A pale likeness of compassionate conservativism

By Lethbridge Herald on November 12, 2025.

Peter Heffernan
For the Herald

In 1979, Progressive Conservatives (PCs) in the government of long-serving Peter Lougheed, introduced legislation creating a program called AISH, the first of its kind in Canada. Having shown the way of more equitable treatment of its disabled and among its most vulnerable fellow citizens, generous-spirited Albertans supported this and then observed every other provincial jurisdiction in Canada adopt similar programs. 

Decades later, then local MLA, fairness-guided and visionary Bridget Pastoor of another PC government, saw that AISH recipients, though they had received intermittent increases were, unlike beneficiaries of other social safety net programs, unprotected from the biting sting of and falling dramatically behind inflation (i.e., Alberta’s most vulnerable were again getting ever poorer). 

That government then introduced legislation to fund AISH in the same manner as all other such programs, CPI-indexed. 

While there have been hiccoughs since, AISH at this time remains, perhaps precariously, indexed. Hope-inducing, but don’t drop your guard. 

Totalitarian tendencies have emerged even in governments in democracies worldwide. As prevailing conservative sentiment remains strong in Alberta voters, a different, almost unrecognizable brand of what is a pale likeness of formerly compassionate conservatism creeped in in the dark of night, hijacked the party and nixed voters’ real priorities. While there is literally a litany of offensive gestures legislated (or in process) showing Albertans the middle finger, with apologies to other hurt and wounded Albertans, here we remain focussed on AISH. 

A substantive majority of my neighbours and fellow citizens throughout this great province are proudly Canadian and, in that vein, caring and sharing. Yet, few voices other than those of the NDP official opposition in Alberta and a groundswell of social workers who know, understand and observe on the ground everyday the plight of Alberta’s disabled poor, God bless them, have been heard denouncing the currently oddly-monikered, divide-and-conquer ”United” Conservative Party’s (UPC’s) seemingly conspiratorially-inspired and utterly uninformed ADAB proposals and, particularly, its mean-spirited 100 percent clawback of the federal government’s Canada Disability Benefit, a well-intentioned, albeit modest hand-up to disabled persons Canada-wide. 

This clawback nets $185 million (77,000 X $2,400) per annum for Alberta’s treasury, taken directly from the pockets of the severely disabled and poorest, without any certainty it will be used for anything other than mad hatter schemes, of which we have witnessed many (from facilitating the tearing asunder of our beloved Canada and turning a blind eye to the desecration of our national flag to outrageous and misguided opting out of constitutionally protected rights of workers to negotiate and, in the perceived absence of show of good faith, to strike). 

Right minded taxpayers’ dollars are being wasted and, worse, our peace of mind and time of day are being stolen from under our noses. CBC’s The National ran a piece on Nov. 3 about Cuban foreign workers in Canada alleging the totalitarian Cuban state claws back 80 percent of the wages such workers earn at Sheritt International in Canada. If this is proven (the case has a convincing ring), it is troubling. Yet, the difference in clawback at 80 percent is not as jaw-dropping as the increasingly totalitarian-oriented UPC’s 100 percent from Alberta’s severely disabled. As despair-inducing as this is for the severely disabled (as has been reported), thus far it has induced only screaming silence and what comes across as indifference from Albertans who are both able and also comfortable. Dismayingly, this includes such stalwarts of proactive moral conscience as the leadership of Alberta’s institutional religions of all stripes. 

I am a follower of Christ. I’ll leave it to the remaining others of other institutional religious affiliations to take account of and search to remedy how their faith communities’ leadership are or are not objecting to overtly discriminatory treatment, in law and in practice, by Alberta’s elected servants of its (by definition and determined by intensive screening) severely disabled, among its poorest. 

Closing thought: If leaders of such arbiter institutions of moral conscience genuinely aspire or purport to be ever present in our world to advance goodness and light and champion compassion, they risk becoming irrelevant sideshows when, as the current and last popes have warned over and over again, they carefully curate what in human life warrants indignation and what is given an easy pass. Which human lives matter, and which don’t. I remind and, deferentially and in humility, ask them: “The Lord hears the cry of the poor.” Shouldn’t we? And so, what do we do?

Dr. Peter Heffernan is a professor of modern languages in the Faculty of Education at the University of Lethbridge.