Politics in Alberta exist in a swampy backwater. They are stagnant, and the green around the edges is not the sign of new growth, but of the algae gradually choking the life out of the political process.
This democratic decay revealed itself most recently during the last provincial election, when less than half the eligible voters in the province determined the outcome and extended the Progressive Conservative’s stranglehold on the Legislature past the 30-year mark.
The months since March 2008, little has changed. Alberta remains firmly rooted in the political right; if anything, it has shifted slightly further right, gradually becoming more fundamentalist in its positions.
Said shift has increased the alienation felt by many small ‘c’ conservatives looking for a more balanced, centrist position.
It has also created an opening for a new breed of influence peddlers and cybernaut coffee shop pundits, people who call blogs like Reboot Alberta (rebootalberta.ca) home.
Founded by former Tory inside Ken Chapman, Reboot Alberta is a discussion forum intended to discuss the future of Alberta and its political landscape in an open, inclusive format. Bloggers are trying to determine what it means to be progressive in Alberta, how to influence government and change the direction Alberta is headed in. Perhaps naively, Reboot Alberta believes social movements through technology represent the greatest hope for altering the path of Alberta; that they can be something more than an online political science class.
They might be right.
Flash mobs – using social media to invite vast groups of people to a ‘happening’ - are successful enough in parts of the U.S. the Twitter/myspace/facebook phenomena have found their way into primetime programming. But the U.S. has a bigger demographic to pull from than Alberta, and for concepts like Reboot Alberta, that could be a death knell.
Any project that exists entirely online, without a public face, is doomed. That said, 200 people showed up for a Reboot Alberta meeting in Kananaskis this March.
The challenge for Reboot (mostly disgruntled Tories), and the similarly named Renew Alberta (mostly disgruntled Liberals) will be for proponents to get out of their heads and into the heads of the average Albertan.
As evidenced by the last election, Albertans, for the most part, just don’t care about the politics of the province. Whether it’s because they’re convinced their votes don’t matter in terms of either leadership or direction, or because they’re simply not engaged by the challenges the province faces, Alberta’s voters have stayed away from the polls in droves.
For Reboot and Renew to have any real impact, membership has to find the on button for Alberta voters.
Otherwise it’s going to be just like a virus-laden computer.
Reboot it all you want. It still won’t work.
-TMac