The Changing Face of Conservatism in Canada: What Does It Mean Today?

So let's wind this back to the year 2006.

I was the 6 o'clock anchor at Global News in Edmonton.

And the conservative leader was Stephen Harper, and he was elected Canada's prime minister.

And the premier of Alberta was also a conservative, and that was Ralph Klein.

And these were pretty heady days in Alberta in particular for the Conservative Party.

Because, oh man, Alberta was booming.

There was just so much oil revenue going into provincial coffers that they literally didn't really know what to do with it all.

And I know this is crazy, but Ralph Klein came up with this kind of a stunt.

It was controversial.

He said, I'm going to give back some of that oil revenue directly to Alberta voters.

So he mailed a check to about 3 million of us in Alberta for 400 bucks each.

And they were dubbed Ralph's Bucks.

And I remember thinking, you know, that's not an insignificant amount of money.

And since I wasn't expecting it, I ended up spending it on a DVD player.

But for the most part, the conservative policies made sense to me at the time.

But man, wow, I mean, things have changed so much.

I moved to Vancouver about 15 years ago.

And I'm looking at my home province of Alberta now and I'm going, what the hell are you people thinking? The conservative government there, led by Daniel Smith, has been doing some pretty eye-popping things.

And one of the most distasteful is that she's been kind of playing footsies with the separatists who... are feeling really emboldened to the point where they're putting on their cowboy hats and they're heading off to washington and they're having meetings with sort of the trump people and making little deals and promises behind closed doors and i'm thinking shut up you do not have the right to decide whether alberta is leaving canada this is ridiculous i think there's let's be generous Maximum 25% of Albertans say, yeah, I might be interested, depending on what that might look like.

That is not a mandate.

You can't make promises to leave.

So that's really annoying to me.

So I'm looking at Alberta going, man, I just don't recognize what's going on there.

But then I think about B.C., the province I'm in now, and about a year and a half ago, the conservatives, the B.C. conservatives almost formed a government.

They had previously formed a kind of unholy alliance between B.C. liberals, B.C. conservatives, and they kind of tried to jam them together in the same party.