Alison Wonderland

"Nothing but a pack of cards!"
Illustration by Sir John Tenniel (public domain)

Phil Burpee, Comment

     This is where we live – Alison Wonderland, aka Alberta. It is patently a place that exists through the ‘looking glass’, as the Limeys would have it, or mirror as normal folk such as ourselves would say. Yes, there is indeed a place somewhere on the other side of the mirror where a whole world exists behind the normal reflections of ourselves that we would expect to see every morning over the bathroom sink.
And it is a place wherein the normal and accepted laws of physics and nature are summarily suspended and replaced by fantastical hallucinations and a general bending and twisting of what we might otherwise call reality. Things get unaccountably smaller and/or bigger, grinning cats become invisible, playing cards dance and cavort, crazy queens command beheadings, a frantic rabbit is forever late for something, tea is served by a demented milliner, a horrible dream state persists where running gets you nowhere - all allegorically, and frighteningly, reminiscent of the legislative and industrial matrix within which the so-called policy apparatus of this province devolves. Our Premier apparently lives in this wonderland, forever rushing rabbit-like hither and yon, tucking that unruly lank of red hair behind her ear, proclaiming the holy writ of the Patch, and enjoining anyone who will listen to forget everything they ever learned about planetary mechanics and long-term socio-economic planning, and instead swallow the old adage of the drug pusher – “Go on, try some – it won’t hurt ya. And hey – ya won’t get hooked…………promise.”


     Geez. What a waste. For the first time since the tenure of the late and lamented Peter Lougheed we actually have a Premier with an ostensibly functioning brain who is culturally and intellectually lodged firmly in the modern world, a lawyer, a mother, an internationalist, sharp, witty, clearly no glad sufferer of fools – someone who could easily be a pivotal driver of social and economic evolution towards a diversified and sustainable new tomorrow - and what do we have her doing?.........trundling around the world peddling sludge to anybody who will buy, dangling donuts and poutines, as it were, in front of the faces of hopeless overeaters, spewing half-truths and distortions as though they were facts, and gibbering wildly about ‘environmental responsibility’ and ‘ideologically-acceptable energy sources’ and ‘unfettered market access’. It’s a sad spectacle. And even though I have long perceived the Tories to be unrepentant dolts, I find myself feeling sorry for Ms. Redford. She campaigned solidly and frankly, embodying a flicker of hope that the 42 year tenure of the Alberta PCs might actually be about to do something astonishing – viz. become attuned to broader realities. It was not to be. She quickly found herself to be captaining a ratship – a wallowing tub of lies and ineptitude and entitlement and cynicism. Any messages she might have sent down to the engine room for course change were summarily ignored, and more coal/bitumen was shovelled hastily instead into the boilers for FULL SPEED AHEAD – DAMN THE TYPHOONS! By the time she realized that the crew was not only inept but openly mutinous, the ship of state had ploughed grimly far, far, farther into the gathering storm. And the captain had been irredeemably co-opted into plumping for the incessant flushing of the bilges into the turbulent and troubled waters.

     It need not have come to this. We need not have become the increasingly reviled pariah that is now Alberta and Canada on the world stage. Alison Redford had sufficient political capital following the last provincial election to have stared down the troglodytes and fixers in the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta. All the old boys who had lined up against her leadership bid had to come cap-in-hand after the election to recoup their plum cabinet seats. For a brief moment, she had the Machine by its short and curlies, and a mandate from the electorate to be neither Ralph Klein (why even mention Steady Eddie?) nor Danielle Smith – ie. not a pathetic lacky and wagging lapdog of Big Oil. Mr. Klein, of course, had long since become a ludicrous caricature – slovenly, uncaring, arrogant, and generally ill-equipped to provide credible governance. Ms. Smith had utterly failed to quell the upwelling of cretinous nutbars, the much-vaunted ‘bozo-eruptions’, that infested her party’s bid, apparently so as not to either upset her constituents or compromise her libertarian sensibilities. She reaped the rewards accordingly and squandered the slam-dunk opportunity to form government (whew!). Now we see her desperately trying to return to electability – which is more or less to say – become a Tory. At least one suspects that Ms. Redford is occasionally stung by the sense of irony implicit in her current role as travelling snake-oil salesperson. Ms. Smith and her cadres seem utterly humourless, however, and intent only on access to power.

