Wildrose deftly defuses robo-call crisis while federal Cons suffer Scotch verdict

by David Climenhaga on May 24, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Electoral Fraud, Robo Calls with No comments

Members of the Wildrose Party try out their new robo-calling technology, which should avoid future problems with the CRTC. Right-wing Alberta politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Wildrose Party Executive Committee President David Yager.

You don’t have to agree with Alberta’s right-wing Wildrose Party to admire the skill with which it stick-handled yesterday’s revelation it had been fined $90,000 by the federal broadcast regulator for a series of improperly identified robo-calls made to voters during the 2012 election campaign.

Compared to the federal Conservative Party’s blundering response to its various recent troubles, it seems mildly astonishing the two parties are essentially the provincial and federal branches of the same organization.

Slapped with the significant fine by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Wildrose Party officials responded deftly.

When the CRTC decision was reported by Global TV, party officials fessed up immediately, then followed with an immediate, contrite and seemingly sincere admission they were wrong and a promise never to do it again. They’d already paid their fine by the time the matter was in the news and that was the end of it. There will be no appeal.

Party leaders left the embarrassing admission to David Yager, president of the party’s executive committee, instead of Opposition Leader Danielle Smith.

The tone and speed with which the matter was handled was pitch perfect. Under the circumstances, the party’s claim it didn’t realize it was breaking the rules will sound quite believable to voters. As a consequence, the whole potentially embarrassing business will likely fall off the radar within 48 hours.

Given the size of the fine and the Canadian right’s issues with regulators like the CRTC, the temptation must have been strong in Wildrose circles to make a fight out of the dispute – but someone obviously made a cool-headed assessment of the facts and realized that would only prolong and magnify the agony.

This contrasts dramatically with the federal Cons’ ham-handed handling of the continuing Duffygate Senate expense scandal and the coincidental court ruling yesterday in the election fraud case stemming from the last federal vote in May 2011 – a case less that coincidentally involved Rack 9, the same Edmonton robo-call company that made the Wildrose calls.

In fairness, there’s a significant difference in gravity between the Wildrose Party’s failure to identify itself as the source of partisan robo calls and the outright electoral fraud in which targeted Liberal supporters were misdirected to incorrect or imaginary polling stations by callers pretending to be from Elections Canada.

Still, if the federal Conservatives had adopted a similar strategy, contritely admitted they had done wrong, paid the party’s debt to society and perhaps tossed in a few extra “overenthusiastic” low-level flunkies to accompany party operative Michael Sona under the bus, the whole affair could have been forgotten by now.

But Prime Minister Harper is almost pathologically incapable of admitting error. His party tried to block the proper investigation at every turn.

Now, in a classic “Scotch Verdict,” the judge in the federal case appears to have let the Conservatives off the hook because, despite powerful circumstantial evidence, the facts were well enough hidden to make it difficult to tie the well-established fraudulent activities to the only party in a position to benefit from them.

According to the Globe and Mail, this result clears Mr. Harper’s Conservatives, Tory candidates and two telemarketing companies of wrongdoing. However, the political reality is quite different. The case is merely “not proven,” while the odour of corruption will stick to Mr. Harper’s party like a miasma.

Moreover, federal Tory pain is bound continue, since the Council of Canadians will now likely take its demand for election results in six ridings to be overturned to the Supreme Court of Canada. Win or lose before the Supremes, the Council’s case will continue to bedevil the Harperites.

Given the ways they dealt with these superficially similar cases, you’d almost think the Harper Conservatives in Ottawa were the farm team, and the Wildrose Party in backcountry Alberta were the pros!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Viva Con! Hasta la Victoria Siempre con Conrad – putting the ‘cross’ back in Crossharbour!

by David Climenhaga on May 23, 2013 in Drivel, Lord Black of Crossharbour, Tortured Shakespearean Imagery with 5 Comments

Lady Black and Lord Black of Crossharbour contemplate the future of our fair Dominion, or something. Below: The real Conrad Black, in happier times, lectures a gangrenous limb as his bodyguard ponders his boss’s remarkable vocabulary; the House of Lords.

Oh dear!

Poor old Tubby Black, welcomed back home after his legal difficulties south of the Medicine Line by our ever-tolerant Canadian nation, finds himself once again bellowing ultra-right clichés like a wounded dinosaur.

It is almost as if His Lordship is in competition with Ezra Levant for the title of the Nick Bottom of Canadian Letters – Bottom! O most courageous day! O most happy hour! – lovable, but not necessarily for the reasons he imagines.

And right now, Lord Black is clearly in the lead!

I confess that when I first heard of the planned return to our Dominion of Lord Black of Crossharbour – as he has been properly known since his welcome into that bastion of democratic meritocracy, the House of Lords (not to be confused with the gentlemen’s hairdresser of the same name on Yonge Street), I feared the worst. Surely, I thought, his Lordship would become a divisive force in our society, arousing passions, perhaps even inspiring the unwashed masses into the streets, clanging pots and pans. Quelle Horreur!

I regret now that expressed that view in the public prints, as obviously I need not have worried.

Notwithstanding several of his Lordship’s recent and apparently unintended comedic turns, the reaction of most of our compatriots has been one of good-natured restraint, smirkily rolled eyes and the occasional ho-hum.

In fairness, as a relatively new recruit to the ranks of what’s left of the toiling press – those “swarming, grunting masses of jackals,” as someone once said of them – his Lordship is being paid, and probably not all that well if prevailing rates hold in his case, to stir our tepid Canadian pot.

And thus, after a short spell of uncharacteristic quietude – as if he were attempting to persuade us of his goodwill, notwithstanding his well-known disapproval of the way we Canadians are cheerfully inclined to view our philistinism as Olympian serenity – he is back to making a nuisance of himself by advocating anti-social behaviour among the moneyed classes.

But as time passes, Lord Black sounds less like the Olympian arbiter of his imagination and more like the crankiest old man of the Canadian right, fulminating against the myriad irritations of modern life.

For example, in a recent crie de coeur against public service unions in the National Pest, the moribund newspaper His Lordship founded and which continues to indulge him even as its beloved market turns against its dreary pages, he dismisses unions as “a collapsed lung that cripples and stultifies any organization.”

