All posts tagged Danielle Smith

Negotiating with Alberta’s PC government? Better bring witnesses!

by David Climenhaga on May 11, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, Labour Relations, Thomas Lukaszuk with 10 Comments

Wildcat strike scene, grabbed from AUPE’s website during the strike. Below: AUPE President Guy Smith, Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk.

Advice to anyone who tries to negotiate a deal with Alison Redford, Thomas Lukaszuk or any member or official of their government: take witnesses with you, and make sure you also bring a tape recorder.

You might want to bring a piece of paper, a pen, a Bible and a notary public as well. One-on-one meetings ending in “handshake deals” with these people? I don’t think so!

In what surely is one of the most outrageous Alberta news stories of the year to date, the Edmonton Journal reported yesterday evening that “Alberta Union of Provincial Employees president Guy Smith ‘misled’ union members when he claimed he had negotiated a full amnesty for striking workers, the province alleged in legal documents filed this week.”

As is to be expected, AUPE and the government are now slugging it out before the Alberta Labour Relations Board over the wildcat strike by about 2,500 provincial Correctional Peace Officers that began mid-morning on April 27 when a long-simmering dispute over occupational health and safety boiled over at the just-opened Edmonton Remand Centre.

The fight over what punishments the government can mete out to the union, including seeking compensation for the cost of the strike and a six-month dues suspension, can be expected to drag on for months or years.

As is most emphatically not to be expected, the government came right out in a statement of claim to the Alberta Labour Relations Board and called Mr. Smith a liar: “He then chose to falsely claim that he had the agreement that he desperately tried to get and never obtained,” the statement says.

The strike ended on May 1, when the jail guards went back to work, assured by Mr. Smith he had had negotiated an amnesty for them.

The deal looked like a climb-down by Deputy Premier “Stompin’ Tom” Lukaszuk, Ms. Redford’s designated tough guy and court jester, who just hours before had vowed he would never even talk to Mr. Smith or any other official of AUPE while the strike continued.

Just the same, as Journal political columnist Graham Thomson reported yesterday evening in an excellent column, Mr. Lukaszuk nevertheless met Mr. Smith on April 29 in an Edmonton restaurant where they discussed the illegal strike, and presumably how to end it.

When the meeting was over, notwithstanding the things now said in the government’s statement of claim, Mr. Smith appears to sincerely have believed he had a deal – a belief he used (at considerable political risk to himself within AUPE, it should be noted) to get the guards back to work.

Pretty quickly, though, various government spokespeople started backing away from the deal that Mr. Lukaszuk either made or didn’t make with Mr. Smith. When they began to do so, AUPE filed an unfair labour practice complaint with the Labour Relations Board.

The union complaint said in part that AUPE members “feel betrayed by the government and AUPE and take the position that they were tricked into returning to work.”

It is the government’s response to that complaint in which Mr. Smith is accused of intentionally misleading his members.

The government’s and AUPE’s filings to the ALRB were leaked to the Journal by some person or persons unknown for some reason, about which we can only speculate. But the government statement of claim, Mr. Thomson accurately reports, “reads like a political speech, using inflammatory language that would be at home on the floor of the legislative assembly.”

It is hard to say with any confidence what the principal actors on the government side of this story truly believe, or who came up with this particular strategy, but it is a fair observation that the government’s response is not a particularly astute one.

Now, to those of you who are grumbling, “Yeah, but Dave’s a union guy, and he used to work for Guy Smith,” all that is true. Full disclosure: I know Mr. Smith, I used to work for him and I hold him in high regard.

Beyond my personal confidence, however, there’s not much sense to the government’s story – which, as they say, has not been proved before the ALRB, let alone in a court of law. The most obvious flaw, of course, is that doing what the government now claims he did would amount to political suicide for Mr. Smith within AUPE. For that reason alone, it seems highly unlikely.

Then there is the matter of the documents on which the story is based. They were supposed to be held in confidence by the ALRB. It is interesting to speculate on who did the leaking and for whose benefit.

Whatever the answers to those questions are, it is said here the government’s response was foolish because there is no way the union is going to roll over on its unfair labour complaint – and now they’re bound to go before the labour board and try to prove the government did make the commitment that is now in dispute.

If they don’t succeed before the labour board – which, after all, is a tame and employer-friendly body – expect this fight to move on to the courts.

And so at every step of the way, in a public forum, the honesty and trustworthiness of a government that growing numbers of Albertans mistrust on those very grounds will be disputed in a public forum.

As good an idea as it may have seemed at the time to whoever came up with the idea of leaking the government’s statement of claim and AUPE’s documents, it’s hard to see how this will do this government much good. Some of the potential consequences include:

Other groups going into negotiations with the government – and not just unions – will now to be extremely wary and distrustful, with good reason. Can it be trusted? Likely not.

The credibility of the ALRB has also suffered another blow, even if the documents were not leaked from its offices.

Jail guards represented by AUPE will be so furious another illegal walkout must be considered a possibility.

Chances are also good this is another nail in the coffin of the 11th Hour progressive coalition Ms. Redford’s government cobbled together to save her government from the Wildrose Wave in the April 2012 election.

Next time, it is said here, many progressive voters will be prepared to take a chance on another Smith, Wildrose leader Danielle, even if they do it by voting for the Liberals or the NDP.

As for Mr. Smith, I can only say that if I were him, I’d challenge Mr. Lukaszuk or the premier to state the government’s allegations in public, instead of in a privileged document. That way he could respond in an appropriate manner to the government’s claim he lied to his own members.

It might have been momentarily less satisfying, but surely it would have paid dividends in the long term for the government to argue Mr. Smith must have merely been mistaken, and for the documents to be kept confidential until they were presented to the ALRB panel.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Ironies abound in Alberta’s agitated politics as Alison Redford cranks up the postage meter

by David Climenhaga on May 8, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics with 1 Comment

How Albertans should see Progressive Conservative and Wildrose policies and procedures. Below: The clever Wildrose Facebook attack on PC Premier Alison Redford’s faintly unsavoury taxpayer-funded mail out, which makes it look a little worse than it really is.

