This wasn't actually said on the Internet, but I dug it up on Youtube and transcribed the relevant part, so I'm putting it here. It's an excerpt from Premier of Alberta Rachel Notley's
speech at the 2016 NDP national convention in Edmonton. (Hidden for length.)
It's a bit of a tradition in my family, and certainly in our party here in Alberta, to study conservatives closely. You know, after forty-three years you can see why that might be the case.
So my father, Grant Notley, for example, had some very serious differences with the Progressive Conservative premier of his day, but, compared to what followed, you have to give Peter Lougheed credit for significant foresight. Peter Lougheed urged Albertans to act like owners of our own natural resources. He pursued a vision of a diversified and resilient economy. And he laid the foundation for many of the social services we enjoy in Alberta today.
Now I didn't agree with Premier Lougheed's party politics all the time or with many--most--of his decisions, but I do believe that he was always fundamentally honest with voters. But let me offer you what I think might be a little bit of an understatement. I would suggest this, that today's conservatives are a very different proposition, at least in this province.
Today's conservatives don't dare run on what they really believe in. And, you know, in a way, I kind of sympathize, I kind of sympathize with them. Because what do they have to work with, really? They want to fire nurses and teachers and make pay and working conditions worse for those who remain. They want to impose mean-spirited and self-defeating conditions on the poor when they need a hand up, and they want to ignore them otherwise. They want to invest more and more into the only social program that it seems they do support: prisons. And they want to privatize public services, because what social services can't, what social services can't benefit from diverting ten or twenty percent of the budget to insiders, shareholders, and senior managers? There are no forests they don't want to cut, there are no streams they don't want to foul, there is nothing sacred or important about our climate or our land or our water, or at least, at least there is nothing that we should be doing, they believe, to protect any of these things since every environmental measure is always opposed by today's conservatives while also, in many cases, denying the science, or, trying to muzzle the scientists.
And then there is that great and almost historically unprecedented reverse-Robin Hood theft that today's conservatives are all about, their big idea, that every possible benefit and every support for families, for the poor, for the middle class, must be cut to the bone to pay for tax cuts for rich people, leading to the grotesque levels of inequality that we see sometimes growing around us today with all its social and economic consequences. So if today's conservatives were being honest about what they really stood for, I don't think that too many people would vote for them.
So since, so since they can't campaign on what they really want to do, what do they do? Well, we got a look at that in the federal election. They make the issue what women are allowed to wear. They make the issue cracking down on fellow citizens if they are from other countries or if they profess non-Christian faiths or if they came here as refugees trying to escape persecution and terror. Our Conservative opponents made the issue the personal destruction of their opponents. They make the issue how many donuts got ordered and how much got spent on coffee. They hide behind focus-group slogans like "We're all about the economy" as if making most people poorer and worse off is good for the economy. Anything, anything, as long as it isn't a debate about what they really stand for and what they really want to do.
Once every once in a while, the mask slips and we see their real face, like Donald Trump, for instance, the real face of North American populist conservatism with the mask off, along with the little failed Donald Trump mini-mes who pop up in Canada every now and then.
My friends, let me be very, very clear. There are many good people in conservative parties. You know, I mean, I've lived in Alberta for a long time and I know many many of them. There are some admirable roots in Canada's long tradition of progressive conservatism, and maybe, at some point, our blue friends will find their way back to those roots. But based, but based on what the Conservatives put before the people of Canada in the most federal, recent federal election, based on the angry, raging, talk-about-anything-but-what-we'd-actually-do performance that we get from our conservative oppositions here in Alberta, I'd say our conservative friends, at least in this province, are going to try everything else first, which is why they so richly deserve defeat.
There were some other good speeches delivered by
Stephen Lewis (former Ontario NDP leader, son of former federal NDP leader David Lewis) and
Thomas Mulcair (outgoing federal NDP leader).