| lordmandeep said: lol people out in the Western provinces are not as back ward thinking as we think.
Just because they support the Conservatives does not mean they are Rednecks. |
As someone who was born and raised in Calgary, I can say for certain that Albertans are not becoming "more liberal" and that the media is just becoming less successful at distorting/lying about the views of typical Albertans.
From the early days of the land-rush straight through to today Alberta has been a destination for economic immigrants who were seeking the opportunity to have a better standard of living. By the nature of ths immigration, Alberta has attracted primarily self motivated and hard working individuals who desire an environment of self-determination, and scared off those who have drastically different values. At the same time, being that there was no unified or organized immigration there is no binding force to hold together any social conservative movement; and there is also a multi-generational learned tolerance for people who are different.
As you can imagine, this meas that the majority of the issues for provincial and federal politics in Alberta are strictly economic and (because of the belief in personal responsibility and independence) these are generally very fiscally conservative people; and there isn't much in the way of social policy discussion in Alberta.
With this said, the (mostly eastern) media has always cherry-picked events to portray Alberta (and Calgary in particular) in a bad light ... About a year ago there were several news stories in most major news outlets because skin-heads were going to protest in Calgary. For weeks the media (CBC in particular) presented Calgary as a hot-bed of racism, and when the protest happened 12 skin-heads showed up with 8 being from out of province. Yes, 4 people from a province of 3 Million people protesting in a city of 1 Million people were enough for our publicly funded broadcaster to spend weeks calling Alberta a hot-bed of racism.