Such fond memories this inspires! Has it already been more than a decade since His Lordship dismissed me and a few of my colleagues as “gangrenous limbs” awaiting a necessary severing? Well, severed we were, but like the severed scions of the Glastonbury Thorn, we keep springing up again … seemingly everywhere!

“Public sector unions are a blight on our society,” grumped the Pest’s headline writer in his useful summary of Lord Black’s jeremiad against every variety of union, which got the tone just right while saving less-resolute readers from the task of deciphering His Lordship’s unhealthily choleric medical imagery.

But it is said here that, so irritated by the many burrs that inhabit the underside of his ample saddle, Lord Black’s prescriptions no longer make much sense, even from his inharmonious point of view.

For example, he suggests replacing collective bargaining in the public sector with some form of binding arbitration – a solution that presupposes the continued existence of some sort of entity with which to arbitrate bindingly, a mild surprise. But what if the arbitrator refuses to do what the employer wants, and plumps for a fair settlement for the working classes?

Surely, under such circumstances, the moneyed classes might discreetly riot, or, worse, carry their depleted millions away to a tax haven in the Channel Isles!

And if arbitration fails, Lord Black seems to be proposing to draft public employees into the army.

This may sound sufficiently draconian to impress his tiny but devoted band of supporters. But has he considered that what he is in fact advocating is handing boots, automatic rifles and training in the firing of mortar bombs to a group of people he has said elsewhere are raving socialists determined to convert the country into a Third World dump?

One is tempted to cry, Viva Con! Hasta la Victoria Siempre! 

Indeed, so irascible has become Lord Black’s incessant columnizing that one keeps expecting him to huff bitterly at the prospect of having to dine in a restaurant too dimly lit to read the menu or see the food, surely a grave symptom of our national malaise!

Why, he even finds his former friend Rob Ford, who for the moment remains the mayor of Toronto, increasingly irritating, or, as he put it, “like the embarrassing guest at a family Christmas party” – which, come to think of it, in the matter of relations within our Canadian family at any rate, is rather like the pot calling the kettle, er … Black.

Which brings me back to the inevitable comparison of Lord Black’s role in our happy land with that of Mr. Levant, the well-known Sun News Network provocateur of similar views.

I have met Mr. Levant, and my assessment of his character is that, despite his outrageous on-air persona, he is in fact nothing more than a showman who has hit upon a sure-fire formula for achieving what passes for ratings success on late-night cable TV – 17,000 viewers and very slowly rising, tabby cats and sleepless parakeets included.

I am not saying Mr. Levant is insincere in his frequently repugnant views – au contraire! – merely that he may possess a more puckish outlook than one might imagine if you are part of the minuscule group that actually listens to his daily rants on obscure cable TV channels numbered 700 and higher.

As for Lord Black – despite being a notoriously bright fellow, the author of several massive doorstoppers thought to be capable of keeping even a heavy vehicle from rolling down a steep hill, with even more on the way – how can we doubt that he passionately believes every dreary word he writes?

Which is reason enough, I say, for our tolerance, and even a little sympathy, for this perpetually cranky and remarkably un-Puckish curmudgeon. He is, after all, all ours!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Pack the Senate with cheats, then call for reform, then take off for Peru? Good plan!

by David Climenhaga on May 22, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Allaudin Merali, Senate Abolition, Senate of Canada, Senator Mike Duffy with 4 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, not pictured because he’s pretty well disappeared, has heeded the touristic lure South America, illustrated above. Below: Canadian Parliamentarian Joan Crockatt and U.S. Representative Davy Crockett. Note to Globe and Mail: There is a difference! Below them: Allaudin Merali.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was apparently grinding away at his Conservative caucus yesterday morning about the need for Senate reform.

An interesting strategy, his!

First you pack the place with self-entitled cheats and porkchoppers like Mike “The Puffster” Duffy, then you argue that their misdeeds are proof the institution needs reform!

If nothing else, this suggests Calgary Centre MP Joan Crockatt was sticking right to the party strategy handbook when she suggested in a now-ntorious Tweet that her Conservative Party is more ethical than all those other parties because some of its unethical senators resigned from caucus when they got caught.

Of course, this doesn’t mean very much when they can be expected to go on reliably voting for the same things as they would as caucus members while try to insinuate their way back to insider status, at least until they reach 75.

Ms. Crockatt’s risible suggestion prompted general hilarity among the chattering classes nationwide – and probably would have gone international had it not been for the antics of Toronto Mayor (and future Conservative senator?) Rob Ford, who was already occupying the Canadian Curiosity slot on foreign newscasts.

(By the way, here’s a note for the Globe and Mail’s editors, if such a thing is still employed by our National Paywalled Website: Unlike Davy Crockett, the late U.S. Congressman of a similar name, it’s Joan Crockatt, with an A.)

Let it be said nevertheless that Ms. Crockatt might be well advised to follow the example of former avid Tweeter Pat Martin of the New Democratic Opposition and shut down her Twitter account for the duration, or at least hand it over to a reliable aide.

Speaking of reliable aides, that brings us right back to the prime minister’s current sea of troubles.

I expect Mr. Harper’s suggestion at a studiously public caucus meeting yesterday morning that any of his MPs who are just there for reasons of self interest should “leave this room” was mainly greeted with discreetly rolled eyes.

“I know that like me and my family, you are scrupulous about paying personal expenses,” Mr. Harper is said to have added, presumably with a poker face and to a largely silent room, before quickly jetting off to the much friendlier environs of Peru and Colombia, leaving Question period to underlings.

Mr. Harper’s problem is that, right now thanks to Senator Duffy and others, the public has taken a fairly jaundiced view of his government, and he knows it. And nowadays who can blame them for a little cynicism, when just a few layers of the onion are peeled back yet the PM refuses to acknowledge any responsibility or even knowledge of what was going on among his closest aides right in his own office?

Instead, quite typically, Mr. Harper blamed the NDP and the Liberals for his self-inflicted troubles – and privately, no doubt, the “liberal” media as well. You know, those well-known social democrats like PostMedia’s Andrew Coyne and the editorial Board of the Globe and Mail, for whom l’affaire Puffster has been too much to swallow even with their usual tolerance for bad-tasting Tory potions.

Despite Mr. Harper’s not-entirely-successful attempts to “distance himself” form his stinky Senate appointments, the PM had very little to say before his hasty departure about the one issue that would have benefitted from the disinfectant properties of a little sunlight.

