All posts in Ed Stelmach

Two additional reasons morale is better at Alberta Health Services: Liepert & Duckett are gone

by David Climenhaga on June 16, 2012 in Alberta Health Services, Alison Redford, Chris Eagle, Doug Knight, Ed Stelmach, Fred Horne, Gene Zwozdesky, Ron Liepert, Stephen Duckett with 3 Comments
Dr. Stephen Duckett, right, doesn’t mince words while talking to Doug Knight, then the President of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, in September 2009, Below: former Health Minister Ron Liepert.

Morale among doctors, nurses and other medical staff is dramatically better than it was two years ago at Alberta Health Services, the massive health board that runs all the province’s public hospitals.

When AHS executives announced the results of their 2012 survey of employees, medical staff and volunteers who work in the AHS system yesterday, they were justifiably pleased by the improved morale, which according to a Calgary newspaper they attributed to “employee recognition, increased decision-making at the local level and an unqualified commitment to support patient advocacy.”

But that’s only part of the story of why morale is better at AHS than it was the last time the survey was conducted, in 2010.

There are two other big reasons that AHS didn’t mention in its rambling and earnest news release and which didn’t come up in the coverage on a day when most reporters were chasing a very different story:

  1. Ron Liepert is gone
  2. Stephen Duckett is gone too

Mr. Liepert was the minister of health under former premier Ed Stelmach from March 2008 until January 2010, so the 2010 survey was conducted while the office door was still swinging behind him.

During his time in the Alberta provincial cabinet, Mr. Liepert earned a well-deserved reputation as a bull in a china shop. He was controversial all right – the kind of controversial that caused crowds of seniors to spontaneously boo him when he entered a room. I’ve seen it and heard it with my own eyes and ears.

On the policy side, Mr. Liepert leaned toward the idea private care is better. You may agree that the controversial kinds of reforms he advocated were needed and helpful, or you may think they were unnecessary and dangerous. But almost everyone agrees that he was forceful and undiplomatic in the way he went about doing his job.

He was a broadcaster by trade, and medical professionals didn’t hold his views in high regard. Morale suffered.

Public outrage about the state of Alberta’s health care system and Mr. Liepert’s role in it was so intense by January 2010 that premier Stelmach, who obviously held him in high regard notwithstanding his infamous bluntness, moved him to the important energy portfolio. He has since retired from politics.

Mr. Liepert was replaced as health minister by Gene Zwozdesky, a conciliator with a reputation for bringing parties together and cajoling them into getting along.

Dr. Duckett was the Australian PhD economist that Mr. Liepert hired as president and CEO of AHS in the spring of 2009. During his time at the helm, Dr. Duckett earned a well-deserved reputation as a bull in a china shop.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Dr. Duckett could be extremely rude. (His defenders chalked this up to his using charming Australianisms that Canadians didn’t understand. This is nonsense. He may not have always been rude, but he certainly was when I heard him in action.)

After leaving AHS, Dr. Duckett has portrayed himself as a defender of public health care, and maybe that’s true. He has a fair complaint, perhaps, if as he says he was brought in on the understanding he’d be running a well-funded health system and was then told when he got here he’d have to cut a billion dollars out of it.

But his decisions were sudden and mercurial, and seemed to employees, health professionals and the public alike to have been made without consideration or contemplation.

One minute we had a province-wide nursing shortage and then, according to Dr. Duckett, there was no shortage of nurses at all. (Now there’s a nurse shortage again.) One minute we were about to rebuild a major psychiatric hospital and the next, after Dr. Duckett waved his calculator, we were going to close it down. (Now it’s being renovated again.)

He was a technocrat, and medical professionals didn’t hold his views in high regard. Morale suffered.

Perhaps unfairly, Dr. Duckett became a lightning rod for everything large numbers of Albertans thought was going wrong with their health care system.

Finally, in November 2010, came the renowned “cookie incident,” in which Dr. Duckett was breathtakingly rude to a group of reporters – with the action captured on camera and quickly loaded onto Youtube. Mr. Zwozdesky had had it up to here – or maybe it was there. At any rate, Dr. Duckett was spectacularly fired. He has since returned to Australia.

