“The NDP ran a deeply uninspiring, technocratic campaign that did not fundamentally change anything about Alberta. There is so little that the NDP did that is going to survive KENNEY’S FUCKING SUMMER OF REPEAL.
Like think about all the things the NDP did. They had four years of a majority government in this province and what is going to survive to September of this year? The minimum wage and pretty much JACK SHIT ALL ELSE. The carbon tax? Gone. Progressive tax? Gone. Labour law reforms? Gone. Increases in the corporate tax? Gone. Like it is all just being tossed out.
It is so frustrating to have spent four years being treated by people in the New Democrat Party of Alberta like a crank and a wrecker for pointing out these things and saying this is exactly what is going to happen, and having people turn around and say to you, we have to do this, we have to win the election. Well guess what? We didn’t win the election and you didn’t do anything so we have absolutely nothing to show for it. […]
It makes me fucking sick. For real, this is what happened. The NDP got elected in 2015 and they imported Brian fucking Topp in from the federal NDP. Brian Topp is a technocratic jerk from the federal NDP who has internalized every single bad way of doing politics -- and they bring those ideas to win campaigns.
This is a culture that does not prioritize having politics, doing politics, or having political beliefs and doing political education. It is a culture that prioritizes working on as many campaigns and for as many governments as possible, regardless of whether those campaigns are successful, regardless of whether those governments actually help people, regardless of whether they get reelected or not. And you bring this into Alberta so you can get reelected in four years which they utterly failed at as we saw on April 16.
And at the end of the day, all these people, Brian Topp and John Heaney and Nathan Rotman, they’re going to fuck off out of this province to other very nicely paid NDP staffer jobs wherever the NDP is in power and the rest of us have to live with the consequences of their shitty politics and bad technocratic decisions. […]
The New Democrats do not care about their members except for as people who donate to them and give them money or as people who volunteer during elections. They do not give a shit about their members at any other time. They do not even really want them to be involved in the party. Because once you start getting involved in the party you might start doing things like POLITICS or POLITICAL EDUCATION or trying to do factions or MAKE POLICY or all those sorts of things.
And the NDP fucking hates that. They want you to be good volunteers at election time and they want you to sign up for a monthly donation. They could not give a FUCK about you the rest of the time.
The other really big problem with the NDP’s failure to do politics generally is that when leftwing politics is not done, the world still exists and the world still needs to be politically explained to the public, particularly in a time of an election when the world is being explained to the electorate. And because there is absolutely no explanatory forces at play in how the Alberta NDP chose to campaign, the world gets explained by the conspiracy theories of the right.”
- Kate Jacobson on the Alberta Advantage podcast, “Predictability: Welcome to Hellberta.” April 19, 2019.
