All posts tagged Ed Stelmach

The way the cookie crumbled: Fred Horne fires Stephen Lockwood, entire AHS board

by David Climenhaga on June 13, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 6 Comments

The former Alberta Health Services Board, fired yesterday by Health Minister Fred Horne, as seen by the 99 top executives of the provincial health care agency. Actual AHS board members may not appear exactly as portrayed by the health minister. Below: Former AHS CEO Stephen Duckett, former AHS board chair Stephen Lockwood, Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne.

As Stephen Duckett, once the CEO of Alberta Health Services, might have said to Stephen Lockwood, who until yesterday morning was the chair of the AHS Board: “Well, that’s the way the cookie crumbles.”

Dr. Duckett and Mr. Lockwood both met sudden ends as senior officials of the Alberta health care system when Alberta’s often-arbitrary Progressive Conservative government began to view them as more of an impediment than an aide to its plans.

As alert readers will recall, the putative cause for Dr. Duckett’s dismissal in November 2010 was the fact he was rude to a reporter while eating an oatmeal-raisin cookie. The real reason, of course, was that the Australian PhD economist had become a lightning rod for public dissatisfaction with the massive provincial health board the government of then-premier Ed Stelmach had created two years before.

In fairness to the PCs, Premier Alison Redford’s health minister, Fred Horne, had a marginally better case for firing Mr. Lockwood, who was openly defiant in his refusal to do the government’s bidding and halt the embarrassing payments of bonuses to 99 top AHS executives.

Mr. Lockwood was obviously operating under the illusion the government meant what it said when it told him the board of AHS was independent. Well, now he knows how things really work in Alberta!

Mr. Horne certainly seemed to act decisively, canning not only the rebellious board chair, a hard-ass trucking executive from Calgary who wasn’t used to back chat from mere ministers of the Crown, but the entire 10-member AHS board.

He did it within five minutes of the start of his 9:30 press conference called for the purpose, and less than 12 hours after Mr. Lockwood’s defiance became clear to everyone in the province.

Mr. Horne immediately appointed Janet Davidson, a former deputy minister unknown to the public, as Official Administrator of the board’s affairs – and there’s a strong whiff in the air of the possibility the government will never again appoint a board to run the affairs of AHS.

However, it seems likely the act was more thoroughly and carefully premeditated than yesterday’s political choreography suggests.

Just for starters, Ms. Davidson didn’t just happen to stroll through Mr. Horne’s office door Monday afternoon and say, well, sure, she’d be prepared to take over by the end of the week.

Plus, there were those five mysterious – and mysteriously unspecified – acts of defiance by Mr. Lockwood that were noted in the minister’s press release. More than one of us, I suspect, would love to know just what commands Mr. Lockwood chose to disobey.

So, no, this wasn’t quite as spontaneous a development as we have been led to believe.

Regardless, as was argued in this blog yesterday, there is no way Mr. Horne is going to escape this imbroglio without a certain amount of egg on his face.

He looks like a flip-flopper of dubious judgment, having appointed Mr. Lockwood with high praise less than 10 months before and made public statements in March suggesting that while he didn’t like the board’s plan to pay $3.2 million in bonuses to the execs, he would go along with it.

But he won’t look weak to the public – which, in the world of conservative politics is an even graver sin than flip-floppery. And who knows, this may very well play in Ponoka, the Albertan equivalent of Peoria.

Anyway, given Mr. Lockwood’s persistent defiance, once Mr. Horne had publicly given him his marching orders, the government really had no choice but to make him walk the plank when he declined to obey them.

Presumably Mr. Lockwood understood this and reckoned that outcome worked for him – his determination to stand up to the government certainly won’t harm his reputation in Alberta’s business and legal communities.

Mr. Horne and the government will now just have to live with the embarrassment of having fired a guy who is claimed to have just saved AHS $100 million and who less than a year ago they were touting as the best thing ever to happen to health care in Alberta since they hired … erm, Stephen Duckett.

Moreover, the minister will also have to get used to the fact there’s now nothing at all standing between his government and what happens in the health care system, which is bound to be controversial and unpopular with many voters no matter what he does next.

Case in point, in an attempt to reassure the public all is well despite the drama, Mr. Horne stated that “nothing about today’s decision changes the normal delivery of health care in Alberta.”

Indeed, he went on, “hospitals and other care facilities continue with normal operations. The changes we announce today are unlikely to be noticed by most people.”

AHS management, meanwhile, presumably backed by the former board, which included nary a representative of the public interest, has been pushing “workforce transformation” that to date has involved the elimination of well over 200 Registered Nurse and Licensed Practical Nurse positions and their replacement by unskilled health care aides.