To wit: the unethical and possibly illegal payment of $90,172 by the former chief of the prime minister’s staff, Nigel Wright, to Senator Duffy.

Mr. Wright fell on his sword on Sunday morning to protect his prime minister after his effort failed to bail out the Harper Government by quietly paying off Senator Duffy’s improperly claimed away-from-home living expenses.

Alas for Mr. Harper – who has replaced Mr. Wright with a callow former National Citizens Coalition hack rather like himself who used to walk around wearing a picket sign reading, “Liberal, Tory, Same Old Story” – the issue just won’t fade away.

Indeed, the only way to make it go away forever is to fix the Senate. And unfortunately for the PM’s “reform” talk, the only way to fix the Senate that will actually work is to abolish it.

 

Contracts? Contracts? Who cares about contracts?

Meanwhile, out here in Alberta, Premier Alison Redford has vowed to forestall the inevitable and force former Capital Health and Alberta Health Services CFO Allaudin Merali to go to court if he wants to try to get his half-million or so dollars in severance.

Alert readers will recall how Mr. Merali’s expense account became a cause célèbre and a huge embarrassment to the Redford Government in August 2012 when CBC investigative reporter Charles Rusnell published the results of a Freedom of Information search revealing “how he spent tens of thousands of dollars on lavish meals at high-end restaurants, bottles of wine, even a phone for his Mercedes Benz car.” Mr. Merali left the employ of AHS soon thereafter.

Yesterday, Calgary Sun political columnist Rick “The Dinger” Bell quoted Ms. Redford as saying, “If people think they are entitled to something in a contract and other people don’t think they’re entitled to it I guess they can hire lawyers and take legal routes and go to court.”

In other words, she said: “We are not going to voluntarily do anything with respect to his severance. … We are not going to simply sit back and take a look at what he may or may not feel he’s entitled to without resisting that.”

There are just four problems with this plan:

  1. Alberta Health Services signed a contract with the guy that says he’s owed the money
  2. Outrageous as his expenses may have seemed, all of them appear to have met the lax the rules for executive expenses in effect at the time he was a Capital Health Region employee
  3. He was rehired and then fired by another employer, AHS, and there’s no evidence his expenses at that organization broke any rules
  4. Canada, even the part governed by Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservative Party, still has an independent and impartial judiciary

In other words, while Ms. Redford’s attitude is pretty typical of Alberta’s Top Tory Dogs – that is, the law is for you, not for us – sooner or later we Alberta taxpayers are going to have to pony the money up to Mr. Merali.

Yes, we can understand that by getting caught by the CBC successfully claiming expenses that offended ordinary voters, Mr. Merali embarrassed the government and incurred the premier’s wrath.

But we can also understand that Alberta taxpayers are not very well served by a legal fight against Mr. Merali’s claim, which as far as can be seen is entirely legitimate and backed up by a long trail of paper.

All Alberta’s premier is doing with this posturing, it is said here, is pouring good money after bad.

Unless, that is, she is slicing the facts extremely finely, since it will be AHS that has to pay up, and not technically “her” – that is, on the principle of l’état c’est moi, the government of Alberta.

On the other hand, if she is proposing to get involved in the affairs of AHS, that is not necessarily a bad thing either.

She could start by telling AHD Board Chair Stephen Lockwood to stop defending bonus pay for the health agency’s remaining executives on the grounds “it would be wrong from many perspectives to not compensate them as per their terms of employment.”

You know, completely unlike Mr. Merali.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

(Prime) ministerial responsibility and all that … surely the wrong man has quit!

by David Climenhaga on May 20, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Ministerial Responsibility, Nigel Wright, Parliamentiary Government with 10 Comments

The home of Canada’s Parliament, held in contempt by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Reform Party, doing business under the name of the Conservative Party of Canada. Below: former chief of staff Nigel Wright, Mr. Harper and Senator Mike Duffy.

Surely the wrong man has quit!

Nigel Wright, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff, resigned yesterday in the imbroglio that followed the revelation he gave disgraced Senator Mike Duffy $90,172 to pay back the Parliamentary expenses the supposed representative for Prince Edward Island in the Upper House had improperly claimed.

The purpose of the controversial payment, obviously, was to make the political problem created by the discovery of Senator Duffy’s unethical behavior disappear.

But the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, surely, requires that the prime minister himself must go.

Calm down, people! Your blogger recognizes this is not very likely. Mr. Harper, his cabinet, and significant portions of his Reform Party caucus, which does business under the name of the Conservative Party of Canada, hold Parliament, Parliamentary tradition, Parliamentary conventions, and Parliamentary democracy itself in contempt. This has been well understood since 2011.

Nevertheless, the doctrine of ministerial responsibility itself is quite clear.

“According to the doctrine,” says my favourite Canadian politics textbook, “the minister who heads each department must be accountable to the House of Commons for the conduct of each and every civil servant working in that department.”

“On the most basic level, this means that ministers may be asked in the House to investigate allegations of incompetence or impropriety in their departments and take appropriate measures,” explain authors Patrick Malcolmson and Richard Meyers in The Canadian Regime.

“If the incompetence or impropriety is substantial and may be attributed to poor management, however, the stakes become much higher,” they write. “Under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility the minister must take personal responsibility for major problems of mismanagement.

“In more serious cases of mismanagement, this means the minister must resign.” (In every case, the italics were added by me.)

Now, there can be no doubt that Mr. Harper is the minister responsible for the Prime Minister’s Office.

It is true that the employees of the modern institutionalized Canadian PMO are partisan political appointees outside the rules of the Public Service of Canada. Nevertheless, they are public employees paid by the taxpayers of Canada through the budget of the Privy Council Office, the prime minister’s government department. So it can be persuasively argued that under the ministerial responsibility doctrine their behaviour is the clear responsibility of the PM.

Moreover, the mismanagement in the case of Mr. Wright’s outrageous payment to Senator Duffy is of the most egregious kind, carried out by the prime minister’s closest aide.

So the prime minister’s alleged lack of knowledge, much emphasized by Conservative Party spokespeople and the media, is no excuse.

As the Wikipedia’s excellent and accurate entry on ministerial responsibility explains, “the minister is responsible even if the minister had no knowledge of the actions.”

In other words, it changes nothing if we take Prime Minister Harper at his word that he knew nothing of the actions planned and perpetrated by his closest advisor.