Am I the only one who sees irony in the leader of Alberta’s ultra-conservative Wildrose Party working up a full head of steam because the merely very conservative government of Premier Alison Redford plans to mail a colourful budget brochure to every household in the province – at taxpayer expense, of course?

After all, the Wildrose Party of Danielle Smith is effectively the Alberta provincial branch of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party of Canada – the one mailing out those federal Tory flyers attacking Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau’s substance as well as his masculinity.

The federal Tory ads are being mailed to voters across the country at taxpayer expense as well, of course, but there’s no word about how Ms. Smith feels about that – nor is there ever likely to be.

She was also silent on the provincial government’s new policy of referring to the Alberta Government as the Redford Government in news releases drafted up by civil service public relations flacks – another bad habit copied from the Harper Government.

But on the topic of the Redford Conservatives – the 61 supposedly Progressive MLAs so spooked by Ms. Smith’s 17-member caucus they’ve forgotten who got them elected and offer destructive policies nearly identical to those of the Wildrose Party – the Opposition leader was in fine fettle.

“We have a premier who is desperately afraid of losing confidence from her party in her leadership vote in the fall, and she’s pulling out all the stops, including using taxpayer money to send out political propaganda,” Ms. Smith huffed in an interview with the always reliable Canadian Press, which you can only read in out-of-town newspapers nowadays because the moribund Alberta rags don’t use the news service any more.

Ms. Smith raised an important and fairly non-partisan point – which was echoed from the other side of the political spectrum by NDP Leader Brian Mason – and that is that this mail-out likely has as much to do with internal PC Party politics as with any desire to inform the populace of the government’s plans.

“This has got a lot to do with the premier’s campaign, which is now in full swing, to win her leadership review in November,” Mr. Mason told the CP, most certainly an accurate assessment of the premier’s motivation.

If the mail-out can help her improve her polling numbers with voters, it will most certainly help her win her party’s endorsement to carry on – which, as has been stated here before, she likely will anyway.

Still, with their characteristic ineptitude, Ms. Redford’s strategic brain trust made it easy for the opposition by printing the $350,000 brochure in the same orange and turquoise colour scheme the premier used in her 2012 election campaign.

A clever commercial artist in Ms. Smith’s party’s employ worked up a witty Facebook graphic that drew attention to this fact, managing to make the leaflet look just a little sleazier than it in reality is.

The contents of the eight-page mail-out add up to the usual baloney we’d expect from any premier who found herself in Ms. Redford’s shoes – plenty of excuses for the party’s screeching turn back to instinctive austerity from its promised sustainable funding for social programs, blamed on the already evanescing “Bitumen Bubble,” plus anodyne bromides about the province’s glowing future.

Well, call me cynical, but I reckon that to the winner goes the spoils – and in a democracy that usually means the keys to the room with the postage meter.

The brochure is faintly unsavoury, but I just can’t get my knickers in a twist about a sin this small compared with things like the Tories’ determination to ship bitumen and jobs out of the province and the country as quickly as they can – a policy they share with the Wildrose Party, except that Ms. Smith’s crew is standing on the sidelines yelling, “more, more, faster, faster!”

Nor do I believe for a moment that the Wildrose Party – the would-be, erm, Smith Government – would behave any differently in office on this particular count.

That’s not cynicism designed to discourage citizens from voting, yet another Tory bad habit, merely an evidence-based assessment of the likely behaviour of so-called conservative parties of almost all stripes whenever they manage to glom onto power.

The government, meanwhile, defended sending us all the factoids contained in its cheerful “Report to Taxpayers” – “we don’t apologize for communicating to Albertans the information that Albertans want to know,” sniffed Finance Minister Doug Horner.

Well, not all the information that taxpayers want to know. The government won’t be releasing the contents of a report on pipeline safety to taxpayers any time soon, Energy Minister Ken Hughes explained yesterday.

Mr. Hughes promised: “We’ll release it in the fullness of time” – the dispensation of which will happen, as lots of people in Alberta of all places understand instinctively, whenever…

In other words, don’t hold your breath waiting for environmental pie in the sky.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Premier explains Alberta politics to children: ‘Opposition Leader, what big teeth you have!’

by David Climenhaga on May 3, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, Alison Redford, Fairy Tales with 5 Comments

Alberta Premier Alison Redford, right, meets Opposition Leader Danielle Smith, left, while on her way to announcing a new school opening. Actual Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Premier Redford, Alberta Union of Provincial Employees President Guy Smith.

Once upon a time, while Alberta’s premier was telling fairy tales to impressionable children, some of her senior officials were spinning fairy stories of their own.

Actually, this all happened yesterday.

The premier told a group of Grade 1 students at an Edmonton school library a story about a good princess named Alison, who built schools for children just like them, and a very bad princess named Danielle, who wouldn’t build any schools at all!

The Alison in question, of course, is Premier Alison Redford herself, the one telling the story. The Danielle is Danielle Smith, leader of the Opposition Wildrose Party. And maybe Ms. Redford didn’t use exactly those words, but you get the general idea.

If you think I’m just making this up to be mean, well, forget it! You can’t make up stuff like this! Anyway, you can read all about it yourself courtesy of the Canadian Press, which is usually pretty dependable.

“Alberta Premier Alison Redford is warning young schoolchildren to beware of the Opposition Wildrose party because, she says, it is committed to not building anything,” the anonymous CP reporter managed to write without breaking into hysterical giggles. “Redford told the children – and the parents and dignitaries seated behind them – that while her government is committed to building things, her opponents are not.”

The CP report didn’t say if anyone’s jaw actually hit the floor when the premier started saying stuff like this to little children, but it did mention that she said the same thing to another group of kids in Calgary the day before – so apparently this is part of an actual plan cooked up by the communications braniacs in her office, not just a horrible error in judgment.

She also announced that her government will be building seven new schools in the Edmonton region.

