Three Provinces, Three Cultures

The ecent federal election gave the Harper Conservatives and the New Democratic Party the upper hand in Ottawa. Since both parties had their origins in Prairie protest movements, the roots of which go back over a century, it is useful to look at the forces that launched them.

For more than a hundred years these forces have had huge impacts on election outcomes in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. They were subliminal, neither visible nor audible on the surface, and they developed differently in each of the three provinces. In his new book, Code Politics: Campaigns and Cultures on the Canadian Prairies, Jared J. Wesley seeks to uncover the mystery of these undercurrents and explain why, despite common geographies, social and economic histories, settlement patterns and institutional foundations, they helped create three distinct “political cultures.” Wesley, taking his lead from earlier political scientists, defines political culture as a set of common values that underpin a political system, the lens through which a community reveals itself, identifying its problems and challenges and defining the limits of acceptable solutions.

Wesley chooses to leave aside many accounts based on works of history, interpretations of literature and analyses of institutions, laws and governments, and instead compresses each of the provincial political cultures into three themes and one summary code. For Alberta, the three subthemes are populism, individualism and provincial autonomy. The summary code is freedom. In Saskatchewan, the sub themes are collectivism, dirigisme and polarization, which produce the summary code of security. In Manitoba, the themes are progressive centrism, pragmatism and trans-partisanship, and the summary code is moderation.

Wesley concentrates for his analysis entirely on the few short weeks of election campaigns, ignoring the years in between, when, I would argue, most political culture is formed. He examines hundreds of pieces of campaign literature, party platforms and the election speeches of a half-dozen dominant party leaders in the three provinces since the mid 1930s. His thesis is that party leaders who discovered and adopted the “codes” gained office by campaigning to show they shared citizens’ values.

I find Wesley’s thesis too simple. His work takes us only part way to understanding what happened. It is too much a gloss on Prairie political thinking, not a total explanation for 110 years of political history, although he does provide general readers with a short and helpful compendium of leaders, parties and campaigns in the three provinces. What his approach underestimates in all cases are the personality and power of individual leaders, and the push and pull of events at both the provincial and national levels. To his credit, Wesley candidly acknowledges that his thesis faces hurdles. He allows that “it is possible that the most critical branching points in Prairie party history occurred outside the scope of this study,” and also that “events are subject to an infinite number of contingencies.” It “is by no means a simple or comprehensive theory. It is a mid-level model that, when applied to the Prairie context, cannot account for various anomalies.” But there is, he suggests, a general trend that can be useful.

Wesley begins his Alberta analysis with the rise of Social Credit during the Depression of the 1930s. This is his first major hurdle because the cultural values that most mark the province—and thus any Alberta code—were implanted before Alberta became a province in 1905, and were certainly in play between 1900 and 1930, the period of massive homestead settlement by Prairie grain farmers and their families.

The immigrants who arrived during those years faced dire hardship, and their response to it created the predominant political culture of the province. They may have come west as rugged individualists, spurred on by the eastern political and corporate boosters who sponsored them. But the conditions they faced soon dulled their optimism. Land in many cases was unsuitable for grain crops, and the quarter sections they were given proved too small to be economic. The climate was often forbidding, costs were high and the price offered for their wheat was often too low to cover those costs.

To top it off, they had severe problems getting financial credit. It is not always recognized that, long before the 1930s Depression, Alberta’s economy was more often in recession than growth, hardly conducive to a zesty political culture, characterized (in Wesley’s words) by a spirit of “freedom.” So I would question his first Albertan subtheme—individualism—in those early Alberta years and in its later development.

This early period was indeed marked by Wesley’s political theme of populism, including the election in 1917 of two members of the Non-partisan League to the legislative assembly, the United Farmers of Alberta and early Social Credit measures of constituency reporting, recall and referendum. But it did not last. To treat Alberta politics in recent decades as populist is far too great a stretch. Populists posit that citizens can participate directly in creating and implementing public policy. The idea is direct democracy, but it is long gone. Nothing could be further from the governing styles of premiers such as Peter Lougheed or, despite his image-oriented, beer parlour election tours, Ralph Klein. At the federal level, Preston Manning did advocate several populist approaches when he created the Reform Party, but Stephen Harper and company quickly put an end to that.