     History will surely judge Ms. Redford, and us, very, very harshly. The sight of her parlaying over tea with the invidious Christy Clark of British Columbia was painful. The spectre of Ms. Clark, who has surrounded herself with sycophants and right-wing ideologues, grinning expansively over the progress of the proceedings was queasy-making to say the least. Clearly Ms. Clark’s apparent resistance to the Northern Gateway pipeline prior to the last election was merely tactical and contrived. She is now seen to be catering to her true power base – populist simpletons and conniving capitalists. And lest it be said that she is merely being shrewd, it ought to be noted that she is positioning British-Columbia’s economic well-being for the next generation on the marketing of liquefied natural gas (LNG) on the world market just at a time when the supply of LNG is exploding worldwide and the price for same is plummeting, and is not expected to recover in any substantive way for the next several decades – quite the business acumen. Similarly, Premier Redford continues to predicate the economic well-being of Alberta on the purveyance of heavy bitumen to, especially and particularly, the Americans and the Chinese – two economic and political behemoths who are inexorably intertwined by dint of China’s holding the note for the U.S.’s multi-trillion dollar debt – ie. China owns the U.S. dollar. So the best that can be said is that Alberta wheedles and whines to be favoured with the opportunity to enable the two primary engines of anthropogenic carbon transfer to tip the balance of atmospheric CO2 beyond what is now perceived to be an imminent and potentially irreversible threshold. Wow! – go big or go home, huh?

     If there were any viable mechanism of global governance, beyond the sham that has become the UN, this would clearly be an indictable offence and punishable under the remit of the International Criminal Court. Marshals would be sent to bundle Ms. Redford into a paddy wagon and place her in the dock for crimes against humanity – for it is increasingly recognized that the concerted proliferation of hydrocarbon extraction has become, and is becoming ever moreso, a human rights issue. Transferring a volatile and extremely dangerous environmental debt not only onto the heads of fellow citizens of this world who inhabit areas particularly susceptible to climatic extremes, but also onto the heads of future generations as yet unborn, truly beggars belief. For law is nothing other than the codification of morality, with appropriate strictures and punishments applied thereto. Our descendants will gaze in disbelief, dismay and horror at the vision of early twenty-first century Canadians slavering at the prospect of gaining access to an obscene wealth by extracting even further oil and gas from under the rapidly-melting Arctic ice-cap, whose very melting is itself the direct result of current and previous extractive activities, and whose weight of concomitant suffering visited upon a beleaguered world is already beyond measure. Our shame will know no end – and they will curse our bones.

     In the late ‘60s and ‘70s there was a delightful, and insightful, old comic strip called Odd Bodkins, by Dan O’Neill. In it the characters would sometimes discuss the respective merits of Magic Cookie Land, which was a euphemism at the time for LSD – a popular and contentious psychotropic drug. But it can likewise refer to any drugged or persistently unreal state of being. One of the characters asked of another – “Why can’t we just stay in Magic Cookie Land?” “It cost too much,” said the other. “We can’t afford the price.” Of course ‘the price’ isn’t money – it’s sanity. And given that Albert Einstein famously cited the definition of insanity as ‘doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’, one might well ascribe the repetition of proven nonsense as belonging rightfully in the loony bin.

     So, a fair argument can be made to the effect that our Premier is acting in ways which indicate a faulty grasp on the general indicators of reality. Five times now she has packed her power-point down to Washington in concerted attempts to undo the effects of a deep aversion on the part of tens of millions of people in the U.S. to any further reliance on the widely-reviled, deleterious and carbon-heavy product that oozes out of the Athabasca tarsands. This requires not only a shim-shammery sleight of hand, but also a dogged dumbing-down and/or direct misappropriation of terminology, as well as an all-too-familiar Harperesque assault on science and empirical analysis.

     Yes, she could have been our Joan of Arc, our Aung San Suu Kyi, our Wonder Woman. But instead she is just a spinny-headed little girl, bouncing around in addled confusion in the Hall of Mirrors that is the world of climate-change denial. If only she had pulled a rock over that rabbit-hole – if only, if only. I suppose she should feel shame, but it is a peculiarity of the drugged state to relate only to the fleeting euphoria, along with a certain twitchy concern for the availability of the next dose.

     I say again – what a waste. Oh, Alison, Alison, Alison…………..

Phil Burpee
November 17, 2013