Meanwhile, across town at the Edmonton Remand Centre, where bad children who don’t attend to their lessons will find themselves when they grow up, either as inmates or guards, Deputy Solicitor General Tim Grant was said to be taunting guards who illegally walked off the job for five days last week in a dispute over safety issues in the recently opened jail.

According to the leader of the guards’ union, Mr. Grant “was telling members there was no blanket amnesty for the Correctional Peace Officers, contrary to the agreement I reached with the government to end the strike.”

“He has been inflaming raw emotions and threatening labour peace with his actions,” said Alberta Union of Provincial Employees President Guy Smith. AUPE has made a complaint to the Alberta Labour Relations Board, not that that’s likely to do much good, given the Board’s transparent pro-employer bias.

Well, you can only hope AUPE thought to get their strike-ending deal with the government in writing, preferably notarized and signed by witnesses. And you can only wonder if the Redford Government is now trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest broken promise in history.

The guards, meanwhile, are so furious that it wouldn’t be a complete surprise if they walked off the job again. If that happens, and you thought last week was a gong show, just wait!

Well, there’s one thing you can believe Ms. Redford about, and that’s her commitment to not changing Alberta’s election financing law – which alert readers will recall has now been shown to permit billionaires to write humungous cheques and then decide later who among their employees, friends and relatives were actually making $30,000 maximum donations.

“We’re comfortable that we have a system that Albertans can have confidence in — that is transparent — and we’re going to move forward,” the premier told reporters at the school-building announcement after nearly five days in virtual hiding during the jail guards’ wildcat strike. (I threw in the italics myself.)

This is actually part of her communications team’s plan, by the way. Ms. Redford will only be around to make happy announcements, plus tell scary stories to toddlers. The rest is left to Deputy Premier Tom Lukaszuk.

To those who suggest banning huge donations from unions and corporations, this government says: “Never!”

The explanation for that position is probably pretty simple. As NDP Leader Brian Mason explained it last week, without huge corporate donations, the Redford Government wouldn’t stand a chance of re-election.

Speaking of which, Ms. Redford closed the day yesterday with a “campaign-style” (not Gangnam style) speech at a $500 a plate dinner to 1,400 or so supporters, each of whom presumably wrote their own cheque.

Even though there’s not supposed to be an election in Alberta until 2016, Ms. Redford needs to campaign hard because she’s facing a Progressive Conservative Party leadership review in November and elements of her own party are growing antsy, thinking things may be slipping out of control under her leadership.

So you can count on hearing many more fantastic tales from Mr. Redford and her retinue in the next few weeks. If this keeps up, even school kids won’t believe what she’s peddling, just like a lot of their parents.

The End.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Never mind the pundits: Alberta Premier Alison Redford has plenty to celebrate today

by David Climenhaga on April 23, 2013 in 2012 Provincial Election, Alberta Politics, Alison Redford with No comments

Alberta Premier Alison Redford, second from right, with Environment Minister Diana McQueen and Culture Minister Health Klimchuk, watch as Deputy Premier Tom Lukaszuk celebrates the Progressive Conservative Party’s victory on this day last year with a sip of champagne. Actual PC cabinet members may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: the real Premier Redford, swearing the oath of office.

Today is the first anniversary of Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s unexpected but comfortable election victory.

If you follow Alberta politics, you’re bound to have been reading a lot of stuff lately about how unpopular Ms. Redford is just now and how she really has no reason to celebrate.

“There is no cause to party,” the Edmonton Journal’s political columnist wrote gloomily, recommending against her drinking anything more expensive than Baby Duck.

He, like everyone else at the moribund local rag and its similarly declining Postmedia counterpart in Calgary, has been touting a self-confessedly iffy Leger Marketing on-line-panel survey that suggests Ms. Redford has no friends.

Well, it’s true, I guess. The popularity of Alberta’s premier does seem to have rather slumped of late – although probably not as badly as the doubtless politically charged members of Leger’s panel indicated – and her Progressive Conservative government likewise seems to have a penchant for making many more enemies than friends.

If there’s anything to this Leger poll – which the Calgary Herald cautiously noted in its story on the survey is “a non-random Internet survey” that “does not report a margin of error” – the news wasn’t particularly good for anyone else either, at least anyone else the Journal or the Herald is likely to advise readers is a credible and serious candidate.

So if, as the poll suggests, 60 per cent of Albertans disapprove of the job Ms. Redford is doing, nearly 40 per cent disapprove of the work of Opposition Leader Danielle Smith as well. Ms. Smith is doing better with her own supporters, the poll suggests, with 39 per cent who approve, versus 26 per cent who approve of Ms. Redford. But … yadda-yadda … Feel free to read it for yourself if you care all that much.

In reality, the situation Ms. Redford and her government find themselves in is akin to that experienced by all of us who have discovered to our astonishment we’re not as young as we used to be. To wit: Growing old is for the birds, but the alternative is worse.

And the alternative for Ms. Redford last year, it could be argued, was a fate almost worse than death, that is, political death!

A year and a couple of weeks ago, tout le monde political Alberta had written off Ms. Redford and her Tories and were already typing up the obituaries, not to mention the longer one for the four-decade-plus PC regime started by Peter Lougheed.

The really important reporters, of course, were writing up glowing tributes to Danielle Smith, Tom Flanagan and the other Great Minds behind the Wildrose Party, which we were all persuaded was about to win a huge majority.

So let us not forget the reason the Alberta political punditocracy was writing off Ms. Redford and the PCs last year in almost exactly the same words they’re writing them off now was public opinion polls that looked an awful lot like this latest survey.

Instead, as we all know now, Ms. Redford posted a respectable 61-seat majority government and got the last laugh, or at least the next-to-last one.

Since political life is better than political death, I’d say Ms. Redford has something to celebrate right there.

What’s more, plenty of Progressive Conservative MLAs who expected to lose their seats are still safely ensconced in their Legislative sinecures. So, no matter how worried they are about where Ms. Redford is taking them next, neither they nor any others in the party, are very likely to take the chance of skidding the premier at her mandatory PC Party review next November.

So there’s a second reason for her to celebrate – she’s probably safe at least through to the next general election in 2016, or whenever.