In fact, I would say that government in Alberta has become more and more distant from the citizen. Even in the mid 1950s I participated in a provincial campaign in High River–Okotoks in which we defeated a Social Credit Cabinet minister over a local highway relocation plan so unpopular that it illustrated Ernest Manning’s government was no longer listening to the citizen. And today, Wildrose Party mavericks are in the legislature with the theme that the Stelmach government “is out of touch.” Again, I would argue against populism as one of the durable marks of Alberta’s political culture.

The one theme Wesley cites that has lasted is autonomy—autonomy, that is, for Alberta. Drive through southern Alberta today and you see billboards that read “More Alberta, less Ottawa.” The demand for autonomy originated well over a century ago when the new provinces struggled to wrest the ownership of natural resources away from Ottawa. Resource ownership had been transferred to the four eastern founding provinces at Confederation and to Prince Edward Island when it entered Confederation. The transfer to Alberta was delayed 24 years until 1929. It was a living memory that justifiably marked the grievance agenda.

A few years later Premier William Aberhart greatly expanded the autonomy theme to attack the exclusive federal power over banking, claiming that it prevented Alberta from implementing Social Credit economic theory. Enduring witness to this old feud is the existence of Alberta Treasury Branches, near-banks that provide a way around the Federal Bank Act.

Wesley claims that Premier Ernest Manning used the “freedom” code to attack Pearson’s medicare in 1965. But I would argue that battle was just another appeal to autonomy: “Keep your hands off our health care.” It was the politicians’ counterpart of the Alberta ranchers’ signs that appear throughout the province warning “No Trespassing.” Another example was Peter Lougheed’s attack on the Trudeau government’s National Energy Program. And more recent examples include the attacks on the long-gun registry and the Canadian Wheat Board, campaigns that draw heavily on the autonomy theme.

It is tempting to dismiss the particularity that Wesley bestows on the autonomy theme. After all, it is a favourite theme of governments elsewhere and, to some, mere window dressing for politicians’ jurisdictional and financial power grabs. But autonomy does have a particular poignancy in Alberta, because of the province’s long struggle to end its colonial status as a federally managed territory and, after that, to diminish its dependence on economic and financial decision making based in the East.

To me “freedom” and “individualism” were co-opted by Ernest Manning and Social Credit as right-wing entrepreneurial sales themes in response to the discovery of oil at Leduc in 1947. As Wesley does elsewhere, he discounts far too greatly the role that events play in setting provincial themes and codes.

The discovery of oil coincided with the growing urbanization of the province, whose three million people today include only 15,000 full-time farmers. In less than ten years, Alberta was transformed from one of Canada’s poorest provinces to one of its richest. Manning worked hard to reinvent themes and codes that fitted this dramatic change. Populism was gone. Autonomy—from Ottawa or Bay Street, the French, the old-line parties or the established churches—needed reworking. But something more was needed. This is where the right-wing entrepreneurial appeal to individualism and freedom was born: the idea that Alberta’s wealth was “created” by its individual citizens and must be protected from “them,” the outsiders who would try to control our wealth and limit our freedom. It is an idea that has been sold successfully to Albertans (and other Canadians) by provincial politicians and the oil industry, but it is not a bedrock element of Alberta culture.

When it comes to Manitoba, Wesley’s codes— progressive centrism, pragmatism and trans-partisanship with a summary code of moderation—begin with post-1930 Depression politics. Again, as with Alberta, I believe his codes ignore the more indelible culture created in that province in the late 19th century. The early history of Manitoba, which entered Confederation 35 years before Alberta and Saskatchewan, had its political culture set by the Riel rebellions, the suppression of them, the turbulent race relations that followed and the rise of a working class in Winnipeg that culminated in the Winnipeg General Strike. Wesley acknowledges these events, but attributes too little to their influence on the province’s political culture.

