Excerpt from Alberta Politics Uncovered:
Copyright Mark Lisac 2004, ISBN 189630091X, NeWest Press.

Rural Alberta looks at the outside world as a source of economic opportunities and exploits those opportunities with ingenuity and energy. It also sees itself besieged. The pressure squeezes in on everything from ideas for more economically efficient delivery of health care to the prospects for individual landowners in an age of economic globalization. One old farmer from northern Alberta said in early 2000: “These are the only people that are going to be left – Monsanto, Cargill, and IBM.” He was a traditional Conservative supporter, not a New Democrat. . . .

Two decades earlier, western alienation had a different source. Its most vivid expression was anger over the 1980 National Energy Program. All through the small main streets of Alberta’s towns and villages, however, other forces were at play. If you had travelled through rural Alberta in the spring of 1982, when heads were being turned by the sudden appearance of the Western Canada Concept party, you would have seen the trailing edges of an older world. It was a world in which couples in their 80s would pull out scrapbooks and show mementoes of what life had been like when farming in their area was just getting going in the 1920s. It was a world where a burly, white-haired man who stopped for a sidewalk conversation could recall coming to Alberta as a child by crossing a still open prairie in a horse-drawn wagon that his father drove from North Dakota.

It was a world where the remnants of William Aberhart’s and Ernest Manning’s Bible Belt still survived. Every town had shops with small posters in their windows advertising evangelical meetings. If you hit a place on the right day, you could attend a lecture at which wide-eyed and flummoxed local men were told that the Bolsheviks had infiltrated Canada’s civil service in the 1920s, and the line of their influence could be traced through Lester Pearson down to Pierre Trudeau.

But most of all, it was a world with a sense of impending loss. These were not just people who had seen their financial drams crashing in the 19800s, although one man in a Taber beer parlour pulled his latest bank receipt out of his pocket to show a reporter that his balance was down to nine cents. They were people who suddenly had to cope with seeing all sorts of public signs in French and thinking their children would have no chance of a job in Ottawa because French was not a language you could easily learn here. They were people whose lives were ordered in the grids set out in regular patterns of 160 acres and of square miles that had suddenly turned into metric fractions because someone in Ottawa had had a bright idea. Some of them still mourned the loss of the Canadian ensign flag.

They were losing, it seemed, everything that had made their lives certain and safe. That has been the rural condition in the West. It creates a separate set of political attitudes.

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