecting Northwestern Ontario, including the tourism industry which was highly dependent upon American fishermen and hunters crossing the border to hunt and fish in Canada. 

But with a huge boundary water and virtually no regulations regarding where visitors could stay, there were real issues about tourism revenue being lost by resorts and natural resources being plundered, especially by fishermen who could scoot quickly back across to the Minnesota side of Rainy Lake and Lake of the Woods after filling their boats full of Ontario walleye without having to buy licences as long as they didn’t actually land on shore or stay in Canada. And they didn’t have to stay at a hotel, motel, resort or campground. They could just park anywhere on Crown land, often leaving behind piles of garbage in the wilderness.

The Reid brothers made an impression on me because they had perspectives that seemed balanced. They  didn’t overtly lean to the left, they certainly weren’t rightists,  they came across as being central.

And to me, that central perspective is what’s too often missing in politics now. I’ve written before here that there is a population in Alberta who don’t feel their viewpoints are reflected by a party in Alberta that has a chance of getting elected.

That lack of balance is why I won’t be voting in the West Lethbridge by-election when one is called. I’m not going to throw away a vote just because it’s my democratic duty. I’m not going to grapple with my conscience about putting an X beside a party that has some good points but not enough for me to endorse it with a vote.

And both the NDP and UCP do have merits in their political platforms, strong merits – which should get howls of objections from their respective opponents – but they do. But both have perspectives that may be problematic to voters who feel disenfranchised because a more centrist option doesn’t exist, or at least one doesn’t exist that has a chance of being elected as government.

From this perspective, if the NDP wants to attract a wider audience it needs to get Gil McGowan and the Alberta Federation of Labour more into its fold. Gil made some really good points when I interviewed him during his run for the NDP leadership about how the party has moved away from its worker roots. I think he’s right. 

The party that once was the home of the working class fighting for fair wages and humane hours is now often associated – right or wrong – with those whose stands on social issues quite frankly are contrasted by their own financial prosperity and job security.

The NDP needs to listen more to the working stiff struggling to make ends meet, who think they should given the same hand up that others are offered, the working Joes and Janes who see their disposable income decrease while costs rise. 

In case the NDP didn’t notice, a lot of Albertans have issues with the so-called supervised consumption sites which were dumped upon communities under their rule. A lot do support the UCP’s approach to recovery-based treatment. 

As a person who has written in the past about my own family’s battles, I tend to support that UCP approach because enabling is no answer to combating society’s ills.  If recovery isn’t the point of an addictions strategy, why have one at all? 

I remember as a teen contemplating the addictions problems destroying my family when I had my sights set on a career in social work. Material I read and studied in that era suggested people whose lives are directly affected by an addict don’t have to let the addict destroy others lives in addition to their own. There comes a point when people have to separate themselves from the addict and the addict’s harm. Should that be the case with society as a whole as well as individuals?

With that said, we can’t ignore the trauma being faced by those battling addictions and need to show compassion towards them. As a person who as a child often slept outside in family cars, the lawn in the backyard, or even on a picnic table on school nights to get rest from the demons destroying members of my family inside, I’ve seen first-hand what enabling an addict does. It destroys lives, it destroys families, it destroys self-esteem and it destroys the mental health of others who have to live with the addict. 

And as we know mental unwellness and addictions are often inter-twined.

 Enabling an addict simply expands the territory of the addict’s destruction, that destruction which I guarantee has impacted me for my entire life as I’ve fought to succeed and put my family’s ills behind – their alcoholism and mental illness, which have taken a toll on me.

But for me the buck stops with me. And I have serious concerns when people dismiss a recovery approach to addictions treatment, instead just talking about harm reduction. I struggle to see how harm is reduced when addicts are given the tools to help themselves die. To me, that’s tantamount to assisted suicide. And suicide whether by drug or razor blade – or combinations of the two as I had to deal with during a parent’s suicide attempts before I was even in my teens – is still suicide.

And nobody who hasn’t been forced to try to stop a wasted parent from bleeding out in a bathroom sink as I did at 10 years old has no business telling me I know nothing about addictions and self-harm. Trust me, I know.

And don’t talk to me about harm reduction unless like me, you spent your childhood hiding pills, booze, razors and knives from a parent! Trust me, I know all about harm reduction, too!

But addicts do need support systems, including those who don’t want to seek help or aren’t ready. To let them just die alone on the streets is inhumane, as well.

 I truly understand the need, based on my own family’s history, to find ways of working with people to minimize the damage to themselves. Which in turn minimizes damage to others. 

In either case, one singular approach isn’t necessarily the answer as we saw under the NDP’s stewardship of this province. Perhaps the UCP’s way isn’t the only way but at least it acknowledges the importance of recovery. Of hope. Of personal responsibility and accountability.

If the NDP were willing to acknowledge that its approach didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, undecided voters or UCP voters might consider giving them support in the next election, either in the West Lethbridge byelection or provincially. 

If they showed true support for the low wage earner, the blue-collar person footing the tax bills for all the social programs Albertans need, they might get more votes.  And they need to quit blaming the UCP entirely for the physician shortage which has been going on in Canada for many years, long before the UCP even came into existence. We wrote stories on it many years before the UCP even came into existence. It’s a problem that has been ongoing across this country for a long time.

But the UCP needs to acknowledge its own failings and get the doctor’s comprehensive care model signed, sealed and delivered. The government needs to actually show it cares about the the health of its residents and give health care professionals reason to stay in this province. Quit fighting and show some leadership on health care. Give health care professionals a reason to stay here so every Albertan can have a family doctor again!

While the premier said Monday night the province needs to find savings in the doctors’ budget why not take a different approach and perhaps increase the so-called beer tax to help pay for budgetary shortages? Why not up the gas tax a cent a litre to increase revenue to pay for the much-needed doctors in this province? 

Why delay? We need doctors and we need them now. And a targeted tax increase could raise the money needed to pay for the doctors’ budget.

The UCP also needs to drop its efforts to scrap the Canada Pension Plan. It works and it works well. The last thing Albertans need right now is any more financial insecurity. Just quit wasting time and money and act upon issues that truly matter to the province – like climate change, inflation, quality education, doctors and crime.

Residents who feel disenfranchised politically in Alberta have told me these are some of their concerns with these parties, too. But will either listen?

 If they truly care about Alberta and its future, both the UCP and NDP need to pay heed to a wider spectrum of Albertans. 

All political parties need to listen to all of their constituents. All need to fair, be open-minded and be leaders!