To the Editor:
Peter Lougheed was given a full state funeral, the first ever for a former Alberta premier. The big capitalist media universally praised him. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called Lougheed a visionary and patriot.
"Every single one of us woke up this morning in Peter Lougheed's Alberta," said Alison Redford, Alberta's current premier. These are true words, yet they fail to reassure those of us opposed to the course set by Lougheed.
Before he resigned as premier in 1985, the 1980 recession devastated Alberta's petroleum manufacturing industry, one of the world's largest. Today Alberta is more reliant on resources than ever, especially petroleum, and tar sands development is spurring catastrophic global climate change.
Behind the hoopla, the funeral was a lament that big business can provide no great vision or solutions to get us out of the trouble Lougheed has created for Canada.
Those of us in the left and popular movements in Alberta who grew up when Lougheed was premier have a different memory of his legacy. He was not a liberal or Red Tory, as the many protests we organized attest.
His party's 1971 victory over Social Credit, which had been in power since 1935, represented the end of any aspiration of the petit bourgeois for influence in the Alberta state. His victory meant the total take over of the province by big corporate interests, and Lougheed was their face.
Lougheed's true legacy is serving the large oil and gas corporations, mainly foreign owned. For them, he won more provincial control over resources at the expense of the rest of Canada, laying the groundwork for the Balkanization of Canada. His approach, such as an elected Senate, rejected the equality of nations in Canada by strengthening provincial rights. This helped regional capitalist interests ready to sell out to U.S. and other foreign corporations.
Accelerating a process started by SocialCredit, Lougheed's government enriched the giant transnational corporations by handing over the province's rich natural resources. Lougheed placed these resources even farther from the reach of Aboriginal peoples or the people of Canada. He was patriotic only to money.
Lougheed's provincial rights agenda is a danger to the future of Canada itself. It gave the Reform Party and its present embodiment in Ottawa, Stephen Harper, a great weapon to dismantle Canada.
The Reform Party's solution to Quebec's demands for increased sovereign powers was to give each province the same powers. In 1997, the growing influence of the Reform party led every non-Quebec premier to sign the Calgary Declaration, which proclaimed that all provinces must have legal equality.
Although Lougheed supported the failed 1992 Charlottetown Accord as a way to "bring Quebec back into Canada" and to achieve a province based elected Senate, he led Harper and our big business overlords to their present reactionary position. They will now reject any concessions to Quebec unless these further entrench the reactionary, anti Aboriginal and anti Quebec federal system imposed by the British in 1867.
It is a vision of federalism that denies the equality of nations and their right to self determination. It is a vision that continues the inequality of Aboriginal nations and Quebec. It is a vision that divides workers.
Harper gave Lougheed a state funeral for his dedicated service to the oil corporations, not to the people.
Darrell Rankin, Manitoba office, Communist Party of Canada