Mr. Wright may “accept sole responsibility” if he wishes, but under the doctrines of our Parliamentary democracy and the practicalities of real political life, the responsibility is not his alone, whether or not he or his erstwhile boss like it.

Nor is the prime minister’s statement that “I accept that Nigel believed he was acting in the public interest, but I understand the decision he has taken to resign” good enough, notwithstanding his fatuous addition of the standard Conservative Party talking points that “securing jobs and economic growth for Canada … is the focus of all our efforts and attention.”

Well, obviously not! Unless, of course, we are talking about jobs and economic growth for Tory insiders.

“A minister is ultimately responsible for all actions by a ministry because, even without knowledge of an infraction by subordinates, the minister approved the hiring and continued employment of those civil servants,” states the Wikipedia’s entry. Well, this is most certainly true in the case of Mr. Harper, who personally chose and hired Mr. Wright as his chief of staff.

Even if we accept the view that the most senior civil servants may be called before Parliament, bypassing their minister, Mr. Wright is simply too high in the food chain for such treatment.

Yet so far, unsurprisingly, not only has Mr. Harper refused to take personal responsibility in this case, he appears to be denying that he has any responsibility at all.

Nevertheless, his public acceptance of Mr. Wright’s resignation, ipso facto, acknowledges the responsibility is his.

Ergo, it is the prime minister that should resign.

Don’t hold your breath.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Schadenfreude, evidence and politics: a half-hearted defence of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford

by David Climenhaga on May 19, 2013 in Realpolitik, Rob Ford, Toronto Star with 5 Comments

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford as he might have appeared in ancient Rome, whence comes the idea that in politics public figures and their associates must be above suspicion. Below: The real Rob Ford; Caesar’s wife.

Schadenfreude is all very well, but this whole Rob Ford video scandal has me feeling just the tiniest bit hinky.

It’s a due-process thing, and I recognize that there can be no due process in politics, as unjust as that may seem.

No, realpolitik demands that the operative rule in politics be summed up in the notion we abbreviate with the phrase “Caesar’s wife,” although it might more accurately be expressed as “Caesar’s Ex-wife.” To wit, the idea mere associates of public figures, not to mention the public figures themselves, must be above suspicion. End of story. (We’ll discuss Nigel Wright’s $90,172 gift to Senator Mike Duffy some other time, OK?)

Still, my problem with the journalistic prosecution (as opposed to persecution, I guess) of Toronto’s thoroughly disreputable and embarrassing mayor for being seen in a video by someone smoking something that is said to be crack cocaine is that there is really no evidence for this beyond hearsay from a small group of people, not all of whose motives may be entirely pure.

To wit: I haven’t seen the video, and neither have you – unless you’re the guys who took it, one of two Toronto Star reporters who watched it on a cellular phone in a smelly automobile or the editor from a gossip website in the United States, where, as we all know, you can say pretty well anything about anyone and get away with it if they’re a public figure.

But even if I had seen the video, I’m not sure I’m capable of telling what anyone depicted in a cell-phone image is smoking, even if it’s pretty clear they were smoking something.

Which is where the schadenfreude comes in. Of course it’s satisfying to see the mighty brought low, especially when the mighty one in question is an arrogant and ignorant so-and-so who espouses positions on just about every issue that I personally find to range from idiotic to outright repugnant. So it’s fair to say I’m ill disposed toward the guy.

What’s more, the mayor in question exhibits a range of behaviour from his driving habits, to voting in council to excuse himself from paying back lobbyists for political donations, to his defence of his private property line that seem entirely inappropriate under the circumstances and which he seems to think were completely reasonable. So, on top of the last point, I’m quite prepared to think ill of him.

Finally, now that he’s been accused, the guy insists on behaving in a way that screams guilt – he won’t discuss the specifics with anyone or even indicate what he plans to do next. So, it’s darned hard not to just say to heck with him, and assume he’s guilty.

Perhaps my problem is that what he’s now accused of doing – instead of backing policies I disagree with or generally behaving like a lout – is an actual Criminal Code offence, and that makes me want to think some of the standards of the courtroom ought to be observed, even in the realm of politics.

On that topic, Bill Clinton admitted he smoked pot, even if he didn’t inhale, Barry Obama supposedly smoked a little too, and we probably all wish Prime Minister Stephen Harper had also smoked something, and maybe inhaled as well!

Regardless, are we confident the two known Canadians making the accusation Rob Ford was smoking crack are without an agenda?

They work for the Toronto Star, after all, and the Star has been involved in a crusade against Mayor Ford, ever since he stupidly refused to talk to the newspaper’s reporters because he didn’t like the coverage it was giving him. This may prove he’s an idiot who doesn’t listen to his PR counsel, but I’m not sure how much we can extrapolate from that.

However, there have been several times I thought the Star went over the top on this war too. Didn’t they go after the guy for being caught eating fried chicken when he was supposed to be on a diet, for heaven’s sake? Well, I’ll have to plead guilty to that particular sin myself, I’m afraid.

So do I distrust the Star reporters’ conclusion that it was definitely Mayor Ford in the video and that he was most assuredly smoking crack? Like Richard Nixon, let me say this about that: I don’t doubt they saw what they said they saw, but I’m not certain I completely trust their deductive powers.

As for the drug dealers trying to sell the video, supposedly for $200,000, excuse me, but these guys just don’t sound like public-spirited citizens. As for their appearance with Hizzonor, having one’s picture taken with a politician hardly makes one an associate. As readers of this blog will know, I’m proof of that myself.

Then there is the matter of purely practical politics. Are we going to call for the resignation of every politician accused of doing something unsavoury, as the Star did in the case of Mayor Ford yesterday? If so, get ready for politicians you agree with to be subjected to the same demand on similar or weaker evidence, probably sooner than later.

And imagine what will be said of the left, the centre and the media in the event Mr. Ford can somehow establish, say, that it wasn’t him, or that he was just blowing bubbles!

Moreover, you’ve got to admit, every minute Mayor Ford now remains in office is a bonus for progressives. The guy is not exactly a stirling reference for the people who see the world the same way he does, like his pal and Mr. Wright’s boss, Prime Minister Harper, for example.

Mayor Ford is a disgrace. He richly deserves to be voted out of office. If he committed a Criminal Code offence while in office, I’ll personally be delighted to call for his head.

