Backlash against Wildrose shows most voters reject bigotry.
by Gillian Steward
The sighs of relief sweeping Alberta are almost audible. It's not that most Albertans are relieved that the Progressive Conservatives won the election, yet again. But rather that it is now abundantly clear that most Albertans are not racists and homophobes.
Other Canadians likely feel they don't need to prove this. But in Alberta we had a history that clung to us like an old, tattered sheet.
The Social Credit party, which governed Alberta for 35 years, was overtly anti-Semitic in its early days.
In the early 1980s anti-Semitism reared its ugly head again, when it was revealed that a social studies teacher in a public high school was teaching students that the Holocaust was a hoax. Jim Keegstra was quickly booted from his teaching job and eventually convicted of wilfully promoting hate, a decision upheld in 1990 by the Supreme Court.