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Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan

Let's be clear: the Alberta Dividend is silly pandering to Dave-Rutherford conservatives who buy the whole "I know what to do with my money better than the government" line. The Tories did the same thing not too many years back, and for the exact same reason: to buy your vote. I'm not going to pretend my vote isn't for sale, but it costs more than an iPad.

At its worse, it’s good retail politics. At its best, it’s a recognition that the money doesn’t belong to government, a concept difficult for statist elites to comprehend.

Direct democracy initiatives? Talk to me when the Wild Rose Alliance proposes meaningful electoral reform in Alberta. Not this goofy straw poll for Senators that we run.

Yeah, why should we elect the senate when it can be used for patronage appointments? And citizen-initiated referenda? Who would want the great unwashed proposing legislation?

The rest is just sophistry. This "cadre of government elites" are the very people who make up the leadership of the Wild Rose Alliance. Your Rod Loves and Tom Flanagans and so on--a murderer's row of intellectual poverty and dogmatic faith in the widely-discredited economics of Milton Friedman.

This is the SAME group that ran on a "change" agenda in the early 90s. Even their ideas are the same (the "Alberta Dividend" is a particularly egregious retread of an old tory standby).

So no, they're not "populists." The Wild Rose Alliance represents total continuity with the conservative elite in this province--their "grassroots" message is just a sop to the rhetoric of populism that resonates so well with the "Als" of this world. But real populism is a distant memory; I suppose it died with William Jennings Bryan.

Populism has always existed in Alberta’s political culture. The UFA, Social Credit, and Reform Party all had populist elements. Manning experienced it under his father long before Flanagan was around. I can’t speak for the Wildrose or other parties, but I know when I was a director for the Calgary-West constituency association in the early days of the Reform Party, anyone could have a say in shaping policy. That being said, any populist movement will necessarily need to be articulated and usually that's by an “elite”. The question revolves around the different outlook between a populist elite and statist elite. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on comparative analyses of various schools of economic theory but I’d be really surprised if Love and Flanagan were ideologues who saw no role for government. They simply have more faith in people and the market to make better decisions than the state.

Vote for them if you want; just don't be surprised when what you get is more of the same.

Actually, I think it’ll be more of a change than we’ve seen with the Harper Conservatives since Wildrose will not be as hampered by the need to represent various diverse regions of the country or feel pressured to move to the left.