Word arrives that newly re-elected Premier Alison Redford is being described as a political centrist in the image of Peter Lougheed. There is a word for that kind of word. It is nonsense. If Redford is, in fact, the keeper of the Lougheed legacy, by definition she is not centrist — because neither was he. Judging the full record of his years in office from 1971 to 1985, Lougheed was unquestionably a great premier for Alberta. Scratch that. He was a great politician for Canada. When I covered his government as a legislature journalist, he became one of the top three Canadian political leaders I’ve most admired. Later, encountering him during my years working at the Herald and the Sun, I discovered a thorough and naturally decent man. I once witnessed him using his elder statesman status in a room full of swashbuckling, rich, young Calgary entrepreneurs to challenge each of them, pointedly and by name, to do more, give more, for their community and their society. It demonstrated the truth of who Peter Lougheed is. Equally true, however, is that he has never been a man of the centre. From training and disposition, he governed as a believer in the marriage of technocratic decision-making and limitless expansion of the state to assist (manage?) the lives of ordinary citizens. His instincts, and his initiatives, went far beyond so-called Red Tory balancing of market forces and the human need for collective help. In the mid-1980s, one of Lougheed’s last acts as premier was a white paper on science and technology that proposed government “pick winners and losers” in the economy. Even as Alberta’s economy was hitting the bottom of the metaphoric well because of the nefarious National Energy Program, the blowback from business leaders and the political class was ferocious. The broad centre of Alberta society opposed the state making such determinations. It fought back against Lougheed’s visionary excess. No matter. The dream articulated in the white paper became the marching orders for Lougheed’s hand picked successor, Don Getty. Lougheed-legacy statism became the intellectual and economic ground on which the fiscal fiascos of the late 1980s and early 1990s played out. Ralph Klein is caricatured as a neo-con revolutionary who inflicted a Chicago School, market uber alles ethos on Albertans. But Klein began political life as a rough-and-tumble Liberal populist/pragmatist and never strayed far from those origins. Asked once what he thought of a particular passage in libertarian god Friedrich von Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Klein reportedly replied: “Do I look like a guy who reads books?” What he did read were the times and Alberta’s finances. He recognized the necessity of bringing the province, not hard to the right, but back to its natural political centre. He restored the balance by which government leaves undone those things that it ought not do, and steps in to do those things that only it can do. Enter Premier Redford, stepping deftly over the political corpse of her preternaturally cold and stiff predecessor, Ed Stelmach. If her eye-popping promises of increased spending come to pass, she will, indeed, revert to Lougheed-era winners-and-losers dirigisme, but with a carny-barker, Stampede midway twist: “Everyone’s a winner, folks. Step right up.” As a friend of mine e-mailed following Redford’s victory, “the left wing of the NDP is now in charge. (NDP Leader) Brian Mason had a far more sensible economic platform than Redford.” Curiously, it is on so-called moral concerns rather than mere economics that Redford reveals how far beyond the centre she is, even compared to her decidedly non-centrist mentor. Lougheed, after all, acceded to the adoption of Pierre Trudeau’s Charter of Rights in 1982. He did not give in, though, before winning a clause in the charter designed to sustain proper balance between legislatures and courts. Redford seems to have no taste for anything like proper balance or, for that matter, the charter itself. From the beginning of the campaign, she seemed partial to fiat rather than full democratic discussion. If I understood well, she declared issues such as abortion and gay rights off the agenda not because they are beyond provincial jurisdiction, but because they are not permitted in political conversation. The phrase “Stalinist instinct” must be used very sparingly, but still. Most disturbing was her insistence that conscience rights provisions exempting certain doctors from prescribing contraceptives, or certain marriage commissioners from officiating at gay weddings, are an unspeakable, foreign concept in Alberta. Conscience rights are charter rights. There they are, the first rights enumerated in the fundamental rights protected by the rest of the document. Nor is it true, as Redford claimed, that those rights have been settled one way (read: her way) for ever and all time. On the contrary, the courts have worked continuously for decades to balance conscience rights against other rights that might offend them. Whether one agrees or not with outcomes in particular cases, the courts continue struggling to find the centre point of fairness and equity in matters of conscience. Both by her attack on conscience rights and her claim to descend from the House of Lougheed, then, Premier Redford shows the centre is far from her natural home. Let us have no more nonsense about it.