This is not likely to reassure Albertans worried about the quality of health care they might receive if they require it, unless Mr. Horne means to say that the cuts to skilled nursing staff are about to stop.

The last time the situation in heath care seemed this chaotic and confusing here in Alberta, premier Stelmach shuffled Ron Liepert, the bull-in-a-china-shop health minister of the day, to another portfolio and replaced him with Gene Zwozdesky, the velvet-voiced old crooner of the PC caucus.

Mr. Horne played a key role in this calming effort, promoted by the premier to Parliamentary Assistant for Health, which turned out to be a stepping stone to his current position.

Alas, Mr. Horne is now on the hot seat and Mr. Zwozdesky is no longer available, having been rewarded for his good service last time by being made the Speaker of the House.

No one in the Redford Government caucus springs to mind with natural diplomatic skills to match Mr. Zwozdesky’s.

So for the time being AHS will likely shuffle along from disaster to catastrophe, erratically led, its problems exacerbated by the dysfunctional corporate model imposed on public health care back when Ralph Klein was premier of Alberta.

It’s hard to imagine how this can end well for Ms. Redford, Mr. Horne and the PC Party. Or, for that matter, for most of the rest of us!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

AHS Chair Stephen Lockwood to Health Minister Horne on executive bonuses: ‘Drop dead, Fred!’

by David Climenhaga on June 12, 2013 in Alberta Health Services, Alberta Politics with 7 Comments

Alberta Health Minister Fred Horne: it’s hard to imagine how he can come out of this fight with Alberta Health Services Chair Stephen Lockwood not looking foolish or weak. Below: Mr. Lockwood in a screen grab from his first news conference as AHS chair.

Whatever happens next, it seems certain Alberta Health Minster Fred Horne is going to end up with egg on his face.

Indeed, when the dust has settled from the current contretemps at Alberta Health Services, the entire government of Alison Redford is likely to look foolish.

Challenged yesterday by Alberta Health Services Chair Stephen Lockwood over the question of bonuses for the health system’s top 99 executives, Mr. Horne has no way to respond that won’t make him look either foolish or weak, possibly both.

Yesterday morning, Mr. Horne ordered Mr. Lockwood in no uncertain terms not to pay $3.2 million in budgeted bonuses in the current fiscal year to the senior executives of AHS, the massive province-wide health agency that was created in 2008 by former Premier Ed Stelmach and then-health-minister Ron Liepert.

“Later this afternoon, the AHS board will announce that it has made a decision to award bonuses to its employees,” Mr. Horne prophesied in a statement issued after a news conference in Lethbridge.

“However, at a time when we’ve asked our front-line providers – including doctors and teachers – to take freezes in pay, we cannot and will not accept AHS’s decision,” he said. “It is completely out of step with the times. As a result, today, I have issued a directive that instructs the AHS board to reconsider its decision to pay executive bonuses.” (Emphasis added by me.)

Never mind that back in March, Mr. Horne said in response to questions about exactly the same situation: “It’s a decision for the AHS board.” But that was then and this is now – a time frame during which it appears to have dawned on the government that generous bonuses for senior public-sector executives are both sure to be unpopular with voters and bad optics for a government demanding big concessions from public service unions.

The independent-minded AHS chair, however, obviously had other ideas.

Yesterday afternoon, Mr. Lockwood, a lawyer and trucking company executive from Calgary who is plainly used to not being challenged by anyone about anything, called a special meeting of the board, where the members promptly voted to defy Mr. Horne and pay the bonuses.

One has to feel a certain sympathy for Mr. Lockwood’s position, which is that a deal’s a deal, the executives were promised bonuses this year and AHS will keep its word. Next year, there will be no bonuses, Mr. Lockwood has already said.

“This is about doing something once you have said it and not backtracking on it,” he told a local newspaper yesterday.

His challenge to the health minister leaves Mr. Horne and the Redford Government with only two choices, neither of them particularly palatable:

Mr. Horne can fire the entire board, or at least Mr. Lockwood.

This will make the health minister look like a fool.

After all, it was Mr. Horne who appointed Mr. Lockwood as chair less than a year ago in September 2012, praising his “tremendous business experience” and touting him as the right man to lead the health system into the future. (Mr. Lockwood was the permanent replacement for Ken Hughes, who quit to run for Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservative Party, for which he is now the energy minister.)

And imagine what would happen if it were then revealed that AHS was doing much better than expected financially under Mr. Lockwood’s leadership – even after the bonuses!

On the other hand, Mr. Horne could not fire Mr. Lockwood.

This will make the minister appear powerless, or at least weak.

Firing any member of the board over voting to do its duty as it sees fit will also raise serious and potentially complicated questions about who actually runs AHS.

