Why I'm running in this provincial election

"Finding out what really improves lives and then acting on it is actually the serious business of government." - David Cameron

So if you haven't heard yet, I'm running for MLA, hoping to represent Lethbridge West for the Alberta Party!

Why would I submit myself to such public scrutiny?

Bottom line, when I look at our overall well-being, I see some systemic problems that need to be addressed. I want to help Albertans have better lives. Politicians focus on money and rightfully so because it's hard to have a high quality of life if you're struggling financially. A strong economy boosts all of us, but there are also some key issues that a government needs to address, outside of dollars and cents, that could alleviate suffering and encourage flourishing in our province. I want to be at the table to help make these decisions. I also want politicians who have a greater allegiance to their constituency than their party, so in order to get a politician like that, I'm going to have to be one like that.

I'm not crazy about political parties to be honest, but running as an independent is futile. As far as parties go thoug, the AB Party has a team of really smart and diverse people who value fiscal AND social responsibility. As I saw the impressive individuals stepping up to run for the Alberta Party I was emboldened to go for it myself. People like Kara Levis, Katherine O'neill, and Lana Bentley, not to mention AB Party stalwart and most effective opposition MLA Greg Clark to name a few, made me feel encouraged to be numbered among them.

4 years ago, Albertans decided that the PC rule had to come to its justifiable end. We were basically given two other options: the right wing Wildrose or the left wing NDP. I was not overly enthused with either but I was impressed by Rachel Notley and I guess so was the majority of Albertans because she emerged victorious. I also had to give a lot of credit to Lethbridge West candidate Shannon Phillips who worked her butt off to win an impressive landslide, considering southern Alberta's conservative voting history. That being said, I voted NDP mostly out of fear of what I was told the Wildrose would do. I've come to learn that protest votes and fear based voting is not a way to enrich our democracy. I wanted someone to vote for rather than against and if I didn't have that option I would try and BE that option.

I have never been a big fan of party politics. I believe that they turn elections into contests of "colours", brands, and teams rather than ideas. I'm Mormon so I'm "supposed" to be conservative. I'm an educator so I'm "supposed" to be liberal. But the more entrenched in one team I got the less I fit with the dogmatic expectations. Parties have so much to lose politically that they fear dissent of any kind. They control the messaging of their candidates leaving little room for divergent thought or a diversity of opinion. Your opinion on progressive taxation should not have anything to do with your position on GSAs in schools but we're at a time in which the political boundaries have been so clearly demarcated that I can predict your view on almost 20 different issues after hearing your views on one of them. This is evidence that we're getting hacked by ideological tribes. We don't HAVE to follow the crowd and we don't HAVE to hate the other side!

I work in education so last election I was weary of supporting the team that was vocally calling for austerity and drastic cuts to education and health care. I sided with the NDP, but that did not mean that I agreed with every New Democrat idea. In fact, I would be concerned if someone agreed perfectly with every opinion of any political party. That would be a sign to me that this person is likely succumbing to group think and motivated reasoning. Most people, I would hope, could find something in every party's platform with which they disagree at least partially. I believe that most Albertans are actually quite moderate. But the options are becoming more polarized. In this election I hope we put our politicians to the free-thinking test and demand that they demonstrate that they are able, if necessary, to deviate from their party's dogma for Lethbridge's sake.

In my research for the election of 2015 I was impressed with the small Alberta Party, which had one seat in legislature at the time but enormous possibility. One of their core principles was a commitment to have their MLAs be more responsible to their constituencies than they are to the party itself. If one wanted to be a free-thinker in any party, whether you were right or left on the spectrum, it appeared that the Alberta Party was the only option. Big tent, firm walls.

Unfortunately in Lethbridge West there was not an opportunity to vote Alberta Party last election. I called the party the day after the election. I bought a membership and I asked how to make sure there would be a candidate come 2019. I have to admit, through those years, it was not at the top of my priorities. I have a busy career, a growing family, and I was not looking to add to my schedule. But as we approached 2019, it became clear that if there was going to be someone running for the Alberta Party in Lethbridge West, it was going to have to be me.

What I Stand For

Normally when we research candidates and parties we like to look at their policies and opinions on all the issues du jour and then match them to our own opinions. That's one way of doing it and I will come forward with more information about my opinions on the issues. But there is something systematically at stake in our democracy that concerns me more than some of the issues being presented by the other parties.

