Strong and Free is Morton’s autobiography, and a classic study of Alberta politics.
Once a generation or so, a book re-sets the agenda on understanding Alberta politics. The first of these was C.B. Macpherson’s 1953 volume, Democracy in Alberta; the second was Richards and Pratt’s Prairie Capitalism (1979), and the third is the subject of this backgrounder, Ted Morton’s Strong and Free: My Journey in Alberta Politics.
In Democracy in Alberta Macpherson’s thesis was that Alberta was “politically and economically a subordinate part of a mature capitalist economy” centred in Laurentian Canada, but whose people, we Albertans, “at the same time, have preponderantly the outlook and assumptions of small-propertied independent commodity producers.” Most reviewers praised Macpherson’s criticism of the “Alice-in-wonderland economics” of Social Credit, but did not emphasize the Marxism that informed it. What Macpherson meant by “small-propertied independent commodity producers,” for example, was that farmers and by extension the rest of us, were members of the “petit-bourgeois class,” and thus afflicted with “false consciousness of society and of themselves.” The theoretical limitations of Marxism aside, looking back, Macpherson’s greatest omission was his failure even to consider the potential impact of Leduc Number One, which blew in some six years before the book was published, or, before that, the importance of large-scale coal operations. Nor did he mention ranchers: no petit bourgeois they!
