Kevin Van Tighem throwing his hat into the political arena
Kevin Van Tighem says he can no longer justify wasting his experience, skills and knowledge when Alberta is facing such critical times.
The author, conservationist and former superintendent of Banff National Park is running for the provincial NDP nomination in the riding of Livingstone-Macleod (the riding is Premier Danielle Smith’s home turf, although she plans to run in Brooks-Medicine Hat).
The Jasper Local caught up with Van Tighem on his way to the NDP’s convention in Calgary. The following interview has been condensed and edited to fit this space.
Bob Covey: In your book, Wild Roses Are Worth It, you asked Albertans to reimagine themselves. I’m wondering if your decision to run for the NDP nomination represents a reimagining of yourself?
Kevin Van Tighem: Oh yes, it sure does. I was very happily retired, enjoying my fishing and my hunting and my book writing and all the things that come with it. I never, ever dreamed I would be a politician. People were after me over the years to step up and I kept on saying no. But here I am!
BC: What was your position that you were always saying no?
KVT: I just sort of figured that I had done my stint in public service and it was time to step aside, but in politics these days it’s hard to get people to put themselves out there. I was looking at Livingstone-Mcleod, which is really the centre of my universe, and nobody was coming forward. A lot of it is because they’re worried about the safety of their families and that sort of stuff. It shouldn’t be like that. Then something occurred to me: I’ve got a lot less at stake than other people and I’ve got a lot of experience and time. I thought ‘well, how can you sit it out?’
BC: Your last book came out at a time when there was an explosion of concern around strip mining. You’ve been a fierce advocate for the eastern slopes. What other issues are you hoping Albertans will be passionate and engaged in?
KVT: It became really clear through that whole coal issue that Albertans really do love the place they live in and care about how it’s treated. I think we’ve got momentum on a lot of conservation issues right now and I certainly hope we can pull those into the political discourse with a government that actually thinks about that sort of stuff, but it’s been interesting as I’ve been out door knocking. I volunteered during the last election and always hated door knocking; you just feel like you’re intruding on people. But it was so different this time. A lot of people who open the door dragged us in or came out on the porch; people really wanted to talk. It’s this feeling of powerlessness, watching these events going around you and thinking ‘the things that matter to me in my life aren’t getting any attention. I don’t seem to have any control over the world we’re living in.’ We were hearing from people who couldn’t get their parents into palliative care and didn’t know who to turn to, people that couldn’t get a family doctor. Every time we ran into a teacher or parent we were hearing about education. So there’s all these other issues that really do matter to a lot of people, and what they got instead was war rooms and inquiries and all of this ideologically-driven stuff that doesn’t relate to the world they’re living in. My own span of focus has really widened to know that this is not a good time in Alberta for a lot of people and they aren’t getting any attention from the government on the things that matter to them.
I’m not just a one-trick pony, is what I’m saying. I’m not a single-issue person coming from my environmental/conservation side. I bring that to government and I hope it will be a powerful contribution but I am all in on the issues that Rachel Notley has been raising because that’s what I’m hearing about at the door.
I’m not a single-issue person coming from my environmental/conservation side.
Kevin Van Tighem
BC: You put up with your fair share of name-calling, trolling and efforts to discredit you during the Off Highway Vehicle debate in the Castle Wilderness conversations, and you acknowledge it can almost feel unsafe to step into the public political fray. What’s your strategy to protect yourself and your supporters from the inevitable toxicity?
KVT: You can’t really protect yourself. You’re out there, you want to connect with everybody. Some people are carrying a lot of frustration and grief and anger and acting it out and that’s what you’re getting. It’s going to be there. I think the big thing is you need to stay on the high road. We’ve all got just as much good inside of us as bad. A lot of the nastiness is online. People, when they’re looking at you in your eye, can’t be as nasty as they are when they’re anonymous behind their keyboards. It’s not really that bad. It can be stressful, because it weighs on you, but jeez, since I declared my interest in this candidacy I’ve had more social media contact than ever before. There’s an army of people out there that support and care for one another. You’ve got to remember the loud and angry voices are coming from a place of hurt, in most cases. But that doesn’t mean they represent the world you live in. The world you live in is the one where all those people are standing behind you and wishing you well and supporting you.
BC: You’ve suggested ways to connect our individual, local actions to larger, momentum-shifting changes, namely: filling one’s minds with possibilities of where they are, rather than the impossibilities of where others are. In the context of a provincial election seven months from now, what are some possibilities that Albertans can focus on to instil hope for the future?