Of course, she may lose then, as everyone seems to think now that she will, with voters complaining about the shards of broken promises that litter the streets of Alberta’s cities and towns.

But are you really certain that, three years hence, Alberta voters will even notice, let alone care?

The truth is, it could happen, and the Opposition will try mightily to ensure it does, but Alberta voters have a long and undistinguished history of ignoring broken promises, incompetent government and bonehead mistakes before returning Progressive Conservative governments to power by comfortable majorities.

Is anyone who doesn’t have a partisan point to make really confident enough to predict the same thing won’t happen again in 2016?

We should also be careful what we wish for. Ms. Redford still has three years to keep those promises, and, what’s more, some of them aren’t worth keeping. Do you still want – as Ms. Redford promised on page 29 of her 2012 policy platform – to “recruit foreign temporary workers”?

The fact is, Ms. Redford and her government have plenty to celebrate today. So why wouldn’t they say, “what the hell,” and pop the corks on some champagne?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Is Chuck Strahl’s dual role on the Manning Centre and security committee appropriate?

by David Climenhaga on April 22, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Conservative Party of Canada, Manning Centre, Security & Intelligence, SIRC with 7 Comments

Chuck Strahl listens to a participant in the Manning Centre conference in Ottawa in March. Below: Manning Centre founder and figurehead, Preston Manning.

Should Chuck Strahl be able to serve simultaneously on the board of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, a partisan political organization tied to the ruling Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other provincial conservative parties, and on the apolitical Security Intelligence Review Committee?

The SIRC is supposed to be, in the words of its website, “an independent, external review body which reports to the Parliament of Canada on the operations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.”

“Parliament has given CSIS extraordinary powers to intrude on the privacy of individuals,” the website explains. “SIRC ensures that these powers are used legally and appropriately, in order to protect Canadians’ rights and freedoms.”

Mr. Strahl is a former Reform Party, Canadian Alliance and Conservative Member of Parliament from the British Columbia Interior who served as Deputy Speaker and held several cabinet portfolios during his political career. He retired from politics after the 2011 election and was appointed to a five-year term on the SIRC in June 2012. His biography on the committee’s site is open about his dual role, stating clearly that in 2011 he was appointed as a director of the Calgary-based Manning Centre.

As readers of this blog know, according to an email the group sent to its supporters, Mr. Strahl has now been appointed chair of the board of the Manning Centre, the organization founded and led by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning that works openly to keep the Harper Government in power and is now trying to extend the reach of neoliberal politicians into Canadian municipal governments.

Well, it’s still a relatively a free country, so the Manning Centre can call itself whatever it likes and work for the political outcomes it supports, but the question of whether the chair of this partisan organization’s board should serve in a sensitive and apolitical Parliamentary security review position is another matter entirely.

A claim by B.C. Premier Christy Clark last Wednesday that Mr. Strahl has been campaigning for her Liberal Party in the current election in that province has proved highly controversial and prompted swift backtracking by Ms. Clark.

The B.C. Conservative Party issued a press release Thursday stating Mr. Strahl was barred from campaigning in the election because of his membership on SIRC and demanding Ms. Clark apologize for saying he was doing so.

The Globe and Mail reported Ms. Clark quickly “clarified her statements,” explaining, “he has been active for the last two years and when he took on his non-partisan role just very recently, he stepped back from that.”

No doubt spokespeople for the Manning Centre will try to claim that organization is non-partisan too, but, really, how can they?

“The Manning Centre is dedicated to building Canada’s conservative movement,” the group’s website states. At the federal level, there is only one Conservative party. As the statements, speeches and participants at last March’s Manning Centre “Big Ideas” conference in Ottawa made perfectly clear, time and again, the “conservative movement” means Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party and, here in Alberta, the Wildrose Party of Danielle Smith. “Us” and “the Conservatives” meant the same thing for most participants in the conference.

For example, Mr. Manning staked out a partisan position in Alberta politics in one of his principal speeches, stating, “in Alberta an aging Progressive Conservative administration has lost its way ethically and fiscally and needs to be overhauled or replaced.”

Mr. Strahl, naturally given his position, attended the conference.

As for the Manning Centre’s foray into municipal politics, its so-called “Municipal Governance Project” is also a directly partisan activity whether or not the group is actually backing a slate or trying to unseat Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi. It is most certainly backing individual candidates, one or more of whom, presumably, may challenge Mr. Nenshi directly.

If it is inappropriate for Mr. Strahl to serve SIRC and work for the B.C. Liberals’ at the same time, surely it is equally inappropriate for him to have a similar dual role with the Manning Centre and SIRC.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Redford Government just can’t seem to stop fumbling health care expenses frenzy

by David Climenhaga on April 19, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics, Alison Redford with 2 Comments

Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne, right, helps Premier Alison Redford get ready to face Opposition questions about Alberta Health Services expense accounts. Alberta politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Health executives Michele Lahey, Sheila Weatherill, Alison Tonge. 

The clueless ineptitude of the Redford Government dealing with Alberta’s continuing health system expense account brouhaha is matched only by the belligerence of the Opposition in portraying the situation as an outrage and a scandal.

Since mainstream media now routinely refer to the matter that way – “Redford, opposition trade barbs over Alberta Health Services expense scandal,” is how the Edmonton Journal headlined the story yesterday – it’s fair to say the opposition strategy is working.

Whether it’s in answers to questions in the Legislature, management of issues by Premier Alison Redford’s newly hired phalanx of former Ontario spin doctors, the juvenile quality of a stream of mean-spirited Tweets from the deputy premier’s BlackBerry, or just the Progressive Conservatives’ apparent inability to predict when the next embarrassing story is about to break, her government seems to be operating without a clue in a cartload!

Rudimentary issues-management skills should have allowed Ms. Redford to step out of the way with aplomb when the two latest loads of stuff hit the proverbial fan. Instead, she got splattered!

The first one was this week’s revelation that in 2008 a senior Capital Health Region executive had a trip to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for cancer tests, which by the sound of it weren’t needed, approved by her boss as a legitimate expense to be paid by the public.

