http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/...anielle-smith/
Chris Selley’s Full Pundit: Who’s afraid of Danielle Smith?
Chris Selley Apr 23, 2012 – 12:39 PM ET | Last Updated: Apr 23, 2012 1:36 PM ET
First to Alberta: Postmedia’s Michael Den Tandt appreciates Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith’s stated and apparently sincere belief that people, including her candidates, “should be allowed to say what they wish, and that they should likewise individually be held to account for what they say.” We agree. We don’t think the presence of multiple “bozos,” for lack of a better term, in Canadian legislatures is a good thing; but we see only upside to said bozos being allowed to speak their minds and letting the voters decide. We also see no value in Smith publicly denouncing such candidates if she truly believes they should be allowed to spout off. That, too, is instructive for voters. That said, with regards to Wildrose candidate and evangelical pastor Allan Hunsperger, we still don’t buy the idea that attacking the Edmonton public school board for tolerating gay students on grounds that gay people will burn forever in hell constitutes a personal religious belief, rather than a political one. It’s a rather potent mixture of the two, and people have every right to be disturbed by that.
Sun Media’s Lorrie Goldstein, meanwhile, is heartened by the diminishing political returns available from pointing and shrieking at politicians who hold unpopular opinions — or even popular ones, as in the case of capital punishment — and warning that these politicians have secret plans to destroy the country/province/city/school board in question. We are heartened by this too, to a point. But an old story about a boy and a wolf comes to mind. If people completely tune out such warnings, it opens the door to extremists and, more likely, rank incompetents.
The Calgary Herald‘s Don Braid is thrilled that Alberta finally had “the passionate, full-throated, high-stakes battle many of us have hoped for since the 1970s,” but appalled by the “divisive, hate-filled, bile-spewing monstrosity” the campaign quickly became. “Only a decade ago, former Premier Ralph Klein’s native background was just an interesting fact. Now a leader has to mention it to prove she’s no racist,” he writes, referring to Smith’s post-bozo-eruption press conference. “This is not progress.” There are real, important policy differences between the Wildrose and PCs, Braid laments, but by election day they had been all but “obscured … with mud.”
On his Maclean’s blog, Colby Cosh argues it’s not inconceivable that “social liberals” might vote Wildrose despite its population of social illiberals — just as “social conservatives who want to vote for the Wildrose must somehow be prepared to tolerate voting for a pro-abortion, pro-gay premier.” Suffice to say, tough choices are in play for just about all Albertans. Polls show the Liberals falling off a cliff. And “anybody at all who wants to vote PC must be prepared to tolerate the perpetuation of a government that has taken, and aggressively hidden the evidence of, well-documented illegal kickbacks for party purposes from schools, municipalities, and healthcare,” says Cosh — an “offence [that] is objectively worse than Adscam.”
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