Wildrose Alliance leader Danielle Smith stumping during her summer tour of Alberta. The far-right party has weakened the right flank of the Progressive Conservatives. Image courtesy Wildrose Alliance.

At Marv’s Classic Soda Shop, Marvin Garriott, known for his oiled handlebar moustache, is often asked to speak of politics. He’s the local prophet on the subject; all small towns have one. A two-term councillor sitting for the 1,900-person Southern Alberta town of Black Diamond, Garriott poses for tourists and reporters, mugging in a bowling-alley inspired uniform matching the laminate, post-war decor of his pop shop. He knew the federal Conservatives would sweep to a majority, predicted the fall of the Liberals and even says he foresaw the Orange Crush (and the demise of the Bloc).

Ask Garriott to predict the outcome of the upcoming provincial leadership race and his vision goes dark. “It’s going to be an interesting one,” he says, passing judgment on the provincial Progressive Conservative party with a wince and a so-so motion of his left hand. “They weren’t listening to us. And the whole health-care issue has been a fiasco, and it still is.” Albertans face a leadership contest and probable election come fall, and are calling for change. Considering Black Diamond is in the dark blue heart of Tory country, Garriott’s verdict is a surprising vote of non-confidence.

For 40 years, the Conservatives, under the auspices of King Ralph Klein and lately “Steady Eddie” Stelmach have boasted vote margins envied by now-deposed Middle Eastern despots. At least, until Stelmach’s bumbling leadership style cost him the support of party insiders. Facing declining oil royalties, ongoing economic sluggishness and a rogue MLA forcing the party’s failing health-care policies into an unflattering news spiral, the Conservative caucus is “dissolving,” according to David Taras, a media studies professor at Mount Royal University. “People elected [Stelmach] thinking he was experienced, but it turned out there was nothing steady about Eddie,” Taras says. “When 45 percent of your budget goes into health-care, that’s the gold standard. That’s the standard by which you will be judged.”

Following in the out-sized footsteps of the iconic Klein, Stelmach’s path was bound to be bumpy. But his political missteps have been scrutinized more severely by the formation of two new parties: the centrist Alberta Party and far-right Wildrose Alliance. The latter, led by charismatic former journalist Danielle Smith, has quickly leeched the support of the populist-minded and arch-conservative alike (though the pendulum may be swinging back lately).

Stelmach’s fading fortifications were dealt a fatal coup de main during budget talks in January. His finance minister, Ted Morton, reportedly threatened to resign rather than deliver a financial plan easy on cuts and leaning heavily on the province’s reserve savings. Stelmach beat Morton to the podium. The premier resigned during a hasty news conference. He took no questions. Two days later, Morton announced himself a leadership contender. The Conservatives are now staging a six-way race to elect a leader in a five-party province.

The turmoil may even lead to an actual contest come election day—a rarity in a region where there’s more competition within parties than between them. The root of Alberta’s electoral intractability lies in its history, according to Taras. Early American immigration, strong religious communities and the hangover of the Trudeau-Era National Energy Program mean it may be decades before the province sees any real political movement—the election of superstar Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi being the exception. Up to a quarter of Alberta’s budget relies on oil royalties, and the rest of the country is growing increasingly hostile to oil sands development.

The result is a hankering for a strong leader who can stand up to the environmentalists and robber barons of Eastern Canada: “The lesson is that we need majority governments that have to be strong vis-à-vis Ottawa, because if they’re not strong, bad things can happen,” Taras says. “People see environmental politics through the lens of ‘what’s Ottawa going to do to us now?’”

And here, it should be noted, Albertans have a point. Last year, the province’s taxpayers gave the federal government $7 billion more than they received in revenue and services—about the same as what Quebec received in equalization payments. The province also receives less than its fair share in health-care transfers.

Since the ’70s, Alberta’s politics have revolved more around the protection of regional interests than the promulgation of truly conservative social values. That leaves a cadre of leadership candidates that run the gamut from Red Tory to Stockwell Day—just as long as they support oil and gas, all seem to be welcome under the big blue tent. For decades, that made for a broad, stable conservative dynasty; now that base appears to be fracturing.