“I was instructed to go for a further consultation at the Mayo Clinic by my boss to ensure that I was clear of the condition. As it was not my decision, it was funded by my employer,” former CHR vice-president Michele Lahey told a local newspaper after she was tracked down at the private hospital where she now works in the United Kingdom.

“I do not believe I have done anything wrong,” she added. So no, she wouldn’t be repaying the money – and, as Health Minister Fred Horne admitted, the government concluded it didn’t have a leg to stand on when it pondered trying to collect the $7,800 from her.

Ms. Redford wasn’t even thought of as a potential premier at the time this happened, let alone the occupant of the office. Mr. Horne wasn’t the minister either. And, for heaven’s sake, Alberta Health Services hadn’t even been created – and when it was it was supposedly in part to fix just such problems.

Yet Ms. Redford and her advisors let that ball just sail by. Even the fact it originated with a Freedom of Information filing apparently failed to alert the government the story was about to break.

Still, since it also looked as much like a case of line jumping as one of expense account shenanigans, the government could plausibly have pleaded it was looking into that through the Health Care Preferential Treatment Inquiry led by retired judge John Vertes.

Alas for them, they’d already closed that affair down – apparently over the wishes of Judge Vertes – managing to make the whole thing look like a cover-up on top of everything else.

You have to admit, it takes real talent to bungle things this badly! And we’re still less than halfway through the story!

The second punch in the one-two combination came in the form of the next revelation, that another former senior health executive – this one hired for Alberta Health Services by former CEO Stephen Duckett, the fellow fired in November 2011 for misusing an oatmeal-raisin cookie – had been allowed to expense $1,200 in medical tests needed to get permission to move to Canada.

Surely the government could have blown that one off with the excuse it’s standard practice to do such things when recruiting top executives from abroad?

But, no, perhaps from bad luck, perhaps by bad management, they seem to have managed to drop that ball too. Maybe they forgot because, barely three years after she was hired as strategy and performance VP, Alison Tonge had also packed up and moved back to the U.K.

Now it’s been revealed by the Calgary Herald AHS paid Ms. Tonge at least $426,576 to go away!

This too happened before Ms. Redford’s watch began, but no matter. You’d think the government would have figured out by now the FOI requests just aren’t going to stop until journalists have pumped that well dry, so they might as well release everything and make a virtue of necessity. Don’t count on it, though, because strategic thinking doesn’t seem to be part of the Redford Government’s repertoire.

Yesterday afternoon, former Capital Health CEO Sheila Weatherill threw up her hands at this and said she shouldn’t have authorized Ms. Lahey’s trip to Minnesota, so she’d personally pay back the $7,800 – the cost plus inflation. Maybe she’s just nostalgic for the days the local media used to treat her with adulation.

A gleeful Mr. Horne – who may or may not have come up with the idea himself – told the media he had Ms. Weatherill’s cheque in hand.

Not that this is likely to end the feeding frenzy any time soon. Somebody’s bound to do so anyway, so it might as well be me that points out this still leaves Ms. Weatherill with $1,492,200 of her controversial 2008 buyout – and that’s not counting her $1.7-million executive retirement plan and her pension!

Since all three opposition parties have got their teeth into a good thing with this stuff, we can’t reasonably expect any of them to stop as long as the headlines keep coming.

And as we get closer to the next election in 2015, it’s safe to predict the Opposition will up the ante.

In particular, the Official Opposition, the far-right Wildrose Party under former Fraser Institute intern Danielle Smith, which has no more use for public health care than most of Ms. Redford’s caucus and cabinet, is joined at the hip with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party. As is well known, Mr. Harper’s Robocall Party has negative campaigning implanted deep in its political DNA.

If in the run-up to the next election in 2016 the Wildrosers don’t stoop to the kind of advertising we just saw welcome Justin Trudeau to his new role as federal Liberal leader, it will be an astonishing development.

So if Ms. Redford and her insiders can’t up their game, we are led inevitably to two conclusions:

First, the next three years will see politics in Alberta descend to a whole new low of American-style viciousness – the fear of which made former Premier Ed Stelmach throw up his hands and quit in 2011.

Second, if the premier can’t get her act together, the possibility of a Wildrose government – which seemed laughably unlikely a year ago as Ms. Redford’s PCs celebrated their comfortable election victory – every day seems more like a probability.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Most of us are happy at 29 … but maybe not Alison Redford

by David Climenhaga on April 10, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Keystone XL Pipeline, Polling with 6 Comments

Happy 29? Unlikely. Cake shot grabbed from eslpod.com. Below: Alberta Premier Alison Redford and B.C. Premier Christy Clark, 29 and 25 (per cent) respectively.

Most of us are happy at 29. The world is our oyster. The future looks bright.

Alison Redford at 29? Not so good.

But then, we’re talking percentage points here, not years.

A 29-per-cent approval rating is a problem.

The Alberta premier was in Washington, D.C., yesterday trotting out the line heard recently at the Manning Centre “Big Ideas” Conference that a pipeline full of Alberta bitumen might actually be doing Earth a big favour on the planetary warming front.

Opponents of the Keystone XL Pipeline, Ms. Redford told a crowd of curious Americans at the venerable Brookings Institution think tank, “proclaim that either you stand against the oilsands, or you write off the environment, along with any hope for a sustainable existence. That is completely wrong.”

Instead, hecklers notwithstanding, the Progressive Conservative premier said Alberta is one of the most environmentally friendly jurisdictions in the world.

Well, good luck with that one. But even if it’s true, and even if her mission to the Imperial City works out the way she hopes, it isn’t going to help with the problem that really bedevils her, the one summed up in that awful number 29.

As noted, that is the percentage of Albertans qualified to vote in a provincial election who approve of the job Ms. Redford is doing, at least according to the Angus Reid polling company’s highly entertaining periodic horserace survey of how Canada’s premiers and their chief opponents are getting along with the people who give them their jobs.