Moderation—the umbrella code Wesley identifies for Manitoba—seems to me an effort to summarize political history since the Depression and after the fact, rather than a description of the province’s prevailing political culture. He provides an exceptionally good account of campaigns and governments from John Bracken to Gary Doer, but it is not a history fired by trans-partisan moderation. The political fights that brought Dufferin Roblin, Ed Schreyer, Howard Pawley, Gary Filmon and Gary Doer to power and re-elected them were rough partisan affairs. Easy enough, after the dust settles, for the winner to say, “I appeal above party to all the people.” Every intelligent victor in all parts of Canada makes this appeal.

From the outset, both geographically and psychologically, Manitoba was situated between east and west, often giving Winnipeg as much in common with eastern interests as with western. Unlike Alberta and Saskatchewan, it often was the target of westerners with grievances, since it was Western Canada’s railway hub, grain exchange, centre of the private grain elevator companies, and sub-centre (long before Calgary) of major real estate and financial interests. Like Chicago, Winnipeg had its own distinct and vibrant culture and was neither a wholly eastern or western city.

I would describe the political culture of Manitoba as patiently waiting for a safe chance to opt for progressive change. Manitobans want to change the policy, not the system, not the institutions. To get the progressive program they want, they will change leaders and parties, but not institutions and structures—they are too tied to traditional patterns to venture down that path.

The differences in political culture between Alberta and Saskatchewan are fewer than many outsiders might think. This is because of immigration and settlement patterns, and other religious, social, economic and even geological factors. As a current example, most Canadians refer to the so-called Alberta oil sands, but they are a feature of Saskatchewan’s landscape as well.

I would argue that what gave the two political cultures different complexions were the different ways in which their first provincial governments dealt with early grievances and unrest. Liberal governments were in power for 40 of the first 44 years of Saskatchewan’s provincial history. They managed to deal with the growing dissatisfaction by showing they were in sympathy with the farmer’s plight and by working with co-ops and other farmer institutions that arose to deal with the growing crises.

This did not happen to anything like the same extent in Alberta. The Rutherford Liberal government in Edmonton between 1905 and 1910 either did not understand the culture that surrounded the growing agrarian revolt, or was too tied to the national parties that created the province to risk appearing as native sons. Where early provincial governments in Saskatchewan were partners advocating provincial rights, the Alberta Liberals were easily cast at agents of the East, as well as corrupt and reactionary. As Alberta populism took hold, the Liberals were defeated in 1921 after a ten-year battle with reformers.

The most important political change under the United Farmers, and later under Social Credit, was the crushing of traditional political parties—and, more significantly, of political debate. I observed while growing up in Alberta that Social Credit was not a party. It was a movement, a league. Not every Albertan was a member and many opposed the government. But it was not acceptable in our town to openly attack the Social Credit program, “beliefs” or leader, who was always referred to as Mr. Manning. There was no political conversation. What evolved was a one party state. Opposition did not come from the legislature or any public forum. Rather, it welled up outside the legislature, replaced the government that was in power, only to become another one-party system.

In contrast, Saskatchewan’s early Liberal government caught the mood of reform and made common cause with the early farm co-op movements in their battles with Ottawa. After four decades, tired Liberal governments were pushed to the side by new forces led by Tommy Douglas, who mastered the old codes of collectivism and grievance—and created some new ones—but above all, personally mastered the skill of using them. But the political debate never stopped; unlike Alberta, in Saskatchewan it remained a popular sport.

While Wesley does not totally discount Prairie leadership, he seems convinced that political success was far more about the codes than about the skills of the men and women who used them. This ignores the success of leaders who did not use Wesley’s particular codes—men such as Gary Filmon who stayed in power in Manitoba for eleven years without them—and the failure of others who did use the codes—men such as Harry Strom in Alberta, who used the old codes but lost to Peter Lougheed.

Wesley’s work is most valuable in elaborating the role in political history of underlying themes and codes—the forces of collective consciousness, as it were. It would be more useful, however, if it were balanced with discussion of the role of other moving forces—the skills and personalities of individual leaders, and the role of objective events in the society, the economy and the world context.