If Mr. Liepert and Dr. Duckett hurt morale on their own, the combination somehow added up to something more than the whole of its parts. They didn’t just seem like two bulls in a china shop. It felt like there was a whole stampede. Morale at AHS headed for the sub-basement!

Mr. Zwozdesky, the old smoothie, replaced Dr. Duckett with Dr. Chris Eagle, a physician, and a soft-spoken, courtly man.

Under Premier Alison Redford, who replaced premier Stelmach, “Zwoz” has gone on to be Speaker of the Legislature. But Dr. Eagle remains in the top job of AHS.

They Didn’t work miracles, but they did pour soothing balm on the troubled waters of Alberta’s health system. The public feels better. The medical professionals – as we saw yesterday – are feeling better too.

Ms. Redford has helped too, by persuading Albertans she means it about preserving our public health care system. And her Health Minister, Fred Horne, may not be quite as reassuring as Mr. Zwozdesky, but his manners are good and he proceeds with diplomacy.

Big challenges remain getting Alberta Health Services back on track. But the sounds of hooves stomping and crockery smashing have gone away. There is peace in the valley.

This is a big part of why morale is improving at AHS.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta MLAs get down to work – sort of

by admin on May 23, 2012 in Alison Redford, Bill 1, Dave Hancock, Ed Stelmach, Gene Zwozdesky, Jack Major, Ken Kowalski, Laurie Blakeman, Mary Anne Jablonski, Raj Sherman, Robin Campbell, Wayne Cao, WCB with 4 Comments
Bill 1? It’s a secret! Alberta MLAs may not be exactly as illustrated.


It’s great work if you can find it!

The first session of the 28th Legislature of Alberta opened today and will sit for … hold onto your hats, people … all of six days.

In their defence, sort of, that’s about all Premier Alison Redford and the rest of the Legislature’s 87 MLAs are going to need anyway, because they only plan to deal with one piece of legislation, something called, appropriately enough, Bill 1.

Bill 1 is … well, actually, Bill 1 is a secret. You’ll find out what it’s about tomorrow at the same time as the rest of us.

Presumably some people know what Bill 1 is about already, because the government has had to print up a Throne Speech and copies of the bill. The general assumption among the Alberta punditocracy is that it won’t be anything all that earthshaking – because the Redford Government intends to save the earthshaking stuff for the fall sitting, which will be a little longer.

You never know with Alberta Tory majority governments, though, and a lot of us will worry that they’re going to ban the right to assemble in groups larger than three, especially if the purpose is collective bargaining, or outlaw the clanging of pots and pans or other forms of free expression in the streets, historically a sign a government has completely lost control of the population, or whatever, until we actually see what’s in Bill 1 later today.

Most likely, the professional pundits have informed us, Bill 1 will be a law to require the Workers’ Compensation Board to cover firefighters and police officers who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. This is a laudable enough goal, of course, but why just first responders? Why not, indeed, a serious shakeup of the whole appalling WCB, with its private-insurance mentality and meat-grinder approach to compensating injured and traumatized workers? Well, don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

Meantime, speaking of compensation, if not for workers, Progressive Conservative House Leader Dave Hancock announced yesterday that the government will accept almost all of retired Supreme Court Justice Jack Major’s largely sensible MLA pay recommendations – except his suggestion of a $335,000 annual salary for the premier, which almost caused a province-wide meltdown when it was first proposed during the campaign leading up to the April 23 general election.

Politically speaking, Ms. Redford had no option but to turn it down under those trying circumstances and to leave it turned down now. How big her salary will be – like the topic of Bill 1 – remains a mystery for the moment. Probably bigger than a breadbox, smaller than a house.

Acceptance of the rest of Judge Major’s report means MLAs will be paid a base salary of $134,000 with the possibility of getting up to $67,000 more depending on the additional responsibilities they are assigned. Like the rest of us, the MLAs will now pay taxes on the full amount – which means that the rest of us will be paying more, too, because we’ll have to pay their federal taxes. But as Mr. Hancock observed, almost certainly accurately, that seemed to be what Albertans wanted, so that’s what we’ll get.

