Sit, Trudeau! Sit!

Woof. Tonight I watched Mark Kelley pick up a die-hard Liberal supporter from Ontario and tour her around Alberta on CBC’s The National. It was gold.

It started out in the Ontario woman’s family home in Ontario with everyone sitting around the living room. They introduced the family dog, which is quite seriously named “Trudeau.” As Mark Kelley put it “Albertans are going to love this!” Mark Kelley asked them how much they know about Alberta, and one of them said she thinks they have privatized health care there. They spoke of Alberta as the “teenage kid” with too much money and Ontario as the wise elder who must watch over and supervise Alberta. They concluded that they didn’t understand how conservative values could work for Albertans.

Then Mark Kelley and the young Liberal were off to Alberta, where the two made their first appearance at a Calgary talk radio show. I expected the callers to hate this woman, and they did. I was also expecting the callers to bring up the National Energy Program, and sure enough they did. Yes, the NEP is a popular sticking point for Albertans, even though it was 25 years ago. Mark Kelley took this woman to a few other Alberta hot spots, most of which really accentuated the philosophical divide between conservative and liberal values in general.

I don’t think this young Liberal is alone in Ontario. After spending almost two years in Toronto, hearing people refer to Alberta as “the west coast,” and watching jaws drop when telling people that yes, there are actually skyscrapers in Alberta, I think this woman has many like-minded friends. Oh, I do love you die-hard Ontario Liberals, but you really do need to get out more.

Just before the two were headed back East, Mark Kelley spoke of the young Liberal’s favourite tidbit of Trudeau’s (the real one, not the dog!): “Canada will be a strong country when Canadians of all provinces feel at home in all parts of the country, and when they feel that all Canada belongs to them.” I’m quite sure this young Ontario Liberal felt out of place in Alberta, just as Ralph Klein might feel a bit out of place in Trois Rivieres, Quebec. Of course there will always be regional cleavages and cultural disparities across Canada, so one cannot interpret this tidbit so literally.

In the end, I saw that East and West have quite similar misunderstandings about eachother; maybe every Canadian should swap seats at some point and see how things look from another piece of the country?