Gary Mar, a former MLA, recently quit his job as the Alberta representative in the Canadian embassy in Washington. He’s emerged as an early front-runner in the leadership race. High on his list of self-described credentials are his lobbying efforts for the Keystone XL pipeline—a tube that would carry crude oil to the U.S., angering environmental groups on both sides of the border.

At 48 years old, Mar is young and eloquent: traits he shares with fellow candidate Doug Griffiths, who holds the title of youngest MLA to serve the province at 29. Former energy minister Rick Orman and deputy premier Doug Horner both have strong resumes, but may be seen as too old-school to tap into the restless undercurrent.

Alison Redford rounds the centrist Tory position. Socially progressive, she supports boosting Calgary as a world energy capital. She’s also pulled some of the campaign brains behind Nenshi’s purple revolution, which saw the mayor sweep last year’s municipal elections. “We can’t continue to presume that an election takes place, we elect a certain set of officials and then those politicians go away to make decisions, and then ask people to vote for them again,” Redford says. “People are demanding a different conversation with their politicians.”

Then there’s Mr. Et-Tu? Morton, who stands for a more conventional, American-style conservatism that blends fiscal utilitarianism and hard-right values such as opposition to same-sex marriage. Whether he has a shot at the top seat in Alberta as the Wildrose splits the right remains to be seen. “The Wildrose has made a lot of inroads,” Garriott says. Stelmach, with his humble rise to the top, should be popular among the types of people who frequent Marv’s soda shop. He’s not. “For a country boy, [Stelmach] lost touch with reality.”

In Alberta, the reality these days seems to be: expect the unexpected.

That was on July 21, 2011. And the irony was likely lost on De Young and his executioners that, only days before this execution was filmed in the interest of scrutinizing lethal injections, Canada was entering its thirty-fifth year without the death penalty.

On July 14, 1976, the House of Commons voted to strike capital punishment from the Canadian Criminal Code. The road to abolition had been a long one. The first time an MP had introduced an anti-capital punishment bill was 1914, and several more such bills would be shot down over the following decades. After 120 years, and 710 executions, Canada’s capital punishment laws were pretty well-ingrained into judicial society.

It wasn’t until 1956 that Parliament even considered removing the death penalty as a punishment for youth offenders. But by the end of that decade, politicians and the public alike had begun to question the humanity of capital punishment and its effectiveness as a deterrent. Anti-death penalty protesters had started picketing executions, serving as foils to the rabid crowds who had once gleefully swarmed public hangings.

As resistance to capital punishment grew, the death penalty was removed from several crimes, including rape and some murder charges. By 1963, it had become de facto policy for the federal government to commute death sentences and, in 1967, a moratorium was placed on capital punishment for all crimes except the murder of on-duty police officers and prison guards. Nine years later, total abolition was made official. The vote on the hotly contested bill, which had prompted Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau himself to take the floor and make a plea for abolition, transcended partisan lines, and split Canada’s MPs 131 to 124.

Canada, post-death penalty

Thirty-five years on from that landmark legislation, and nearly 50 years after the last executions were carried out, debate over the death penalty in Canada still rages on. Public opinion has almost always favoured the death penalty in theory, if not in actual practice. A poll conducted by a private research firm this past January found that 66 percent of respondents support capital punishment in some cases, though only 41 percent of Canadians surveyed actually want to see the death penalty reinstated. Those figures are still astonishing considering how long Canada has been without capital punishment, and that the only attempt to reinstate it was defeated in 1987, 148 to 127, an even greater margin than the one in the original abolition vote.

Is there an empirical reason for the continued support of the death penalty, or the need for harsher sentences in Canada? The numbers would suggest not. Canadian murder rates have been on a steady decline since their peak in the mid-1970’s, the years leading up to abolition. As of 2009, the murder rate was at its lowest in 40 years. There has never been any conclusive evidence that abolishing the death penalty directly results in lower murder rates, but the trend debunks the theory that capital punishment is necessary to keeping murder rates low. What’s more, according to Amnesty International, the conviction rates for first-degree murder cases doubled, from 10 percent to 20 percent, within ten years of abolition, the implication being that the high stakes of capital punishment actually got in the way of justice.