Who knows if this online poll of 7,091 Canadian voters is perfectly accurate? It’s certainly a guide to how well the premiers and their opposition leaders are doing, and Ms. Redford is not doing very well at all.

This is especially true when you consider her white-knuckle drop of 18 points from the last time the pollster did the survey in December 2012 and the truly terrifying plunge of 26 points from a positive 55-per-cent rating her reputation with voters was enjoying the previous August.

We’re almost talking Christie Clark numbers here – according to the same survey, the B.C. premier is at an approval rating of 25 per cent. In just over a month we should know for sure what happens to Western Canadian premiers with those kind of approval ratings – unless, of course, Ms. Clark’s B.C. Liberals manage to find a way to evade their own fixed-election-date legislation and skid Ms. Clark into Victoria Harbour while they stall and find a replacement for her.

Actually, we already know what’s likely to happen with numbers like those. Both former Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and former Quebec Premier Jean Charest had similar approval numbers of 32 per cent in the previous Reid premiers’ popularity survey and they’re both gone now – the former into retirement and the latter to electoral defeat.

Worse, like British Columbia. where half the respondents (49 per cent) approved of New Democrat Opposition Leader Adrian Dix’s performance, fully 53 per cent of the survey’s respondents in Alberta gave Wildrose Opposition Leader Danielle Smith the thumbs up. (They liked New Democrat Leader Brian Mason and Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman better too – with both at 34 per cent. And Saskatchewanians still love Brad Wall, the Mr. Congeniality of Confederation, but you can read about him and all the rest of them for yourself if you’re so inclined.)

Spin all this stuff however you like – and unlike Ms. Clark, Ms. Redford won’t have to prove anything in a provincial general election for three years – what this obviously means is that an awful lot of Albertans are no longer buying what their premier is selling.

It’s no wonder, really. First she successfully built a grand alliance with the province’s progressive voters to defeat Ms. Smith and the hard-right Wildrose Party, then she turned on them in last month’s hard-line budget, which was apparently designed to appeal to the voters she’d lost to the Wildrose. Now, as Edmonton Journal political columnist Graham Thomson observed, nobody likes her! And that was before the “Bitumen Bubble” she used as an excuse went pfffft!

With a popularity plunge like the one the Reid poll indicates, it’s probably not too strong to say Ms. Redford’s reputation has been obliterated – which means her party is going to have to decide at their mandatory leadership review next November if they want to stick with her and be obliterated too.

Obviously her recent charm offensive – chatty visits to the Press Gallery and all that – hasn’t been very charming.

Which brings us back to yesterday’s junket to Washington.

Premier Redford seems to be labouring under the impression that if she, or someone, can persuade American President Barack Obama to OK Keystone XL to export Alberta’s oilpatch jobs to Texas, all will be forgiven.

Now, why Mr. Obama would feel the need to do that is not at all clear when the pipeline not only faces powerful opposition from the president’s own supporters but passes through states that could be fairly termed Mitt Romney territory in the U.S. presidential election last November. But – who knows? – maybe he will.

But if he does, it’s said here this doesn’t translate into a political victory for Ms. Redford for two reasons.

First, regardless of what you hear from Conservative and Wildrose circles, support for the pipeline is far from universal here in Alberta – especially among the progressive voters Ms. Redford wooed away from their traditional parties a year ago and then kicked to the curb in her last budget.

Second, because the voters who want the pipeline will thank Mr. Obama, not Ms. Redford, for the approval.

Ms. Redford is 48.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Are Alberta’s Tories taking the right message from Wildrose Party’s fund-raising success?

by David Climenhaga on April 5, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Civic Politics, Political Fund-Raising, Ralph Klein with 4 Comments

Counting pennies: Premier Alison Redford and MLAs Peter Sandhu and Steven Young count up donations to the Progressive Conservative Party in this photo stolen from Daveberta.ca. Actual donations, especially those brought in by Darryl Katz, may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Floating balloons and Calgary mayors, apparently nothing new about that idea either.

As Alberta prepares to bid a final farewell to Ralph Klein this afternoon, more evidence has emerged the province’s politically active right has given up on the party the market-fundamentalist avatar led for 14 years.

Mainstream media reported this week fund-raising by the farther-right Wildrose Party is outstripping that of the governing Progressive Conservatives, strongly suggesting efforts by such PC leaders as former premier Ed Stelmach and Premier Alison Redford to ease their party back toward the centre after the radicalism of the Klein Era are encountering stiff resistance.

This creates potential challenges for Redford’s party — but is not necessarily a disaster, as the horserace-addicted media seems to be working itself up to claiming.

Still, while the historically unmatched Progressive Conservative money machine is hardly faltering under Ms. Redford’s leadership, donations are pouring more quickly at the moment into a cash-collection mechanism for Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party that is based on the federal Conservative Party’s successful fund-raising techniques, unofficial annual financial statements from Elections Alberta indicate.

But while the Wildrose Party was better at raising large amounts of money from small donors in 2012, media coverage has (intentionally?) exaggerated this portion of the party’s donations to make it sound as if it is almost exclusively supported by grassroots contributors.

The reality, of course, is that just like the PCs, the Wildrosers are also very good at raising large donations from corporations, especially companies in the oil and gas sector.

Alberta election financing laws set a large maximum donation of $15,000 and make it easy for out-of-province corporations to launder their donations through local operations – naturally tilting the fund-raising field in favour of the right-wing parties like the Redford Tories and Smith Wildrosers.

Still, the fact the Wildrose Party could raise about 40 per cent of its revenue in 2012 from small contributors – versus less than 10 per cent in the same year for the Redford Conservatives – should be cause for concern for the Tories. It reinforces recent polling trends that indicate support is strong among conservative voters for the new party’s radical platform, which resembles Mr. Klein’s harsh market purism during his four terms as premier.

In the three-month period before the last election – which must be accounted separately under Alberta election laws – the Wildrose Party raised $2.8 million compared to the PCs’ $2.3 million. Those numbers compared with $517,000 raised by the NDP in the same three-month period and $150,000 contributed to the provincial Liberals.