But it’s said here that the Star’s case doesn’t make the grade, even by the low standards necessary in politics. Not just yet anyway.

This genie won’t go back in the bottle. It’s time to make the video public so we can judge for ourselves.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

CBC journalist Charles Rusnell: slaying Alberta’s Tory dragon, one scandal at a time …

by David Climenhaga on May 17, 2013 in Alberta Legislature, Alberta Politics, CBC, Investigative Reporting, Media, Progressive Conservatives with 1 Comment

Your blogger with CBC investigative reporter Charles Rusnell. Below: Edmonton-Manning MLA Peter Sandhu; Mr. Sandhu with Alison Redford in a Tory Party photo grabbed from the Daveberta.ca blog. The photo-bomber is Calgary-Fort MLA Wayne Cao.

You’d think it would be easy to run a petroleum-soaked, cash-rich jurisdiction like Alberta, but a day seldom seems to pass out here on the western edge of the Great Plains without our governing Progressive Conservative Party suffering another pratfall or embarrassment.But how many Albertans know that so many of these scandals bedevilling our permanent governing party have been uncovered by the same guy — a Canadian Broadcasting Corp. investigative reporter named Charles Rusnell?

It was Mr. Rusnell who broke stories on, among other things, former Tory leadership candidate and senior minister Ted Morton’s bogus government email account; a host of illegal political donations, including the one from Athabasca University; Tobaccogate, wherein a law firm that had the premier’s ex-husband for a partner got picked for years of highly lucrative legal work; former Alberta Health Services CFO Allaudin Merali and his wonderful expense account; Alison Redford’s sister’s iffy political donations; and the disturbing tale of the whistleblower at Transcanada Pipelines.

The latest Conservative caucus calamity (C3) uncovered by Mr. Rusnell is the troubling case of Peter Sandhu, the Tory MLA for Edmonton-Manning, who since his election in 2008 has generally been assessed as a legislative under-performer but not much more.

A low performance rating is no barrier to re-election around here, however, as long as the MLA in question has official permission to put his or her face on a blue-and-orange PC lawn sign, something Mr. Sandhu proved in April 2012.

Nevertheless, Mr. Sandhu is performing well beyond specifications in the press clippings department right now – indeed, to such a degree that he’s at least temporarily no longer a member of Premier Alison Redford’s PC caucus.

On Tuesday, the Edmonton investigative staff of the CBC was reporting that Mr. Sandhu’s house-building company, NewView Homes, not only has a history of chronic debt and faces dozens lawsuits for unpaid bills, but a goodly portion of its liabilities weren’t properly disclosed as required of an MLA under the province’s Conflicts of Interest Act.

Worse, Mr. Rusnell revealed, his investigation “uncovered a false statement made by the MLA in a sworn affidavit filed in a civil court case involving a dispute over an alleged debt.” The CBC says it can show Mr. Sandhu was in Canada at a time he swore he was in India.

Yikes! Now the opposition parties of the left and right are screaming for Mr. Sandhu’s head and demanding that the RCMP step in and lay charges.

The Redford Government would really rather do nothing at all, thank you very much. Premier Redford and Human Services Minister Dave Hancock – who is also the Government House Leader and as readers of this blog will recall, according to the Edmonton Journal the moral compass of the Tory caucus – lamely tried to praise Mr. Sandhu for doing “the honourable thing” and jumping before he was pushed.

So, is Mr. Rusnell on a crusade against the Progressive Conservatives?

No doubt it seems that way deep inside the Redford cabinet bunker, but it’s said here that it wouldn’t really matter which party was in power, Mr. Rusnell would be going after bad behaviour with the same pit-bull fervour.

Charles Rusnell is just one of those guys who can’t stand hypocrisy, special dealing, rule breaking, insider trading and the idea that the law is for everyone else – just the sort of things you’d expect to be rampant in a province that has been run by the same party for 42 years and essentially the same crowd for almost twice that long. Really, probably the only way to get him off your case is to behave yourself.

If Mr. Rusnell were a police officer, he’d be the kind of cop who’d ticket the chief’s car at a funeral. Instead, he’s a former print reporter with a lot of knowhow about filing Freedom of Information requests.

Years ago, Mr. Rusnell worked for the Edmonton Journal, but they pushed him over the side along with many other skilled senior reporters who cost too much and knew too much for the beancounters in Ontario who run the paper.

So nowadays, while the investigation-free daily timorously ducks behind its leaky new paywall, Mr. Rusnell wins awards and breaks scandals one after the other for the national public broadcaster, which is hated by Conservatives everywhere for doing just this kind of thing.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised Mr. Rusnell will be breaking another C3 very soon.

Meanwhile, in other news, Mr. Merali, the former AHS CFO, is back in the news, demanding the payment of the $580,000 severance package he was denied when he was made to walk the plank for embarrassing the government when his sometimes lavish expenses turned up in one of Mr. Rusnell’s most famous reports.

And reading between the lines of the news coverage Wednesday, it sounds very much as if the people who run AHS recognize they’re going to have to pay him – which will be yet one more serious embarrassment for the Redford Government.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: lessons from B.C. for NDPers everywhere

by David Climenhaga on May 16, 2013 in Alberta Politics, B.C. Politics, New Democratic Party, Polling with 4 Comments

Just to set the mood, it’s Left-Leaning B.C. Premiers Day on Alberta Diary. Here’s your blogger with some former NDP premiers from that province – Dave Barrett above, Mike Harcourt and Ujjal Dosanjh below. 

No one can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory quite like the New Democrats in my native British Columbia.

Still, while Tuesday’s upset B.C. election victory by Premier Christy Clark and her un-liberal Liberals is inevitably going to be, well, upsetting to a lot of New Democrats, it is not really bad news for Thomas Mulcair and the federal NDP.

This, we might say, is the social democratic truth that dare not speak its name: an NDP government in a large province like British Columbia would inevitably have enacted policies that upset voters elsewhere in Canada and would have provided excellent targets for attacks by the ever-negative Stephen Harper Tories on Mr. Mulcair and the NDP.

So, as my mother used to tell me, every cloud has a silver lining, and this is the faint silver lining to the clouds blowing over B.C. today.

Pretty soon, I expect Premier Clark will sit down with Alberta Premier Alison Redford and politely negotiate a pipeline from Alberta to Kitimat, Ms. Redford’s home town.

