Editorial—Political Theatre Class

We continue to approach the United Conservative Party’s leadership review on April 9th here in Alberta, and as we approach, more information is coming out about Premier Kenney’s close involvement with what’s been called a kamikaze campaign.  In the process bringing him closer to the campaign finances that have already been the cause of many fines levied.

He goes there propped by a war-driven price of oil that’s provided a significant surplus in the budget and a plan to try to bring gas prices down by temporarily ending Alberta’s $0.13/litre gasoline taxes, while at the same time chastising the federal government for their approximately $0.09/litre carbon tax.

With attendance at the review promising to significantly exceed earlier expectations, it has been decided to move the voting from being in person to via email and other means that are, coincidentally enough, the same means as those during the leadership campaign that the RCMP continues to investigate because of allegations of fraud and possible identity theft by none other than Jason Kenney’s campaign team.

Meanwhile, in the United States, republican politicians are grilling the Supreme Court nominee of Joe Biden, with accusations of everything from her being soft on child molestation to being too far away from the normal public (as in, too educated and too qualified (and, the suspicion goes, too black and too female)) to be able to be a good choice for the general public on their supreme court.  This despite how some of the very same republicans were, during the previous administration, praising her and suggesting she be made the nominee.

Vladamir Putin attempts to justify his invasion of the Ukraine as being to fight rising Nazi sentiments in the country, while simultaneously shelling the homes of those of those who devoted their lives to ensuring that the memory of Nazi crimes were never forgotten.

It’s like they’re not even trying to put up a pretense of governing to help citizens anymore. Less so with most politics here (aside from the UCP) than in the United States, but still starting to rear it’s ugly head, where the point of politics—attempting to design good policy for the most people in a world where few people are the same—has been forgotten in the simple attempts to create political theatre.

And the sad thing is that the system itself has no means of thwarting this type of behavior.  So long as a significant portion of the populace is satisfied with a goal to “make Liberals cry again!” as Donald Trump Jr. encouraged crowds at his father’s rallies, so long as a significant portion of the population proudly holds “ABC—Anybody But Conservatives” as their rally cry, things aren’t getting any better.  The party system has caused a split, where the idea of which team you’re on has become more important to many people than what the people in that team are actually doing.

And that’s because finding out the scandal, the newsbite, the poorly thought out comment or fodder for the editorial cartoon is easy, but actually examining the issues is hard and takes time. And the 24 hour news cycle, oddly, has no time to get in depth on the issues that actually matter because they don’t have a punch line and can’t be explained in the time between commercials.  And if they don’t have the time, then we have to make it.  Anything less and we get, well, what we see.

Meanwhile, bunch of good stuff this week, our Features, Fly on the Wall, recipes, scholarships, advice, and more.   Enjoy the read!