Work remains to be done on their pensions, which by the sound of it will be proper defined benefit plans, which will set a good example for the private sector and cause the Canadian Taxpayers Federation to issue hundreds of news releases. The job also includes, as they say, other competitive benefits – including the ability to expense almost everything, including car washes.

Unlike the rest of us, the MLAs will only have to actually show up for work six days between now and roughly when the snow starts to fly – or so Alberta’s oral tradition of record-keeping says. Good luck finding any official reference to the length of this sitting on the Legislature’s website, or in the public prints. Still, those naturally inclined to work hard will find worthwhile things to do. Indeed, we can count on an enthusiastic and bombastic performance for a while from the new Wildrose Opposition.

That’s why it’s great work if you can get it – which only 87 Albertans can.

Meanwhile, the odds makers were having fun yesterday calculating who is most likely to be named Speaker of the House now that Ken Kowalski has retired.

Since we last discussed the topic in this space, Yellowhead MLA Robin Campbell dropped out to be named to cabinet as aboriginal relations minister and Red Deer-North MLA Mary Anne Jablonski, deprived of her Ed Stelmach-era cabinet post, joined the race.

Previously mentioned candidates still in the race are the creamy-voiced Edmonton-Mill Creek PC MLA Gene Zwozdesky, a former health minister and professional crooner with the demonstrated ability to sooth the savage breasts of angry politicians, Edmonton-Centre Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman, who would dearly love the excuse to no longer have to sit as a member of Liberal Leader Raj Sherman’s dysfunctional caucus, and Wayne Cao, PC MLA for Calgary-Fort who served as Deputy Speaker under Mr. Kowalski.

Although Ms. Blakeman was the favourite of this blog’s readership, as readers can see from the poll at right, the smart money favours Mr. Zwozdesky to win the secret ballot vote today. It’s said here, however, that no one should count out the sunny and likeable Mr. Cao.

The Speaker election is scheduled to take place at 1:30 p.m. The Speech from the Throne with its associated pomp and circumstance is scheduled for 3 p.m.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel channels Henny Youngman: ‘Take my Opposition leader … Please!’

by admin on May 16, 2012 in Alison Redford, Brian Mason, Danielle Smith, Ed Stelmach, Edmonton Civic Airport, Edmonton Oilers, Gary Dickson, Naheed Nenshi, Royal Alberta Museum, Stephen Harper, Stephen Mandel, Tom Flanagan with 1 Comment
Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel and your blogger at a much warmer meeting than the one Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith had with His Honour yesterday. The guy with the cigarette may be one of the new Wildrose MLAs. Below right: Mayor Mandel after his meeting with Ms. Smith, not exactly as illustrated.

Edmonton is going to have to deal with Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith. Got that?

Mayor Stephen Mandel rather dryly cleared that question up yesterday.

The mayor’s actual words after a 30-minute closed-door meeting with Ms. Smith: “It was fine. … She’s the leader of the Opposition.”

Got that? OK, now we can … ummm … get down to business.

For her part, Ms. Smith tried to play the mayor’s chilly reaction after their brief tête-à-tête by sounding upbeat, as is her wont these days: “He has a few key things he is hoping to get action on,” she chirped to reporters. “… We can be helpful in raising some of those issues in the Legislature and elsewhere.”

Yeah, right. I’ll bet the phone lines will just be burning up between those two! (Notice to the literal minded: That was sarcasm.)

Mr. Mandel has always struck me as a pretty serious guy, the few times I’ve met him – which is apparently a few more than Ms. Smith, notwithstanding the fact she’s been running for the province’s top job for months and he’s been the mayor the capital city for all of that time. According to the media, yesterday’s chat was the first time she’s met the man face to face!

Now, none of this is to say that Mayor Mandel doesn’t have a sense of humour. It’s there somewhere. But, you know, it’s mordant.