But, as has been said in this space in the not-so-distant past, defeated B.C. NDP Leader Adrian Dix probably would have done much the same thing, which is one problem with running a low-bridge campaign that doesn’t really seem to stand for anything much.

The majority of British Columbians who are opposed to pipelines from Alberta running through their back yards can be forgiven by their confusion about whom best to vote for to stop them.

Look, it’s been an awfully long time since I lived in B.C. – more than 30 years now – and the place has become a foreign country to me. Someone closer to the West Coast scene can probably tell me how wrong I am about each of these points, and almost certainly will.

Still, it seems to me there are several telling lessons for New Democrats elsewhere in Canada, and for plenty of Liberals too, in the unexpected B.C. vote results on Tuesday night. Because I’m just a negative sort of guy, I’ve configured them all as Don’ts:

  • Don’t be too quick to skid your leader. Who can doubt that if Carole James were still the leader of the B.C. New Democratic Party, she would have done better than Mr. Dix, and probably would be the premier today?
  • Don’t run an issueless campaign from opposition. Low-bridging is for governments with a lousy record and popular leader. (Pierre Trudeau, c’mon down from above!) If you don’t have a compelling narrative that’s different from the government’s, sooner or later the government is sure to start looking better than you do.
  • Don’t promise never to use negative advertising. This is simple foolishness. Not only do Canadian voters tolerate negative ads, they expect them, even desire them. If you won’t vigorously attack your opponents, you will be assumed to stand for nothing. How many times does this have to be said? Nice guys finish last. This is something for Justin Trudeau to think about too.
  • Don’t succumb to poll-driven hubris. Alberta Premier Redford proved it in 2012. British Columbia Premier Christy Clark proved it again this week. Hell, Harry Truman proved it back in 1948 – and that was before everyone under 40 only had a cell phone! Public opinion polls do get it wrong. They’re a useful tool. But that’s all they are. Always run as if you were far behind. Don’t start naming your transition team before you’ve won the election, for crying out loud! Mr. Dix ran as if he was in the lead and he paid the price.
  • Don’t forget your core supporters. In the case of the NDP, that would be social democrats, trade unionists, and even (ahem!) socialists. Maybe B.C. voters figured if only Liberals were running, they might as well vote for a real Liberal.
  • Don’t assume Canadian political parties must be led by men to succeed. This should be obvious to everyone now. There’s a trend apparent here, wouldn’t you say? Canadian voters appear to like women leaders. Right now five of 10 Canadian provinces – with about 87 per cent of the population – are led by women. Maybe you should take this into consideration when you’re picking a leader.

I’m also inclined to think that if you’re a politician expecting to get elected, you should have your doubts about hiring political campaign operatives who are in partnership with people working for other parties. And that you should always pay your transit fare – no matter how short a ride it is you’re planning – although in fairness accidents do happen. But I’m not so sure there are big, profound lessons in these two points.

Oh, and one other thing: if you’re not prepared to fight a tough, meaningful campaign that pays attention to your core supporters – you know, like Prime Minister Harper is a master at doing – maybe you should go to church instead of into politics!

 

This is a moment of reckoning for Canadian pollsters

Pretty obviously, we have reached a moment of reckoning for Canada’s pollsters.

If you only have three strikes before you’re out, Canada’s pollsters have only got one more election to get it right.

Here are four reasons, polling companies’ claims notwithstanding, for Canadian pollsters’ dramatic misses in Alberta last year and British Columbia the day before yesterday, not to mention their none-too-stellar performance in Quebec last fall:

  1. Polling methodology is getting worse on average. Some pollsters will tell you their online panels are nipped and tucked into a perfect imitation of a traditionally random telephone survey, maybe even better. I remain skeptical. Pollsters like these panels because they cost less, and they eliminate the problem of people who won’t talk to them. But the people who join panels are engaged by politics, and therefore a greater percentage of them want political change. This influences these polls’ results and by osmosis exaggerates the desire for change shown in averages of several polls.
  2. Polls don’t tell who will vote. With voter turnout down everywhere – and active voter suppression techniques in use by conservative parties to discourage people who want change – Canadian pollsters are having trouble figuring out who will actually vote. Well, people who are satisfied with the government may not join online panels, but they do come out and vote. If pollsters can’t account for this, they will keep getting it wrong.
  3. Canadian voters are becoming more volatile. Maybe it’s instant online communications. Maybe it’s shorter attention spans. Whatever it is, Canadian voters are becoming more volatile. Lifelong Tories, Grits or Knee-Dips? Forget about it! Every poll nowadays needs to come with a disclaimer: Results may not turn out to be exactly as illustrated. And maybe pollsters need to start doing Third World style exit polls.
  4. Canadian voters are becoming more strategic. In both Alberta and British Columbia, it is said here voters who wanted to scare the governing parties but didn’t really want change sent a message via the pollsters who called them. In other words, they’re lying – knowingly and with a plan – to pollsters. The impact of this is magnified by over-reliance by online panels.

Pollsters need to figure this stuff out – or become a laughing stock.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Who leaked the Alberta government’s response to AUPE’s Labour Board complaint, and why?

by David Climenhaga on May 15, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, Labour Relations with 3 Comments

AUPE President Guy Smith in a characteristic pose.

Who leaked the Alberta government’s response to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees’ unfair labour practices complaint to an Edmonton Journal political reporter, and why?

This is an important question because at the time the leak took place, the government document questioning AUPE President Guy Smith’s personal honesty in harsh and colourful terms was being kept confidential by the Alberta Labour Relations Board.

This was done as a fairly routine part of the board’s effort to effect a settlement of AUPE’s complaint that the Alberta government had broken an agreement it made to end the illegal strike by about 2,500 jail guards on May 1.

On May 9, the day before the Journal story was published, Labour Relations Board Chair Mark Asbell appointed Vice-Chair Lyle Kanee under the terms of Alberta’s Public Service Employee Relations Act “to enquire into the complaint and endeavour to effect a settlement.”

To assist Mr. Kanee’s effort to bring the parties together to reach a settlement, the board halted formal processing of AUPE’s complaint until the vice-chair’s inquiry and settlement efforts could be completed.

To promote opportunities for settlements, it is the board’s policy in such circumstances not to release or comment on any complaints or replies it receives from the parties to a dispute.

So, just to make this crystal clear, although the government document according to the Journal was filed with the board on May 7, acting officially, the ALRB did not provide and would never have provided the document to the Edmonton Journal.

