"Unite the left": a response to daveberta

There's nothing more predictable than Canadians talking about party mergers after an election where things didn't go their way, and this Alberta election has been no different. I mostly ignore that kind of talk--I think so drastically differently about this sort of thing that there's simply no common ground for conversation. But daveberta has a thoughtful post about the topic that's at least worth addressing, even though I can't agree with a lot of it. So here's a response to each of his six points, one by one.

1. Bad blood. I completely agree that there's a lot of unnecessary bad blood between the Alberta Liberals and the Alberta NDP--when one party is openly calling the other "irrelevant" and the other party is equating the first party with their archrivals, there's not much room for détente. But bad blood isn't the only obstacle to a merger, or even the biggest one. The only reason to ever merge parties is when there are negligible, if any, differences between them (the Wild Rose Party and the Alberta Alliance spring to mind). It's never a good idea to merge parties when the party memberships have very different opinions about all sorts of things, and there is a world of difference, both policy-wise and party-culturally, between the Alberta Liberals and the Alberta NDP.

2. It's aiming at the wrong target. Dave tells us that "with voter turnout at 41%, I'd be willing to suggest that all the parties are scraping the bottom of their support-levels and need to look at the 59% of non-voting Albertans for growth." I completely agree. The first response to this election, for all parties, needs to be to figure out who those non-voters are and why they're not voting. There have been a lot of hypotheses tossed around about that, but at this point, that's all they are.

3. Pass the vote. Dave argues that a merged party could easily occupy a much smaller part of the political spectrum, and leave a lot of Albertans without a party to vote for. I couldn't agree with this more strongly. Trying to unify such diverse groups under one big tent, even if it were to work, would marginalize a whole big whack of Albertans. This might not matter to those whose political opinions would be encompassed by the hypothetical new party, but believe me, it matters to the rest of us. We can't let that kind of kludge fix be our response to a very real problem.

4. Greens on the left? Dave argues that the Alberta Greens--especially the 22% of voters in Lacombe-Ponoka who gave the party its biggest non-victory victory yet--are not actually very left-wing. I agree with that, and furthermore, I'd argue that this has to be okay with those of us who are left-wing. Trying to shoehorn them into models that work for us but don't work for them is neither fair nor productive.

5. Different aims. Dave says that "it's clear that the Alberta Liberals are in it to form government, but I'm not sure that's the same goal of the New Democrats." I wouldn't phrase it this way at all, but I do think he's on to something. In fact, I'd argue that nothing epitomizes this difference more than his statement that "party archetypes in both camps really need to put aside their biases and prejudices and take a serious and objective look at why their parties are not connecting with Albertans." What am I (or for that matter, what is he), chopped liver?

It has always been a puzzle for me that Canadians in big-tent parties assume that a party that never gets the largest share of the vote "isn't connecting with the people." In fact, if you add up the ~10% of the vote the Alberta NDP tends to take and the ~28% of the vote the Alberta Liberals tend to take, that's a good 38% of Albertans who suddenly don't count as "people" in sentences like those. And I have to say, this attitude is especially frustrating for me as someone who's lived in a country like Germany, where parties like the Greens (at 8%) and the Free Democrats (at 10%) would never think they need to raise their vote totals to 40% or more or else give up entirely on representing the people who support what they believe in.

In any case, the notion that the NDP "doesn't want power" is a silly one--all political parties want power. But "power" is a much larger concept than "forming a majority government all by our little selves." There are lots of models for taking power, and even forming government, that don't require that. By that token, my big recommendation on this front is to think outside the box. Which might well mean looking beyond the borders of this country for possible answers and thereby moving outside of our comfortable Canadian merger-utopia narratives.

6. First-past-the-post. I have to nitpicky-quibble with Dave's talk of changing the system to "STV or PR" (proportional representation is a category of electoral systems, of which STV is one specific example), but I do agree with the sentiment. The only long-term, non-kludge fix to the problem of representation in Alberta is electoral reform. It's is the only thing that's going to make our legislature look like what we actually vote for. Shoehorning in a kludge fix when there's a legitimately available real fix is like tying your car's engine together with twine.

On the other hand, since electoral reform isn't going to happen tomorrow, the short-term solution to making our legislature look a lot more like what Albertans want to vote for isn't fewer parties on the left, but more parties on the right. Right now, the PCs stand for very little other than keeping themselves in power, and they're such a big tent that the actual right in Alberta feels completely alienated. Like it or not, those people deserve to have a party they can really support, too--and it would have the additional advantage of levelling the first-past-the-post playing field a lot more. It wouldn't be perfectly representative, but it would be more so than what we have, in the short term.