Not all differences are created equal

We have an election going on in Alberta. The conservative party pushing hard to replace the conservative party that has run things (increasing badly) for the past 41 years has a couple of interesting promises in its bag of tricks: revise access to information laws to make information about government easier to access, and bring in whistleblower legislation to protect public workers who expose government waste or bad behaviour.

Interesting not because I ever expect to see it, but because I've heard this all before, from other parties not in power making promises about what they will do when they are in power. Then, suddenly, if and when that day arrives, they suddenly have other priorities from the back pages of the party manual, and the other stuff they were elected to deliver just has to wait its turn--in the platform of a party now in opposition.

But an item on the local news tonight put another interesting perspective on things: take the four parties most likely to elect members to the legislature, and the costs of their top few promises, and oddly enough, the whole election seems to be about how to spend $1.3 to $1.5 billion of public money to buy votes from the public. That's not all of it, obviously--just the part that is getting most of the media attention.

There was a bumper sticker around in the 1960s, as I recall: "Don't Vote. It Only Encourages Them." That, too, seems pretty self-defeating. Not voting just seems to keep them happy doing nothing, to disturb nobody. Our outgoing conservative government, the one that called the election, had a huge majority, so after years of consultation and revision, it decided not to pass a new Education Bill, because it might give the opposition conservative party too much ammunition in an election. The new Bill might have upset 5 000 families spread out throughout a province with 3.5 million people. It might also have encouraged a few thousand other voters to believe the old government was actually willing to make a difference, after years of trying very hard not to. Better not risk that. What's that line about cowards dying a thousand deaths?...  But did they have to take us with them?