It may or may not have been on display yesterday in Mayor Mandel’s icy post-meeting remarks: “She and I don’t see eye-to-eye on certain issues. We cleared the air on certain things and we have moved on from there.” End of story, almost.

No more details were forthcoming but for Mr. Mandel’s response to a reporter who asked if the two had a better relationship now thanks to their momentary meeting: “We had no relationship before the meeting.” (Beat. Beat.) “You would assume the relationship was better after the meeting.”

Stephen Mandel as Henny Youngman!

The local press managed to grind a few more lines out of this, which suggests that nowadays they may have gone back to paying their reporters by the word. Whatever. Here’s the deal, though: There’s no love lost between Mr. Mandel and Ms. Smith. And there’s a good reason for that. No matter how much Ms. Smith would like to put it all behind her, now that it suits her political purposes, it’s going to be pretty hard for the mayor of Edmonton to forget what she did during the recent provincial election campaign.

Ms. Smith and her Wildrose Party campaign brain trust – Tom Flanagan, c’mon down! – hit on a two-thirds strategy.

First, they divided the province into three parts: the countryside, Calgary and Edmonton. Then they concluded that if they could win two out of three, they’d win the province. After that, they beat Edmonton like a redheaded stepchild to win votes in the other two areas.

Ms. Smith stepped into the already settled Edmonton Civic Airport debate and suggested a Wildrose government would take another look at the plan the mayor has championed to replace the historic downtown airfield with a classy residential and business development.

She suggested she’d pull the plug on the new Royal Alberta Museum promised by Ed Stelmach and almost pulled off the table by the federal Conservatives. Ditto the renovation by the province of the long-abandoned Federal Building adjacent to the Legislature, even though the project is more than half completed.

She also told voters days before the election that a Wildrose government would provide no funding for a new downtown arena for the Edmonton Oilers – another of Mayor Mandel’s pet projects.

The strategy was pretty much Wedge Issues 101 – which if it wasn’t a course taught to credulous University of Calgary political science undergraduates by Dr. Flanagan, certainly could have been!

Play on Calgarians’ envy of the capital city to win votes there, be fiscal tough guys on the museum project which the Wildrose Party’s Harperite patrons on the Rideau didn’t like either, and appeal to northern Alberta voters’ concerns that it will take longer to air-ambulance patients to Edmonton hospitals if they can’t fly into downtown Edmonton. The goal in every case: to wedge voters outside the Capital Region away from Alison Redford’s Tories.

Well, it might have seemed like a good idea at the time – indeed, it seemed like a pretty good idea up to about 72 hours before the polls opened! – but it hardly worked out exactly as expected.

In the event on April 23, Calgary voters got cold feet, possibly thanks to several eruptions by some of the Wildrose Party’s bozos. Rural voters north of Alberta’s Mason-Dickson Line (named for NDP Leader Brian Mason and former Calgary Liberal Gary Dickson – joke) weren’t fooled either. Edmonton – mocked by Wildrose supporters as “Redmonton,” and not in the Republican sense they favour – performed to expectations.

The result was another massive majority for Premier Redford and her Progressive Conservatives.

Now Ms. Smith – whom one senses is a politician who loves to be loved, except when she’s in a position to dish out bad-tasting neo-Con medicine, presumably – has been sworn in as leader of the “government in waiting” and is trying to rebuild the bridges she burned to the waterline during the campaign.

That’s going to be difficult – even though, come to think of it, Edmonton could use another bridge across the North Saskatchewan. Indeed, it’s said in the gutter press she had to get Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi to broker her meeting with Mr. Mandel.

Meantime, as the mayor concedes, she’s the leader of the Opposition. Now go away and don’t bother us!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta: Confederation’s biggest kid starts whining at first hint of opposition

by admin on May 10, 2012 in Alison Redford, Cowardly Lion, Dalton McGuinty, Danielle Smith, Ed Stelmach, oilsands, Peter Lougheed, petro-Loonie, Thomas Mulcair with 5 Comments
“Put ’em up, put ’em up! I’ll fight you with one paw tied behind my back,” former Alberta premier Ed Stelmach tells Dalton McGuinty and Thomas Mulcair as Alberta Premier Alison Redford looks on. Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: The villainous Mr. Mulcair eyes our oil; Mr. Stelmach.