And yet support for the death penalty remains. Amongst the cohort of Canadians who believe in capital punishment is Prime Minister Stephen Harper who, during an interview with CBC earlier this year, said he “think[s] there are times where capital punishment is appropriate.”

Although the PM also insisted he has no intentions of trying to reinstate capital punishment, his remarks sparked a minor furor during the recent election, as members of the opposition suggested that a Conservative majority would push the death penalty back into the lawbooks. But the most notable controversy surrounding the PM and his stance on capital punishment has been over the case of a Canadian fighting his own death sentence in the United States.

A Canadian on death row

In 1999, Alberta-born Stanley Faulder was put to death in Texas, becoming the first Canadian in almost 50 years to be executed south of the border. In the run-up to his death, the Jean Chrétien government tried to have Faulder’s sentence commuted, but the appeal was rejected by Texas’s then-governor, George W. Bush. Today, with another Canadian facing the death penalty in the States, the government is less interested in helping.

Ronald Allen Smith, of Red Deer, Alberta, has been on death row in Montana since 1983. His death sentence has been overturned three times and, each time, he has been resentenced with the same outcome: death by lethal injection. Just as they did in Stanely Faulder’s case, the Chrétien government went to bat for Smith. Throughout the early years of his appeals, Canadian officials had stayed in constant contact with Smith’s council, and made a formal request for clemency on his behalf in 1997.

Clemency requests for Canadians sentenced to death in foreign countries had been standard government policy at the time. But Harper’s Conservatives, who took power in 2006, changed that policy, announcing that they would not seek clemency for multiple murderers convicted in democratic states. They withdrew their support for Smith in late 2007, prompting Smith and his lawyers to appeal to the Canadian Federal Court. A judge there determined that the government had to follow the old policy until a suitable replacement was enacted, and Harper finally complied, and the Canadian government resumed its talks with Montana officials. Smith has currently been granted a stay of execution while he fights a civil court battle against lethal injections, which he argues are unconstitutional.

Looking ahead

Thirty-five years after it abolished capital punishment, Canada continues to soldier on without it, in spite of the opinions of 41 percent of its populace, and even the personal opinion of its prime minister. The U.S., meanwhile, continues to hand out death sentences in all but 14 states.

But American capital punishment laws are being challenged, as some people look to revive the brief ban on executions that existed between 1972 and 1976.

The execution of Andrew Grant DeYoung, was filmed in order to determine the effectiveness of the drug pentobarbital in sedating condemned criminals during lethal injections. The video will be used in the appeal of another inmate on Georgia’s death row who, much like Ronald Allen Smith, is fighting his death sentence on the grounds that execution constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

These men’s appeals will bring before American courts the same question that was put to Canada’s legislators 35 years ago. Is the death penalty fair and just in a liberal democratic country? At the end of that long debate, it was Pierre Trudeau who, as was so often the case, provided the most eloquent, definitive answer:

“I do not deny that society has the right to punish a criminal, and the right to make the punishment fit the crime, but to kill a man for punishment alone is an act of revenge. Nothing else. Some would prefer to call it retribution because that word has a nicer sound. But the meaning is the same. Are we, as a society, so lacking in respect for ourselves, so lacking in hope for human betterment, so socially bankrupt that we are ready to accept state violence as our penal philosophy? … My primary concern here is not compassion for the murderer. My concern is for the society which adopts vengeance as an acceptable motive for its collective behaviour. If we make that choice, we will snuff out some of the boundless hope and confidence in ourselves and other people, which has marked our maturing as a free people.”

Pierre Trudeau. Bill C-150, passed by his government on May 15, 1969, ushered in a new era of human rights in Canada.