But the spread really begins to grow dramatically when you look at contributions outside the three-month pre-election window. In all of 2012, the Wildrose Party raised $5.9 million compared to $3.9 million raised by the Redford PCs.

The NDP raised total contributions of a respectable $1.4 million and the Liberals had total 2012 donations of about $479,000.

Much was made by media commentators that this situation leaves the PCs with a post-2012 deficit of $785,000, while the Wildrose Party has a surplus, but it is said here that in itself is probably not all that significant given the ability of both parties to raise huge amounts of cash and the likelihood well-heeled donors will hedge their bets and support both until a clear winner emerges in the run-up to the next election.

It would be a serious mistake to jump to the conclusion this spells the doom of the Progressive Conservatives.

With the party’s emphasis on corporate fund-raising, many friends in corporate boardrooms and the province’s lax financing rules, PC revenues will likely peak later than those of the Wildrose Party. As a result, it is said here they will catch up to and surpass the Opposition party’s successes as the next election nears in 2016.

But with right-wing voters and their money obviously drifting toward the Wildrose, continued PC success obviously also depends on the ability of the premier and her inner circle to maintain the centrist coalition they built in the desperate weeks before the April 23, 2012, election.

They won’t do that by competing with the Wildrose Party for right-wing voters who have already abandoned them, taking their money with them, as the party seems to be trying to do at the moment by letting Ms. Smith set the province’s economic and policy agenda.

No matter what their political lizard brains are telling them right now with Mr. Klein’s public memorial scheduled to take place at noon before misty-eyed throngs in Calgary’s Jack Singer Concert Hall, for the Redford Tories the choice is getting back to the centre or arranging their own political funeral.

Mr. Klein, who served four terms as premier from 1992 to 2006 and who was mayor of Calgary from 1980 to 1989, died in Calgary on Good Friday at 70.

+ + +

Deep-pocketed neocons prove useful target for Calgary mayor 

Speaking of fund-raising and Calgary mayors, when neoconservative Godfather Preston Manning floated his Big Idea balloon about knocking off small-l liberals at Calgary City Hall, he gave Mayor Naheed Nenshi something to shoot at.

If Conservatives with deep pockets don’t like him, Mr. Nenshi reportedly told a closed-door fund-raiser Tuesday, they should run against him, not undermine councillors who are doing a good job.

When it comes to fund-raising potential, it is said here, it’s always useful to have a potential boogieman like Mr. Manning on the other side to concentrate your supporters’ minds – and if you don’t believe me, just watch this short video and see which well-known campaign mastermind pops out the door at the end, a very big grin on his face. If you don’t know his name, the answer is in the index.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

One Province, Two Guvnors … Wildrose and Progressive Conservatives eye reuniting right

by David Climenhaga on April 1, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Alison Redford, April Fools, Danielle Smith, Progressive Conservatives, Wildrose Party with 8 Comments

Pleased to meet you… not! Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, left, shakes hands with Alberta Premier Alison Redford. Below: Alberta Premier Joan Crockatt.

The Alberta Progressive Conservative Party under Premier Alison Redford and the Wildrose Party under Opposition Leader Danielle Smith plan to schedule an initial meeting on “reuniting the right” sometime this summer.

The parties are said to have agreed the time to reunite Alberta’s right is now, before Alberta faces the prospect of an NDP takeover like those anticipated later this year in British Columbia and Ontario.

“We are all neoconservatives with an austerity agenda designed to benefit the super rich, after all,” said a senior party strategist whose identity must remain known only to your blogger for the moment.

“Plus, the Americans are getting really antsy about having to deal with Danielle or Alison every time one of them pops up in Washington lobbying for the Keystone XL Pipeline,” said the strategist, who is the sole anonymous source for this story. “They can’t tell which one is the governor.”

“Anyway, you don’t want to leave this sort of thing too long or you could end up with Rachel Notley as premier and Raj Sherman as minister of health, and we’d be cooked in canola oil forever if it turned out Raj really could fix health care in 18 months like he says he can,” said the senior neocon strategist, who is close to the leadership of both parties but who can’t be named because he wasn’t authorized to speak on behalf of either leader or either party, at least for the time being, if you take my meaning.

“Look,” said the strategist, “everybody knows I had a little problem there for a while and everybody knows it’s over now because they can’t afford to live without me and the Globe and Mail likes to quote me. There are just a few details to be straightened out before I’m running the campaign again. Anyway, I told them I didn’t say anything wrong and I promised them I wouldn’t say it again.”

Once the details of the planned reunion are ironed out, the formal merger is expected to take place in 2014 before the next provincial election is scheduled to occur in 2015.

“We need a slogan, something that starts with an R and means ‘reunion’ but doesn’t have the word ‘union’ in it,” said the anonymous strategist. “If anyone thinks of anything, drop me an email. I’m in the campus directory.”

One potential hurdle standing in the way of a reunion is who will lead the party, since Ms. Redford and Ms. Smith are well known to be unable to be in the same room as the other one at the same time for more than a few seconds.

Officials of the two parties are said to be seriously considering drafting Joan Crockatt, who is currently the Member of Parliament for the federal Wildrose Party for Calgary-Centre, to lead the new amalgamated party.

Ms. Crockatt is thought to combine Ms. Redford’s diplomacy and human touch dealing with subordinates with Ms. Smith’s deep intellectual rigour and strong commitment to public services. Moreover, it’s thought to be unlikely Ms. Crockatt can be re-elected to Parliament in her riding because of all the Liberal voters there who have finally figured out the difference between red and green.

Both Wildrose and PC officials are also thought to be in agreement that whatever happens, it is essential Rob Anderson never gets to be leader of anything bigger than his Mormon Stake’s scout troop in Airdrie.

Since the talks have not yet begun, discussion has only turned informally to what to call the reunited party. Ideas are said to include the Conservative Wildrose Alliance Party (CWAP) and the Wild Rosehip Alberta Tea Party (WRATP, which is likely to be pronounced “rat pee”).