Oh gosh, here we go again! When in doubt, blame those Eastern bastards!

Alberta may be the richest, biggest, loudest kid in Confederation, but at the first sign of opposition to anything we want to do, we turn whiny and defensive, noisily blaming everyone else for all our troubles.

We’ve seen plenty examples of this in the past couple of days – ever since federal NDP Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair dared to connect the dots between the breakneck pace of Alberta’s oilsands development and the deleterious impact the resulting strong petro-Loonie is having on Central Canada’s manufacturing sector.

“Oh My Gawd!” squeaked the Western Canadian media and politicians throughout the region in virtual unison, he’s going to use our out-of-control development and our lousy environmental record as a wedge issue! Why, he’s stooping to … old-style politics!

This is a laugh and a half coming from western Conservatives of various stripes and Sun Media in particular, since together they are the absolute masters of the use and misuse of wedge issues.

Also, never mind that there’s more than a little truth to what Mr. Mulcair had to say – or that the Alberta Tory dynasty’s founder Peter Lougheed, who just days before we were hailing as the best premier of the last 40 years, says much the same thing about the pace of development out here.

The most interesting example of this kind of defensive sniveling came from former premier Ed Stelmach, free at last of the need to play nice with his fellow Progressive Conservatives or anyone else, who waxed poetic yesterday about how those rotten Easterners are all set to screw our poor Prairie hides to the wall and tan them.

This was kind of a pity, because it got all the attention and Mr. Stelmach actually had a number of things to say that made sense in his first post-political interview.

What are those Eastern politicians going to do to get votes, Mr. Stelmach asked reporters after turning up for a show of premiers’ portraits at the Legislature, why, “You beat up on Alberta! It’s going to happen!”

You’d think as the biggest kid on the petro-block, with one of ours as the prime minister and the government majority packed with other Albertans all busy tearing up the country’s environmental regulations and demanding pipelines in every direction, those Easterners wouldn’t pose much of a threat. But here we are, crying already before they’ve even taken a half-hearted swat at us. Oh, boo-hoo-hoo!

“We have to stand together,” Mr. Stelmach warned. “Anyone who wants to grab on to our resources and not put anything in terms of investment, but just want the gravy coming out of the sale of our resources, better be careful!”

Mr. Stelmach is much too nice a man to say “let the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark,” as one of his predecessors is reputed to have commented, but there was a bit of that in his remarks all mixed up with the cry of the Cowardly Lion, Alberta style: “Put ’em up, put ’em up! Which one of you first? I’ll fight you both together if you want. I’ll fight you with one paw tied behind my back. I’ll fight you standing on one foot. I’ll fight you with my eyes closed…”

Just in case you were wondering, that last quote came from the Wizard of Oz. The rest are from the Edmonton Journal.

“All I’m saying is watch the East,” Mr. Stelmach went on. “The Maritimes are OK with us. Watch Ontario and Quebec. They’ve already got two leaders that are pointing fingers.” (The other finger-pointer was Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, a Liberal, which rounds out the Alberta Enemies List nicely.)

Yeah, well, it’s true, and if we keep on acting like we have been, there may be more – and some in B.C. too. But it wouldn’t be the Alberta Way to recognize that obvious fact and try to moderate our behaviour a little.

As noted, much of the rest of what Mr. Stelmach had to say was pretty sensible. Among his points, summarized here by Yours Truly:

  • What really killed Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith was her own nutty denial of climate change, not some of her candidates’ bozo eruptions.
  • A province ought not to balance its budget by killing infrastructure development when it’s the fastest-growing jurisdiction on the continent.
  • So far, Premier Alison Redford’s Canadian energy strategy sounds pretty half-baked.

But why think about stuff like that when there are Easterners to blame for everything?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.