1) Politicians should represent their constituency. When we buy into the party political scheme we become complicit to a top down faux democracy. MLAs toe the party line and vote on bills according to the dictates of their leader. Whipped parties keep power away from the people and into the hands of a select few. If all we are doing is electing people who will follow Jason Kenney or Rachel Notley's commands then what's the point of having an election at all? We vote for a real person, that lives and ideally represents our community, not a drone that echoes instructions from their all-knowing leader. I like my party, I respect Stephen Mandel, and I'm confident in his leadership but I am not afraid to disagree with him on important issues. As your representative I'll put your first.

2) The Legislative Assembly needs to work together! The motor oil of the legislature is human relationships. There are 87 people who sit in a room and decide our fates and most of them don't get along. They would get along under most circumstances but we put these colours on each other's backs and then encourage our elected officials to 'fight' for the orange cause or to 'fight' for the blue. Meanwhile, this type of eye-for-an-eye politics leads to a blinding back and forth battle between teams. Imagine if you were applying for a job and in your interview you promised your employer that you would fight 50% of your colleagues in order to get what you want. Are we supposed to be impressed? If we forget the colours, we can approach bills and policies on an individual basis. Sometimes the NDP will put forth good ideas and sometimes they will not. But it's ludicrous to attempt to block their good ideas just because they are on the wrong side of the aisle. We need elected officials who are brave enough to stand up for what is empirically the better decision regardless of the side that produced it. I will do that. I would work to establish personal relationships with MLAs of all parties in order to help good ideas emerge out of the swamp of partisanship. We could start holding accountable the MLAs who refuse to work collaboratively. Social psychology has figured out the best way to reduce conflict between two groups, and that's through having "superordinal goals" or in other words, a shared objective... something like... managing the finances of a province for example.

3) Ideas > ideology. "He who only knows his side of a case knows little of that." John Stuart Mills
We shoudln't be afraid of a good idea just because it comes from the other team. If you can't find anything of value in what the NDP have done or what the UCP say they will do then you are morally blinded. Being in the Alberta Party I often get accused by leftist of being right-wing and by righties of being left-wing. Which tells me I might be on to something. One of the clearest contributions of the field of psychology is the understanding of heuristics (mental shortcuts that might be misleading) and cognitive errors. When it comes to allowing individuals to make important decisions on our behalf we need to make sure that we have a balanced system that protects those individuals from the human errors they are likely to make such as: confirmation bias, groupthink, and the fundamental attribution error to name a few. When we put one team against another with everything on the line, people are far more prone to have motivated reasoning and to make mistakes of judgment. I am not impervious to these mistakes but as a psychologist I understand the scenarios that make me more vulnerable to error and I know how to engineer my surroundings in a way that makes up for my biases, leading to more rational and evidence based decisions. Bias is not just a source of error it's a predictable pattern of errors that can be identified and avoided. A team like the Alberta Party can take from both sides, while adding its own ideas and not be married to one ideological stance. I like good ideas and I don't care which side of the political spectrum they come from. Conservatives understand how valuable order is in a society, and how easy it is to lose it. Liberals tend to be more motivated to give assistance to the dispossessed. But being a liberal should not disqualify you from caring about maintaining order and being conservative does not have to mean that you don't care about people less fortunate than you. Good ideas can come from any and all sides. We should be listening to ideas from all sorts of sources so that we can analyze and implement the best ones.

4) Trust = $$$. You can argue that heads of industry prefer one party to another but what industry and the economy in general really need is a sense of stability, trust, and general reciprocity. Societies that are characterized in this way are much more efficient and prosperous. There are actions we can take, starting in legislature, that could increase Alberta's 'social capital', which is to say, our sense of trust and connection. A government that is more transparent and consults with the people can slowly build the trust that has been lost over the last few decades. We could demand that every bill put forward in legislature include its limits and risks so that we can all be aware of the potential downsides of any decision before its made. We could strengthen journalism in Alberta to make sure government and industry are operating above water. We can demonstrate trust in our political foes, engaging them in good faith while still holding them accountable. If we can build connections between orange and blue we could instill more trust and social capital throughout the province. And this isn't just so that we can hold hands and sing kumbaya, greater social capital and trust leads to better business and more prosperous commerce.

