Home Social Landscape Featured Articles 'Their Own Schools of Democracy':  The Visible Remains of Political Practice in Rural Alberta

'Their Own Schools of Democracy':  The Visible Remains of Political Practice in Rural Alberta

by Roger Epp

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The point is often made that populist parties in both Saskatchewan and Alberta moved in centralist directions once elected. There are differences nonetheless. In Saskatchewan the CCF government was bound to some extent by grass-roots direction at party conventions; it attempted no equivalent consolidation of local government; and it relied politically on the support of a strong cooperative movement--above all the Wheat Pool--in which democratic practices were also sustained. The other factor that would set Alberta apart economically and culturally was oil. Already by the 1950s, half of government revenues were derived from oil. The province's population grew rapidly and the composition of its workforce changed, putting farmers in the minority. The oil boom had three significant effects. It induced a dependence on the U.S.-based oil companies that were in a position to develop the resource. It provided a focus for uniting "the people" against real or imagined federal encroachments on provincial powers. And it gave successive Social Credit and Progressive Conservative governments the fiscal means to spend generously compared to other provinces on such ideologically acceptable staples as health, education, highways, and welfare--primarily for the elderly--without having to resort to onerous levels of taxation. Prosperity compensated for disillusionment with politics. It has resulted in vast improvements in infrastructure, while at the same time reinforcing what I call a process of political deskilling--a weakening of political capacity at the local level. The dominant mode of politics in rural Alberta has been a kind of patron-client relationship involving an exchange of government favour for passive support; but that mode provides fewer resources to people whose communities suddenly face serious threats in an age of government retreat and economic globalization.

The radical-democratic agrarian populism of the 1920s cannot be reinvigorated. It belonged to the rough equality of a frontier period to which there is no return. But its practices contain what are still exemplary lessons especially for rural people struggling to live well in a particular place. One is that their predecessors found ways to act collectively, creatively, and with some success against earlier manifestations of large, impersonal economic forces and indifferent governments. A second is the understanding that, as John Richards puts it, "the basis of a free society resides in forming a large number of people who can participate skillfully in democratic institutions." Here he adds an important caution: "But people only learn a skill if they practice it, and they will only practice democratic politics if democratic forums are locally available and they have jurisdiction over matters of substance."16 Over against the anti-political oscillation between passivity and resentment, and the deafening silence around the loss of meaningful powers of local governance in Alberta, the visible remains of country halls and schoolhouses still ought to signify more robust democratic possibilities.

This paper is partly extracted from a larger work, “Whither Rural Alberta: Political de-skilling, globalization and the future of local communities,” which was published as a research paper by the Parkland Institute in Spring 1999.

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