Alright, everybody, settle down! It’s April 1. This is a gag. Perfesser Dave just made it all up, including the quotes, and forced me to put it in my blog. The Alberta Conservatives and Wildrosers won’t actually be talking reunion for at least three more years. This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

A tale of a fateful trip: Alberta Wildrose leader to ship out on nine-day ‘Freedom Cruise’!

by David Climenhaga on March 19, 2013 in Cruise Ships, Media, Oil Politics, Really Bad Ideas, Sun News Network with 10 Comments

Hey little buddy, come with me! Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith chats with Sun News Network TV host Ezra Levant. Below: Mr. Levant with Sun TV personality Brian Lilley. Actual far-right bloviators and politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below them: The actual Mr. Levant, the actual Mr. Lilley and the actual Ms. Smith, caught in a National Post snapshot holding right-wing banana cream pie in the sky.

Avast, Matey! Alberta Opposition Leader Danielle Smith has signed on to ship out with a group of Sun News Network bloviators aboard the Holland-America Line’s MV Minnow for Ezra Levant’s “Freedom Cruise” in August.

It has not yet been announced if Ms. Smith will play the role of Mary Ann or Ginger aboard the Alaska-bound excursion.

Sun News commentator Brian Lilley is likely, it is said here, to be cast in the role of Gilligan opposite Mr. Levant’s natural portrayal of the Skipper. And the Professor? Everybody’s crossing their fingers for a surprise cameo by Tom Flanagan. The Fraser Institute mailing list will supply undeserving millionaires.

Sources high within the Wildrose Party promised yesterday that the “libertarian” Alberta Opposition leader will be paying her own freight on board (FOB Vancouver) and won’t be doing any double-dipping at the expense of Sun News Network, which after all is lobbying hard for additional taxpayer and cable-subscriber support.

That would hardly do, since Ms. Smith has just turned in such a brilliant portrayal of a principled politician giving 8 per cent of her salary to charity – and successfully directing her 16 MLAs to do the same thing and look like they like it. Obviously, based on this, we can expect Ms. Smith to turn in a bravura performance aboard the ideological Flying Dutchman technically known unpronounceably as the MV Zuiderdam.

Alas, for every ray of sunshine like Ms. Smith’s addition to the crew of the Minnow, into every market fundamentalist’s life a little rain must fall. So it’s disappointing to have to report it appears very much as if Pamela Geller, director of both the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI) and something that sounds like Stop Initialization of America (SIOA) has cast off from the planned freedom cruise north to Alaska.

Ditto Michael Coren, the always-inspiring chronicler of Christian persecution at the hands of really rude and sanctimonious secular humanists. The well-known Christian broadcaster’s eyes have no doubt have turned heavenward, or at least Romeward, since Mr. Levant’s seagoing ideological clambake was first announced.

Leastways, both these leading lights of the right seem to have been dropped from the program, which tersely notes, “List of speakers subject to change.”

Still aboard, however, is Janet Annesley, Vice-President of Communications for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), who as previously noted will presumably be speaking about the threat posed by anarcho-primitivistic deep ecologists in rainbow-coloured submarines with plans to CAPP-size errant cruise ships full of bitumen buffers. This is a double concern, since so many CAPP members are closely tied to Ms. Smith’s Wildrose Party.

The Minnow will make its stately way through the pristine waters of British Columbia’s Inside Passage. This will give those on the ideologically approved passenger manifest the opportunity to see this marvelous seascape before it is smeared with Ethical Bitumen proudly shipped out of Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s home port aboard leaky Communist Chinese tankers.

Cruise participants must pay up to $8,679 to be trapped for nine days aboard the vast banana boat, which is thought to steer only to starboard. Talk about a carnival at sea!

(Sink the maritime disaster puns already! – Ed.)

Some hints of where Mr. Levant, who is known also to hold extremely strong views about the importation of unethical bananas, and the other loony market fundamentalists aboard would like to steer the onboard discussion may be found in the views on tropical fruit held by the original Gilligan’s Island screenwriters:

GILLIGAN: Skipper, should I pick the yellow bananas or the red bananas, because the yellow bananas are green?

SKIPPER: Then pick the red ones.

GILLIGAN: But the red ones are pink.

SKIPPER: Gilligan, I don’t care if you pick red, white and blue bananas, just pick some bananas!

GILLIGAN: Okay, Skipper… Blue bananas?

But that’s not funny, you say? Well, when you get right down to it, neither are Ezra Levant and Danielle Smith!

Meanwhile, in totally unrelated news, the same senior Wildrose source reports the party is trying desperately to get the so-called National Citizens Coalition to stop using Ms. Smith’s photo in anti-union Facebook ads placed by the sinister and extremist Astroturf group once headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

So far, however, the NCC is said not to be returning the Wildrose Party’s phone messages. For his part, I don’t think Mr. Harper is returning anybody’s.

+ + +

Ezra Levant apologizes for Roma remarks

This just in: Sun News Network must want its mandatory carriage on basic cable TV pretty badly. Leastways, that’s the most reasonable explanation for Ezra Levant’s halfhearted effort late yesterday to apologize for and climb down from his racist remarks about the Roma people, originally made in his Sun News Network program, The Source, on Sept. 5, 2012.

After almost six months of silence, Mr. Levant admitted, sort of, that he was wrong to defame an entire people in terms eerily reminiscent of some of the darkest moments of modern history. True to form, however, Mr. Levant first attacked some of his other favourite targets, a well known environmentalist and aboriginal leaders, then tried to blame his comments about the Roma on an errant leftist impulse. He quoted Ayn Rand, the plumbiferous author beloved by the far right, assailing stereotyping as “the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” Ezra, a collectivist! Who’d've thought!

Mr. Levant also interviewed Sun News Network Vice-President Kory Teneycke, a former spokesperson in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office, who admitted that Mr. Levant “crossed the line” and said the network never should have allowed the episode to be aired.

Canadians still need to ask themselves if Mr. Levant, Mr. Teneycke and Sun News Network have sincerely apologized and committed themselves to changing their ways, and if we should therefore reward them with more generous licensing provisions.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

← Older Entries