Illustrration by Jill Stanton

Big Ideas

In the coming weeks, News Editor Angela Brunschot will look at emerging ideas around democratic and party reform in Alberta. This week, she talks with Alvin Finkel about the Democratic Renewal Project. Next week, hear why former Green Party candidate Edwin Erickson wants to start a new party.

Watching Alberta elections is lot like watching a hockey team that’s already been eliminated from the play-offs — those who love the institution are left pulling their hair out in frustration, and unbelievers just change the channel.

That’s how Alvin Finkel, an Athabasca University teacher, historian, and long-time NDPer expresses the apathy he sees in Alberta voters. He first clued into it when his son, a tradesman living in the downtown area, said he already knew how the 2008 election was going to turn out, so why should he bother watching? He’s part of the 60 per cent majority who didn’t cast a ballot last March.  

And that’s what prompted Finkel to get together with a small group of other frustrated anti-government people to form the Democratic Renewal Project.

The project’s main aim is to get Alberta’s opposition parties to engage in a high-level trading deal to create a super team of opposition opponents, with the idea that if there’s an actual competition, more Albertans will get out and vote, and the legislature will more closely represent the views of Albertans.  (And frankly, Finkel wants the Tories out.)

He’s calling for the centre and centre-left to work together long before the next election, and however many elections it takes thereafter to beat the Tories, by formally deciding which parties run in which ridings, and agree not to run against one another in some cases. This “carving up the province in a gentlemanly way,” as he puts it, would allow the three parties to use their resources to the best possible advantage.

Once the Tories are out, the Liberal government supported by the NDP can implement proportional representation, a system of electing governments that takes into consideration the votes cast for candidates and parties that did not win the riding.

Then they never have to work together again.

“Right now, people have the illusion of choice,” he says. “That’s not democracy.”

Finkel’s solution isn’t exactly new, but it is controversial. In the 2008 election, the federal Liberals agreed not to run a candidate in Central-Nova, where Green Party Leader Elizabeth May attempted to take out Tory Defense Minister Peter McKay.

That particular scenario didn’t work out as planned, but there is an excellent example of how strategic voting (rather than party co-operation) has worked right here in our own backyard. Linda Duncan won in the 2008 federal election because she was supported by people from other parties that saw her as a better alternative to Conservative Rahim Jaffer.

But Duncan had a huge organization, and that just isn’t possible across the entire province, says Finkel. Neither the Alberta Liberals nor the NDP have the resources to pull that off.

Neither the Liberals nor the NDP have agreed to work together. And it might never happen officially. Even though new Liberal Leader David Swann has talked about working with other parties, he hasn’t reached out to the NDP in the way Finkel is suggesting.

And Finkel may be a member of the NDP, but the party isn’t warming to his ideas. At the last NDP convention, the idea of working with the Liberals was shot down. The federal NDP and the provincial party are linked, so there’s little chance of co-operation.

It’s not just the top-level that’s against it. For Deron Bilous, the NDP candidate for Edmonton-Centre in the 2008 provincial election, it’s the formal agreement part that turns his stomach. He’s a true orange New Democrat, who consistently shrugs off any talk of co-operating with the Liberals by talking about his social values. He also ran in a riding with a long-serving and popular Liberal incumbent because that’s where he lives. He sees any move to eliminate choices for voters at the ballot box as undemocratic.

He points out there’s already a natural selection process that parties go though anyway, and parties often decide not to run against very strong candidates. “Do the Liberals run their star-candidates against Brian Mason and Rachel Notley? I doubt it,” he says.

(He can’t say yet whether or not he will take on Laurie Blakeman in Edmonton-Centre in the next provincial election, or chose a more vulnerable opponent.)

As for the rest of the NDPers, the party has never really bought into the idea that they are splitting the left vote. As Brian Mason once told SEE: “The whole vote-splitting issue is just misinformation,” he says. “If anything, the Liberals split our vote.”

Tell that to Bruce Miller, who lost by 134 votes in Edmonton-Glenora in 2008. His NDP competition Arlene Chapman gathered 1,743 votes. Green Party candidate Peter Johnston received 416 votes.

And there lies one of the sketchy parts of Finkel’s thinking. Would voters switch from an NDP candidate to a Liberal candidate, or vise-versa? The answer isn’t as straightforward as you would think. A Strategic Council poll done for the Globe and Mail before the 2008 Alberta election shows that to voters the Liberals and the NDP are not interchangeable.

Among Liberal voters, 30 per cent said their second choice was Conservative. And even of the traditionally left-of-centre NDP voters, 21 per cent said they’d vote Conservative, and 42 per cent said they’d vote Liberal.

But Finkel doesn’t see it that way. If the Liberals and the NDP did work together, the whole election would change. The dynamic of the leadership debate would be completely different.  “The three parties on the left are not different in any real way,” he says. “They may be different in the minds of their leaders, but they are not different in their policies.”

The opposition can cling to their brands as hard as they want, he says, but if they approach the next election with the same old tactics, the election will be a foregone conclusion. And voters are just going to switch channels.

“You want to watch a real game, something where there’s a contest,” he says. “That’s what’s missing in this province. There’s no contest.”