Tomorrow, let’s take a moment to reflect on the 42nd anniversary of the passing of Bill C-150, the omnibus bill that decriminalized abortion, contraception and homosexuality. The rights that Canadians have because of this historic bill are crucial to remember as those same rights come under attack elsewhere: on Wednesday, Indiana became the first state in the U.S. to cut public funding to Planned Parenthood. The same day in Uganda, gay people came close to facing the death penalty.

On May 14, 1969, The Criminal Law Amendment Act formed the legal foundations for the Canadian gay rights movement, and for Henry Morgentaler to perform abortions against — and eventually according to — the law. But it didn’t reduce discrimination, or grant women and members of the LGBTQ community full rights under the charter. Forty-two years later, how much has changed?

Abortion and contraception then:

In the 1950s, a family of five was considered small, explained former nurse Lucie Pepin in her speech commemorating the 30th anniversary of Bill C-150. Many women in rural communities gave birth to their children at home. When complications occurred during birth, the mother was rushed to hospital. If it was too late for a cesarian, her doctor had a decision to make:

“Which to save — the baby or the mother? The Church was clear: save the baby. The Church was clear on many points — women sinned if they refused sexual relations with their husbands or any other form of contraception. The State was also clear. Contraception was illegal and so was abortion.”

Women had no choice in the matter, and neither did their doctors. But Bill C-150 at least changed the latter. The legislation decreed abortion was permissible if a committee of three doctors felt the pregnancy endangered the mental, emotional or physical well-being of the mother. Regard was not given just yet to women’s charter rights to life, liberty and security of the person.

Enter Henry Morgentaler. In 1969, armed with decisive arguments in favour of a woman’s right to an abortion within the first three months of pregnancy, the doctor began performing the procedure illegally in his Montreal clinic. An exchange in 1970 between the adamant doctor and a furious caller on CBC Radio highlighted the fundamental disagreement between the doctor and his critics about when life begins.

Now:

The debate hasn’t progressed. It has degenerated into little more than a shouting match between so-called “pro-life” and “pro-choice” advocates who still can’t agree on when life begins, or whose rights win out: those of the mother or those of the unborn fetus. And recently the Canadian debate has shifted for the worse.

In Indiana, the governor was quite happy to openly chop away at Planned Parenthood’s $2 million in public funding. Meanwhile, in Canada, subtler shifts are taking place. During the election, Tory MP Brad Trost bragged that the Conservative government had successfully cut funding to Planned Parenthood. Stephen Harper quickly denied the comments, saying he would not re-open the abortion debate as long as he is Prime Minister. However, the International Planned Parenthood Federation has been waiting for 18 months to hear whether their funding from the Canadian government will be renewed. During the election, women’s rights groups foreshadowed the Conservatives’ indecision on the matter warning Canadians that Harper would be under pressure from his caucus to re-open the debate. With a Conservative majority now in government, that pressure is sure to grow.

Homosexuality then:

149 Members of Parliament agreed with Trudeau and 55 did not after he famously said “there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.” According to his omnibus bill, acts of homosexual sex committed in private between consenting adults would no longer be prosecuted. But gay sex between people younger than 21 was still illegal.

A Gallup Poll at the time that asked Canadians whether they thought homosexual sex should be legal or illegal found 42 percent in favour of decriminalization and 41 percent against. Homosexuality was openly discussed as an “illness” that ought to be cured. Progressive Conservative Justice Critic Eldon Woolliams voted in favour of Trudeau’s bill so that gays could have the equal opportunity to receive treatment. On February 2, 1969, he said casually on CBC television:

“I don’t think (homosexuality) should ever be put in the criminal code. I think it should be taken out. It should be done in a medical way so that these people could be sent to centres if we feel as citizens who oppose the feeling of this illness and this homosexuality so they could be rehabilitated.”

Woolliams appeared to sincerely (and incorrectly) believe that gay sex was a mere tendency based on environmental factors, and that the “pressure” of these factors could be “relieved.”

Before Bill C-150 was passed, “incurable” homosexual George Klippert was convicted of “gross indecency.” He was sentenced to preventative detention. In 1967, the Supreme Court upheld the decision.

