End of Parliamentary democracy.

“In 1998 the provincial legislature sat for a total of 63 days; in 1999, only 59 days; in 2000, 56 days; in 2001, 36 days; and in 2002, 47 days. In 2003 and 2004, the Alberta legislature was in session for 46 days and 36 days, respectively. (Of course, these figures – as meager as they are – stand in positive contrast to the fall of 1997 when the Conservatives* decided not to hold a legislative sitting because – they argued – there was no legislation to debate.)” The Return of the Trojan Horse, Alberta and the new world (dis)order page 36.

This was all under Premier Ralph Klein of Alberta, Progressive Conservative.

Someone, especially in his early days**, who pursued a drastic neoliberal agenda. 

This is a vital statistic that I unfortunately didn’t feature in my unusually long post on the subject of decreased institutional and traditional representative democracy correlating with parties with neoliberal and right-wing agendas. In plains terms, right-wing parties are more likely to use methods to diminish the institutional and traditional means of Parliament – for example, centralizing power to the Prime Minister/Premier, whipping the vote, mounting giant omnibus legislation with hundreds of pages and invoking closure to silence the opposition and pass bills within mere days.

I present this quote, as I believe it should be more than enough to shock you into thinking.

*The Progressive Conservative party is often just referred to as Conservative due to similarities and simplicity in narrative, but sometimes there’s a vital distinction. For example, at the moment, it’s seemingly so that our Federal Conservatives favour the Wildrose Party over the Progressive Conservative party in Alberta right now. Tom Flanagan, long time associates with Harper and pals, long time far-right-winger is now the campaign director for the Wildrose Party, to raise one connection.

**This slightly changed later on, due to giant surpluses from massive oil revenue – but even that didn’t inspire him to really create a better public sector.