Indeed, because the processing of AUPE’s complaint had been suspended by the board – and even before the vice-chair was appointed to seek a settlement, everyone involved must have known this was an almost inevitable step in the process – there was really no requirement or need for the government’s position to be filed with the board at that time.

Regardless, the only way the Journal could have received this document was in the form of an unofficial leak from a person or persons who for the time being remain unknown.

So it is reasonable for us to ask what the objective was of whoever leaked the government position.

AUPE and the government were making conflicting claims at the time and were in a battle for public opinion. AUPE said the guards who had struck illegally on April 27 had been offered an amnesty by the government, which in this case is also the employer. The government claimed there never was any such agreement.

So by making the government’s argument public, the leak of the government filing to the Journal story delivered a potentially significant public relations blow to AUPE.

The document was summarized by the Journal’s reporter as saying AUPE President Guy Smith, desperate to stop the heavy fines the courts were piling onto the union for the strike, intentionally lied to his own members to get them to go back to work.

It is reasonable to conclude the leak of this document was a gesture of bad faith, by whoever leaked it. It is possible to conclude it was an act of sabotage, intended to make a settlement impossible.

At the very least, the assault on Mr. Smith’s reputation will certainly make achieving a resolution much more difficult – although AUPE is now reacting in a very measured fashion, no doubt on the advice of its legal counsel.

Only four general groups of people would have had access to the document before it was leaked: ALRB staff and officials, the union, lawyers involved in the case, and the government, including the political infrastructure of the Progressive Conservative Party.

It is said here it is extremely unlikely that anyone associated with the board, the union or any of the lawyers involved in the case would have done this.

We can rule out the union because the document paints it and its president in an extremely unflattering light, and had the potential to damage the president’s reputation among the members who elect him.

We can rule out the ALRB because despite a legislated structure designed to be employer friendly, its staff is thoroughly professional and aware of the need to act in good faith and enforce its own policies.

We can rule out any lawyer involved in the case because they are sworn to uphold the law and obviously understand clearly the professional implications of engaging in unethical jiggery-pokery with material of this sort.

So this leaves us, by process of elimination, with only one group of likely suspects for this highly unorthodox and unethical information leak.

To wit: someone in the government, most likely associated with the Progressive Conservative Party.

One can argue that there are also practical arguments from the government’s perspective not to leak the document – at least if it is serious about reaching an settlement to end AUPE’s complaint.

Certainly, if mediation fails as a result of the leak, it seems extremely likely the union will call Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk to the stand and examine him under oath.

After all, what transpired at Mr. Lukaszuk’s dinner with Mr. Smith on April 29 – the one at which Mr. Smith says they agreed to an amnesty deal and Mr. Lukaszuk says they did not – is the key to the dispute between the union and the government.

Nevertheless, the government is the only party that stands to gain in any way from the publication of this material.

Moreover, the Progressive Conservative Party is well known to have a history of using questionable leaks to media of confidential information as a political strategy. Conservative parties generally are known to put a premium on appearing tough, and eschewing flip-flops like the one executed by Mr. Lukaszuk in the AUPE’s version of post-strike events.

It is highly evocative, moreover, that in addition to its timing, the leak was made to the Journal’s political reporter, who conveniently works in the Press Gallery of the Legislature Building.

Naturally, no one can fault a journalist for reporting on such a document.

But the leaker needs to be identified and dealt with if Albertans are to continue to have faith in the work of quasi-judicial bodies like the Alberta Labour Relations Board.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Democracy, Alberta-style: Voters can have any policy they want, as long as it’s Conservative

by David Climenhaga on May 14, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Alberta Teachers Association, Labour Relations with 2 Comments

The Alberta government bargaining team on their way to talks with the Alberta Teachers Association in their Model-T, coloured black. Actual Alberta labour relations specialists may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Education Minister Jeff Johnson and industrialist Henry Ford.

In Alberta, it appears you now have more power as the president of a neighbourhood community league than as a duly elected member of a school board!

With province-wide municipal elections scheduled to take place in October, that’s something would-be candidates for school trustee might want to think about.

Albertans had a small but significant demonstration of this axiom yesterday, when Education Minister Jeff Johnson announced that if members of elected school boards won’t co-operate with the government and vote the way they have been instructed, the results of their mistaken votes will be made to reflect the decision they were supposed to make.

The same goes for teachers’ union locals, which usually hold contract ratification votes. But if union members fail to vote the correct way, the minister said, they will also be required to accept the contract they rejected!

Figuring out how to live with it, of course, will still be their problem.

We call this … Democracy, Alberta-style!

We might also call it the First Law of Governing Alberta, which would go something like this: “We made a mistake. We gave it to you. Now it’s your mistake … and we won’t take it back!”

So Mr. Johnson says he will introduce a law that takes the four-year collective agreement that the government of Premier Alison Redford negotiated in March with the Alberta Teachers Association and make any school board that refused to ratify it (like the Public School Board in Calgary, the largest in the province) or any ATA local where members did the same thing (like the public schoolteachers in in my community of St. Albert) and force them to take it anyway.

The really strange thing about this is that it was Mr. Johnson himself who made this into an all-or-nothing proposition. There is no basis in existing legislation, regulations, ATA policy or Alberta School Boards Association policy saying teachers’ negotiations have to be unanimous or a deal fails. The minister just made that part up.

Now, back in the days when a bilingual Canada seemed like a fairly novel idea, out here in Alberta a lot of Conservatives used to call bilingual product labelling on cereal boxes having French shoved down your throat with your cornflakes.

However, in 2013 when it comes to making democratic organizations vote the way you want them to – or else! – it’s called the Assurance for Students Act.

That means, I guess, that students can be assured that their school trustees aren’t allowed to vote the way they want to if the Redford Government disagrees.

No, I’m joking. What Mr. Johnson seems to have in mind is that students can be assured that their teachers won’t be getting a pay raise for the next three years, but their union will be getting the “comfort letter” it wanted saying it’s their sole bargaining agent plus their professional association now and forevermore.

Or, as the Edmonton Journal more accurately summarized it: “The four-year, province-wide agreement freezes teacher salaries for three years and gives them a two-per-cent raise and bonus in the fourth year. It also limits teachers’ working hours and offers assurances the government won’t tinker with the ATA’s powers for the length of the agreement.”