Now:

Today the Ugandaan Parliament debated a bill that aimed to punish “aggravated homosexuality” by increasing jail sentences from 14 years to life. Until yesterday, the bill also proposed the death penalty for gays. The main motivation behind the legislation was preventing the spread of HIV and AIDS.

We would like to think that Canada is 40 years ahead of Uganda, but we still impose discriminatory policies to prevent the spread of what used to be known as “the gay cancer” — HIV/AIDS.

The policy of the Canadian Blood Services is to ban any man who has had sex with another man since 1977 from giving blood for the rest of his life. The organization asserts that it is arms-length enough from the government to uphold the ban without fear of violating Charter rights. The CBS also discriminates based on action rather than sexuality — a gay man who hasn’t had sex is welcome to give blood. A third argument holds the least strength: though HIV/AIDS testing has advanced over the years, the possibility of a false negative still exists.

However, the policy is inherently discriminatory because it assumes any man who has sex with another man carries a high possibility of illness despite other factors such as relationship status, use of condoms, and differing risk factors based on oral versus anal sex. The CBS, which is regulated by Health Canada, maintains its policy based on outdated science. To their credit, the organization has offered a grant of $500,000 to any researcher(s) who can find a safe way to allow “MSM” men to safely give blood. No researchers have applied for the grant.

The lifetime ban is outdated, as is the recommended deferral period of 10 years, which the U.K. recently implemented. Australia, Sweden and Japan currently have deferral periods of one year. Researchers for the Canadian Medical Association Journal have recommended a one-year deferral policy for MSM donors in stable, monogamous relationships.

We’ve progressed, but we’re not perfect. And there’s a real risk of losing what we have. On May 14, let’s be grateful to the activists that pushed the LGBTQ and women’s rights movements forward.

Nine months later, you’ll find Nelson busy planning ways to feed his new-found “obsession” with French-Canadian culture. Nelson credits the program for his change of heart. However, he’s not too impressed with Katimavik now. Like many, Nelson’s concern centres on recent “drastic changes” to the program. Starting this year, Katimavik is taking fewer volunteers, working in fewer communities and, for the first time, charging its participants.

Admittedly, Katimavik has been on the brink before. Launched in 1977 by Pierre Trudeau’s government, Katimavik was originally designed to solve Canada’s unity problem. Groups of youth from across Canada were cycled through three different communities, where they worked at non-profit organizations, lived together, and learned about the country’s cultural variety. Katimavik received its first blow in 1986, when Brian Mulroney’s government completely dismantled it. Jean Chrétien restarted it in 1994.

The program now has a three-year funding agreement with the Conservative government. Currently in its first year, the agreement will eventually cut Katimavik’s budget by a quarter, resulting in a yearly $4.7 million yearly shortfall. “Katimavik is certainly not as strong, and it is certainly not as able to create powerful Canadian citizens the way it could,” says Justin Trudeau, the opposition critic for youth, citizenship and immigration, and a former chair of the Katimavik board of directors.

The money isn’t the only thing that’s been cut. In order to balance its budget, the new funding agreement has forced Katimavik to cut back in many ways: it has reduced the number of participants to 1,000, down from 4,000 in the early ’80s; the program length has been cut from nine months to six; and, instead of being free, participants now must pay fees of up to $535, $350 of which is refunded upon successful completion of the program.

Trudeau doesn’t like the new fee structure. “It was something that was supposed to be accessible to all young Canadians,” he says, “regardless of social or economic status, regardless of education.”

Publicly, Katimavik has stated the cuts aren’t all bad, as they now have secure fiscal support, and are encouraged to diversify funding and look for new financial partners. But some former participants, such as Nelson, aren’t buying it: “I think we are seeing the beginning of the end for Katimavik, honestly.” For Trudeau, the changes are just another step away from his father’s vision. “Katimavik continues to fail to live up to it,” he says. “We haven’t had the capacity in this program to respond to the demand, to give opportunities to the tens of thousands of young people who would love to do this program.”