KVT: Where I’ve arrived at in the last few years with my writing and my advocacy, I’ve realized that people in a culture and a society are strongly influenced by the stories they tell themselves and each other. We need to tell ourselves different stories about who we are and what our possibilities are. Focusing on stories about angry convoy leaders or urban-rural splits take us to a place we may not want to go. We need to find the stories that take us to a place we want to go. And we have those. We want to be able to look back in 15 or 20 years and say ‘that is when we became who we meant to be as a province, as a people.’ And that’s not what we’re looking at when I look back at the last two years, and certainly not the last two weeks. We’ve got to grab a different future, and align ourselves politically with the people that are most likely to be part of that. And I hope I’m one of them.
BC: Many Albertans, even ones who like Rachel Notley’s leadership, seem to have something akin to an identity crisis when considering casting a vote for the NDP. I’m wondering how you work to remove this stigma that seems so ingrained, particularly in rural parts of the province?
KVT: Well it’s certainly something that is real, and it’s certainly something that I’ve run into in the past in Livingstone-Mcleod. People who say ‘I could never vote for the NDP’ or ‘well I’ve always voted conservative,’ but they haven’t said why. What we’ve run into at the door when we’ve been door knocking are people who have made the transition. They’ve said ‘I’m absolutely fed up with what’s happened to the conservative party in this province.’ So I think there is some of that happening. It’s not like Albertans aren’t thinking people, we are, but we are also creatures of habit. There was a progressive conservative party back in the days of Lougheed, but it was more of a centrist party that tilted right. That was where a lot of people were comfortable. Today, it’s sort of like the centre has been hollowed out, but that’s where most people live. There’s a vacancy sign there. Frankly, I’m a centrist. I live in that centre ground, where I think most Albertans live. I’ve got very strong views on conservation but I also really believe in fiscal prudence and social justice. I sit in the centre but tilt towards compassion. And I think that’s where most people are, and that’s got to take them to the NDP because there’s nobody else there anymore. But you’ve got to get away from those old stereotypes based on how those parties looked to you 20 years ago because the conservatives ain’t those conservatives and the NDP are the ones, I would argue, closest to centre.
BC: You’ve referred to Rachel Notley as a brilliant and humane leader. What about Ms. Notley impresses you most and what gives you confidence she can lead the NDP to victory in 2023?
KVT: She is really smart. Intellectually, she really thinks and lives and understand politics and has the competent leadership skills that come out of having that kind of intellectual depth. And yet she’s a really warm human being. You don’t usually get those two things. She truly is a remarkable person, in terms of thinking skills and leadership skills but also in terms of just managing to stay warm and compassionate and connected to people. You just don’t see that too often.
BC: What concerns you most about Premier Danielle Smith? Is it her leadership style, her track record, her platform or all of the above?
KVT: When the UCP selected Danielle Smith was when they went over the edge and ceased to be anything like the conservative party we saw in the past. They moved to the fringe, and that really worries me because there is no future for Alberta if we go off the deep end to the right end of the spectrum. I have to say I am really worried about the harm that could be done to this place over the next six to seven months until we can get to a general election. But all I can do is look beyond that. After May next year I firmly believe we will have an NDP government and then we can start to fix this province and give it the future it deserves. I just hope we don’t have a major repair job on our hands.
BC: Last question: You’ve got one minute to convince an undecided constituent in Alberta to give you and the NDP a chance to lead in 2023. What’s your best pitch?
KVT: We’re living with the consequences of having made some bad choices. We’ve wasted billions of dollars on things that went nowhere: Jason Kenney putting us in debt to pay off a pipeline that will never get built; all of these silly adventures fighting adversaries that in many cases don’t even exist. We need to have government that’s focused on governing around the things that matter to the people of Alberta, and we haven’t had that for a number of years. What frustrates me is that we’ve been cursed with politicians who’ve been focused on acquiring power, and then using that power for their friends and for their own ideological purposes. That’s not what politics should be about. It should be about an offer of public service. And that’s what I see from Rachel Notley and that’s what I hope to take to my campaign. We need to get back to government that serves the people, that cares about what the people care about and get out of office this endless ideological sword-rattling and time-wasting that we’ve been living with for the last four years.
Bob Covey // bob@thejasperlocal.com
