Article content continued

It’s deliciously easy to mock this particularly peculiar parking-lot putsch. And when people publicly pledge to overthrow a democratically elected government, they make themselves fair targets. But it’s also easy for mockery to morph into social media bullying. Clark isn’t a threat to anything except our sense of dignity, and all the national and regional media attention he’s received has given him — and everyone else — a distorted sense of his own importance.

Yet Clark is speaking, however inarticulately, for thousands of Albertans overwhelmed by the impact of falling oil prices. The latest unemployment numbers are no joke: according to Statistics Canada, there were 62,480 Albertans on Employment Insurance this December, more than twice as many as the same month last year. As layoffs continue and severance packages evaporate, that number will climb. Sure, Clark’s legal claims are absurd. But the pain and fear out there are not. People are scared of losing their jobs, their homes, their futures. They’re looking to Rachel Notley for answers and assurances.

Answers aren’t easy. No, the NDP can’t control the price of oil. Still, after 10 months in office, this government is doing a woeful job of communicating its message to its citizens. It often seems more interested in picking partisan fights or pursuing Quixotic dream policies than in the hard-scrabble work of daily governance. International economics and geopolitics have dealt Notley and her team a terrible hand. But that’s exactly why Albertans need her to lead, to speak to them in a way that shows she understands their struggles and worries.

Notley has that gift of empathy, that personal warmth, that sense of gravitas. It’s how she got elected. Now, her media strategists, who sometimes seem scarcely more sophisticated than poor George Clark, must let her show it.

Who knows? Maybe the party should let Clark and his followers join the NDP in earnest — and listen, really listen, not to their garbled words, but to their deeper fears.

psimons@postmedia.com

twitter.com/Paulatics

www.facebook.com/PaulaSimons