www.ChrisLaBossiere.com

In a quick report about my Big Listen event on the 29th. I am very happy to say that within 30 minutes of posting the idea here and on Twitter, I have a full house of attendees (12-15).

What I really liked was the tone of the responses, which included mostly strangers I have never met, but who want to engage in meaningful political discussion. In several cases, this is their first time getting "active". Within the list of RSVP's there is also a nicely diverse mix of Albertans.

I wanted to share with you an example of the tone of an invite RSVP, as I think it says a lot about the type of dialogue we are attempting to have at our Big Listen events, and maybe a bit about the people getting involved. Paul Turnbull was happy to let me publish his response. All of them are similar in wording and share an interest in our party trying something different in politics:

"Hi Chris,

If you're not full up I'd definitely be interested in attending.

I've been very impressed with the reasonableness, for lack of a better word, I've seen in the people surrounding this movement. There's a thoughtfulness and willingness for real dialogue that's been missing in our politics for a long time.

As a side note, if you haven't read it yet I recommend: David Bohm's "On Dialogue". The Big Listen seems to be something pulled wholesale out of this book. "

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/204526.On_Dialogue

Paul Turnbull (permission received to publish his name)

Now it is up to me to listen to their concerns, ideas, stresses and wishes from their government, and then funnel all of that to our policy and research committee. Of course we will also have some fun and my wife Jill and I will make 12-15 new friends in the process, which is of course a great silver lining of doing things the old fashioned way, around our kitchen table.

NOTE: I think that fellow Alberta Party Board Member David King, a former Peter Laugheed era Legislative Secretary & Minister of Education, wrote a fantastic blog post about doing politics in Alberta differently. I strongly suggest reading it.

The idea came to me for this post tonight when I watched the Nobel Peace Prize Lecture given by President Obama. What inspired me about his speech were three key things:

• He used tremendous humility in his words and body language. Obama uses humility first to disarm his critics, those who say he doesn't deserve the prize so early in his mandate. He tackles the issues right at the start and uses humility, one of the least used but most effective tools in gaining the will of people to follow you.
• He demonstrates the ability to see all sides of an issue, and recognizes their merits. Obama takes an inordinate amount of time, especially considering the audience, explaining why sometime War is morally just. Unlike most politicians, and rigid partisans, he avoids the trap of always needing to talk in one set of code, and more importantly is brave enough to say what sometimes people don't want to hear.
• He inspires us to think in greater terms, above political, geographic, religious, or racial boundaries. His masterful use of the English language, the above mentioned humility and straight-talk, and an ability to draw a picture of what something better might look like, these all help us see a picture of something better. Politics AND leadership is of course about selling hope.

So what?

I am tired of vitriolic partisanship, as most of us are. But when you walk down the dark alley of blog comments, newspaper letters to the editor, and online debate, we are confronted often with what can only be described as people needing to argue their position, twisting the facts or getting stuck in the rut of cognitive dissonance, never willing to concede that we all mostly agree on a large percentage of what each political party stands for.

So, in my personal opinion, the ability for a party leader to connect with us as a humble, straight-talking, and visionary person is the single greatest reason why we may vote for their party. Most Albertans are not the political enthusiasts we are (assuming you have read this far), and so populism in how we choose leaders remains a major factor. Ralph Klein held onto the hearts of Albertans for a long time, and mostly because we felt that he was a humble everyman. When he did something beyond reproach, we started to lose faith in him as a person, and that we couldn't trust him.

This is important because we are seeing a collection of movements start to form in Alberta politically. The Wildrose Alliance have become the standard as far as the polls are concerned, yet another movement, the Progressives are gathering. If you asked them they would say that what the Wildrose stand for is not what the moderate Albertan stands for. The new party movement, Renew Alberta, are advertising themselves as centrists, and again would say that they differ greatly from the Wildrose and the left-leaning Liberals and NDP. 

I am going to argue that many of these party policies and principals are identical, when you look at them in simple text form. Below are Wordles taken from the policy documents and websites. I am willing to bet that you would find it very difficult to guess all five party Wordles correctly. In fact I'll buy the iTunes album of your choice for the first person who guesses all five correctly in the comments.

So my point is this. I think most Albertans want to be excited, inspired, filled with hope, and have a level of trust in our next Premier. I think they will want someone who uses humility, straight-talk, a willingness to see all sides and the vision to lead us along a path of continuous improvement. I don't see that leader yet.

PARTY #1

PARTY #2

PARTY #3

PARTY #4

PARTY #5

p.s. In building these I went to the website of each party and copied and pasted their policy documents, "what we stand for" website text, and in some cased had to past segments together. I REMOVED the following words as much as possible. (PARTY NAMES, Alberta, Albertans, variations on names like Conservative, or Conservatism). This is fun for a poli-geek like me, and I know this isn't science, so please don't give me any BS in the comments about methodology.

Thanks to Wordle for helping with the clouds. If you want to see the one I did of President Obama's speech, you can view it here.

I have watched the Global Warming discussions online this week with much interest. The UN Global Warming conference in Copenhagen Denmark is getting serious attention from around the World. The science behind this issue is extremely complicated, but not nearly as much as the politics.

I am not a doubter, and believe that there is compelling evidence of a century long trend in global warming due to accelerated human production of CO2. That said, I am practical enough to know that no individual or even national based CO2 reductions will make the difference if the developing nations of billions like China and India don't make significant changes in their economic development; which frankly won't happen and might also have catastrophic effects on global economies if they did.

So, I am reduced to hoping for visionary leadership on the issue, and the creation of new ideas to combat the problem. It will be the natural tendency for energy rich economies like ours to ignore the problem, or come up with extremely expensive and untested programs. The natural tendency will be to politicise the short-term and fight for what will keep people employed. For emerging economies, it will be nearly impossible to check the demands of the growing middle class.

So again, I don't have the answer and I will argue that there may not be one that fits every political, geographic and demographic region of the world. What I DO think can make a difference would be a dollar for dollar mandate to spend on technological advancement in combating the problem, vs simply attempting to reduce the CO2 emission of the World. I do believe that the human race has the capacity to find solutions to problems that aren't necessarily answerable with what we know today. Considering that this might be the only way out of this problem, perhaps that is the best way to try and combat Global Warming.

As an afterthought, it may seem an oversight to assume that innovation will come without CO2 restrictions. I am not proposing that we must completely relax efforts to reduce emmissions, but I guess I am suggesting that these will never be enough, if the situation is as dire as many say and the pressure from developing nations will drag these efforts down. In fact innovation will be an outcome of restrictions. I am just suggesting that MORE effort on innovation is needed.

Also, I am not suggesting that Carbon Storage is NOT the answer, but I do seriously wonder what would come of spending $2 Billion in RESEARCHING alternatives to carbon emmisions that can be applied globally, than spending $2 Billion to simply bury our own small percentage of the problem.