Quote:
Originally Posted by Resolute 14
Oh come now, IFF. We both know you are smarter than that. Nobody said anything about disregarding the last 50 years, but it remains convenient that you chose to disregard the first 50 years.
As you allude to later, experience and competence are not synonyms. Ed Stelmach and Rob Anders are experienced politicians. How many here do you think would consider either of them competent?
In the end, I think you are both right, just arguing from different angles. Alberta is a province ruled by dynasties, but when it decides to change, it changes in a big hurry, and it doesn't much care how much political experience the MLAs it elects have.
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Well, I do think that the last 50 years are more important in terms of identifying voter tendencies than the 50 years before that. But... as you suggest, we really don't disagree that much, apart from what we may call a semantic difference between individual experience and "party" experience. My view of it is that since the 1960s, Alberta has never elected a premier who had not been an MLA first.
And that doesn't mean it won't happen now--just that it hasn't happened before. If unprecedented things never happened, we wouldn't have a word for them.