5) Education! "History is a race between education and catastrophe" H.G. Wells.
We are in a knowledge economy. We need our citizens to know things and to know how to do things that most other people don't know how to do. This is not a time to make cuts to education. I understand we're in rough shape because of the deficit incurred on the NDP's watch but if we're going to put money down on our debt (which we do need to) it can't come at the expense of our education system, which is producing our most valuable resource, human knowledge. I do believe that there are conversations worth having in which we can think outside of the box as to how education is delivered in our province. We have a world class public school system but it's not perfect. When it comes to education in Canada it doesn't get much better than Alberta and when it comes to Alberta it doesn't get much better than Lethbridge but I still think there are some systemic changes worth considering. In Lethbridge we have a choice between public school... or public Catholic school. There are parents and families with diverse needs and beliefs about education who feel that they do not fit in the public school mold. The current government has been great for keeping our education system world class even in an economic downturn but many believe that the NDP approach limits educational choice. As wonderful as our schools are, the system requires them to be basically the same. This makes sense because we don't want kids from one neighbourhood to have an advantage over others just because their school fundraises better. So if one school gets a new scoreboard, in order to be fair, every school is supposed to get one. This system doesn't allow for much diversity in educational approach. Imagine we had a school that specialized in educating kids with ADHD? Imagine we had a school that specialized in the arts. High quality sports academies. A general liberal education is important but eventually our kids need to specialize in something in order to find their niche in our evolving economy. There are ways that a government can fund alternate schooling options like charter schools or even some kind of hybrid between home and public schooling.
Our public system is bursting at the the seams. Every westside school is overcrowded, leading to a magnification of emotional and social problems. If there was, for example, an elementary school that was specialized to cater to kids with ADHD (which is a number increasingly growing) we could not only give better service to those families but relieve some of the pressure in our overcrowded schools. (I'm using ADHD as an example but it could be anything; art, sports, STEM etc.)

6) Mental Health matters. Let's be honest, we are the wealthiest province in the country with the highest quality of life index in the world. That isn't to say that there are not still a lot of people who suffer in our communities but comparatively it basically doesn't get better than what we have. That being said, our people still suffer significantly from anxiety and depression among other mental illnesses that lower our quality of life and cost our system a fortune. A lot of that has to do with individual biology and psychology but much of our emotional and social suffering stems from the systemic disconnection, mistrust, and isolation that has become the norm in our current culture. Human beings used to live in extremely tight-knit communities. You didn't need social services because when you were in need your family and your community would rally around you. There were no retirement plans, you had kids and grandkids to take care of you. There was no employment insurance because if you had a bad crop or low haul you could rely on your kin to help feed your family. As we congregated in larger centres we outsourced the benefits that we usually got from our families and communities to the government. Throw in the individualistic, consumerist culture that has dominated the last century or so and we now have little connection to those who live around us and we are suffering immensely for it. The current government puts the onus on the government to bail us out of our mental illness and they are right that there is a role the government can play (reduce inequality, provide mental health services, effective health care/ pharmaceuticals if necessary etc.) But nothing will systemically improve our mental health more than an increase in civic unity and reciprocity. We don't need a counsellor on every street corner (and that's coming from a counsellor who would benefit immensely if that was what we did). We need more kids playing with each other in the streets. We need more neighbours barbecuing, more social clubs and events but these are not things that a government could or should legislate. Our mental health would improve remarkably if people just went for long walks every day in the coulees but what kind of a totalitarian government would enforce that? We can't force people to make decisions that will benefit them in the long run but perhaps the government could incentivize behaviours that are linked with well-being. There are interventions that have been used in the UK for example where depressed people were "prescribed" gardening in groups and the positive effects exceeded that psycho-pharmaceutical all while being significantly less expensive. We can get innovative with what kind of mental health resources we offer and we could start seeing some major improvements in people's psychological and social well-being.

I've gone on too long... I guess I'm excited. Stay tuned and I'll have more to say but more importantly I want to hear from you. I'm a learner and I'm open to suggestions. I and my party have ideas but we're also not too dogmatically decided that we can't hear you out either.