What this is really about, most likely, is proving that the Redford Government can get something done before the premier’s party leadership review next November. As such, if we lived in less Orwellian times, it should probably have been called the Assurance for Alison Redford Act.

Presumably if everyone had gone along with the deal as the government wanted, it would also have let the government say to other unions now or soon in negotiations with it or its agencies, like the province’s civil servants and its nurses, “see, the teachers took zero and you should too.”

Alas, this argument surely loses some of its impact when you realize that the teachers had no choice.

Still, it was a step back from the rumour circulating last week, presumably spread by government officials who were putting the full-court press on holdout trustees, that any school board that failed to ratify would be summarily fired. Not sure if we can call that a positive sign for democracy in Alberta, though.

The act also didn’t include legislation summarily imposing contracts on other public service unions – just yet, anyway – the topic of another rumour that was busily doing the rounds.

From the government’s perspective, the legislation does act as a convenient threat to try to make other public sector unions behave as the government wishes.

All this put the ATA in a tricky position. The teachers’ union clearly wants the deal, and was doubtless pressing recalcitrant teachers almost as hard as the government was coming down on reluctant trustees.

At the same time, they couldn’t really publicly cheer Mr. Johnson’s crushing the rebellion by the feisty public schoolteachers in St. Albert and their colleagues down Highway 16 in Elk Island.

So ATA President Carol Henderson came right out and was both for and against Mr. Johnson’s legislation: “He had to do this in order to keep the deal alive, and we will accept it, but it’s not our preferred solution.”

I guess that’s about as close as the ATA is going to come to a passionate cry of “A las Barricadas!”

Henry Ford, the American industrialist, actually explained pretty well how this sort of thing works, when he said of his Model-T automobile, at the time the best-selling horseless buggy in America: “Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”

For those of you who aren’t from around here, that’s how democracy works in Alberta too: You can have any government you want, so long as it’s Conservative.

And now we know that goes for any level of government under provincial control as well.

As for union members, you can have any contract you want as long as it’s the one we tell you to want. But then, we already knew that!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Athabasca University board to Athabasca University Faculty Association: Drop dead

by David Climenhaga on May 13, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Athabasca University, Post-Secondary Education with 2 Comments

The Athabasca University board meets to discuss its vision for the future of the distance-learning institution. Actual visioning board members may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: History Professor Alvin Finkel, AU Faculty Association President Mark McCutcheon.

It took Athabasca University’s rubber-stamp board less than 48 hours to tell the university’s faculty association to forget about its suggestion an interim president be appointed to get the distance-learning institution back on track while a replacement is found for President Frits Pannekoek.

Alert readers will recall that Dr. Pannekoek, the subject of an overwhelming non-confidence motion last year by the university’s faculty and another by a staff union, has announced his intention to resign, but not until his replacement is found – a process professors fear could take up to two years, with potentially disastrous results for Athabasca.

On Friday, the university board put out two press releases. In one, Board Chair Barry Wilson stated that the board “cannot and will not accept the ‘rescue plan’” proposed on Wednesday by the faculty association.

In the mean time, the board said, it “will move forward with the governance of the institution, including the presidential recruitment process and strategic direction for the future of the university.”

In its second release, the board stated explicitly it would not accept the faculty association’s “recommendation to appoint a faculty member nominated by the AUFA as interim president of the institution.”

In other words: drop dead, and get off our turf.

The board claims it cannot (and anyway, it will not) “delegate that responsibility to an organization that has no legislated public or ministerial accountability.”

Meanwhile, in a comment posted to this blog, a distinguished Athabasca professor charged that some professors who have recently been laid off “are excellent workers who got targeted because they have had run-ins with powerful people.”

“Management is using the ‘stringency’ section of the faculty association collective agreement to pretty much set aside everything in the agreement,” said Professor Alvin Finkel, a well-known political and labour historian, author of an important history on the Social Credit movement in Alberta.

“That section does require them to ‘declare’ stringency and demonstrate that there are long-term financial issues at play as opposed to short-term issues,” Dr. Finkel wrote. “They have not done that because they don’t want our students and potential students to know that we are allegedly in deep financial doo-doo.

“But they want to act internally as if it is just fine to ditch the agreement without having either declared or proven stringency,” he said.

Dr. Finkel said he felt safe making such a statement because he is “someone who is likely less vulnerable to be fired purely for spite. I’m a very senior professor with a huge sheaf of publications and awards both from the university and outside for my academic work.”

Also on Friday, the Athabasca University Faculty Association issued a press release expressing disappointment in the board’s swift rejection of its proposal that it “exercise its legal power to appoint an interim internal president, thus saving money and boosting morale at AU.”

“Why is the board of a university that’s supposedly in financial crisis not interested in saving the estimated one million dollars this proposal would save?” asked AUFA president Mark McCutcheon in the association’s news release.

“Nothing in AUFA’s ‘rescue plan’ asks for the board to delegate its duties,” Dr. McCutcheon, a professor in the university’s English Department, said in the news release. “Article 10 of the university’s president hiring policy makes a clear provision for the board to appoint a temporary president. AUFA’s proposal suggests a way for the board to exercise its duties more effectively, and to help return AU to more collegial governance.”

Notwithstanding its multiple press releases, the university’s board and administration continue to be able to fly largely under the radar on this important story because it is being ignored by Alberta’s mainstream media.

This is good news for Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk and Premier Alison Redford, who don’t need another embarrassing crisis to solve just now – especially one involving a university whose administration spent well over $10,000 making illegal donations to their Progressive Conservative political party, and which despite being a public institution saw the need to spend another $125,000 hiring professional lobbyists to sweet talk officials of their government.

Nevertheless, there are clearly serious and increasingly public problems at Athabasca University that may threaten the survival of the institution.

Moreover, it seems unlikely the board and the present administration have much intention of doing anything about them – although the board said in its second release it has scheduled “a planning and visioning retreat with all the current board members, senior administration and the school’s deans to set out a strategic direction for the institution and address governance issues.”

Well, we all know how useful visioning can be!

It’s pretty obvious the job of doing something meaningful to end the crisis at Athabasca University is going to fall to Mr. Lukaszuk and the rest of Premier Redford’s government, whether they like it or not.

Unless, of course, their plan is to let Athabasca University founder in a way that the government can escape any blame for its demise.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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