The board exists, after all, to insulate the government from unpopular decisions about the administration of the provincial health system. If any member of the board is fired because for not doing the government’s bidding over an item of business well within the purview of the board, the whole edifice is exposed as a fraud and the health system as little more than a government department.

If anything goes wrong – and, count on it, there are going to be big health care controversies facing this government in the next few months – Mr. Horne and the rest of the Redford Government will have nothing to hide behind and no one to blame.

It would also raise the question of just what we taxpayers are paying Dr. Chris Eagle, the CEO of AHS, his $585,000-per-year salary (plus his controversial bonus, cutely termed “pay at risk” by AHS) to do if Mr. Horne is now running the show himself.

But if Mr. Horne doesn’t fire the board, he will be tolerating an open rebellion – surely not an example this increasingly shaky-seeming government wants to offer when there may be other rebellions brewing, even within Ms. Redford’s own Tory caucus.

Probably the best option for Mr. Horne is to keep Mr. Lockwood and the rest of the board on, but somehow persuade them to change their minds. It doesn’t sound, though, very much as if Mr. Lockwood will give him that chance.

Perhaps Mr. Horne should have paid attention to what Mr. Lockwood had to say for himself when he hired him.

“I’ve never been one to back down from a challenge,” Mr. Lockwood said at his first news conference as chair. Apparently he meant it.

Well, this is what happens when the government appoints people who turn out to have minds of their own – something that doesn’t happen very often here in PC Alberta.

Stand by for developments.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

All lawbreakers will be punished … unless they happen to be Alberta Conservatives

by David Climenhaga on May 2, 2013 in 2012 Provincial Election, Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, Election Financing, Elections Alberta, Labour Relations, Wildcat Strike with 2 Comments

“’Ave you got a leesence for your minkey?” An investigator for Elections Alberta pauses momentarily in his probe of political donations made to the Progressive Conservative Party by seeing-eye monkeys. If you don’t get it, I can’t help you. Actual Elections Alberta investigators by now have likely been transferred back to plain clothes. Below: Justice Minister Jonathan Denis, retired Chief Elections Officer O. Brian Fjeldheim and drugstore billionaire Daryl Katz.

In Alberta, lawbreakers must be punished, and they will be punished – unless, of course, they happen to be supporters of the ruling Progressive Conservative Party.

So, the government announced yesterday, it will be going after the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees for the full cost of the wildcat strike by 2,500 jail guards – a figure the government ministers were somewhat fancifully suggesting yesterday will be about $6 million.

In addition, on top of the $350,000 in fines AUPE has already paid, Justice Minister Jonathan Denis was promising to use Alberta’s primitive labour laws to refuse to collect union dues from thousands of AUPE members who had nothing whatsoever to do with the strike for six months. That could cost AUPE another $8 million or so.

However, also yesterday, the Alberta government was delighted to learn nobody broke any laws when Premier Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservative party accepted a donation of $430,000 on a single cheque from drugstore and pro-hockey bazillionaire Daryl Katz seven days before the April 2012 election.

Now, Alberta election law states that no individual, corporation or union may make a donation larger than $30,000 during an election year, so as a layperson you might have thought a $430,000 cheque from one person was pretty strong prima facie evidence that something wasn’t quite kosher.

But don’t worry about it, said a report by Chief Electoral Officer O. Brian Fjeldheim that was released yesterday, everything was OK because the Katz Group sent along a letter explaining that the donation was really just a convenient way to deliver personal gifts from Mr. Katz and 17 of his friends, relatives and business associates.

Mr. Fjeldheim had hired a retired judge and a couple of private dicks to look into whether the rules were broken or merely bent when Mr. Katz turned up at PC Headquarters in the final desperate hours of the 2012 election campaign, when it looked very much as if the Wildrose Party was about to win.

Based on that investigation, Mr. Fjeldheim – who is a long-time Tory stalwart and Chamber of Commerce president from Vegreville in former premier Ed Stelmach’s riding – said he was satisfied that each of the contributors had made the donations from their own funds. You see, Mr. Fjeldheim explained, each of the contributors repaid Katz Group Properties Inc. some time later.

Premier Redford herself and Mr. Denis were quick to declare the ruling meant the story was over.

“None of the people the Opposition has repeatedly maligned throughout this entire province over the last few months were found in any responsible, they were completely vindicated,” Mr. Denis huffed.

“Mr. Katz has been vindicated,” echoed a spokesperson for the billionaire in a statement. (Or, maybe Mr. Denis was echoing the spokesperson. Whatever!)

Actually, one of the 17 donors was found to have broken the rules. You see, the Katz Group’s chief financial officer lives in Ontario, and non-Albertans aren’t allowed to make donations in this province. A donation from the same fellow’s professional corporation, though, was ruled A-OK.

His penalty? They put a stiff letter on his file!

“I just don’t see how they could have made this finding,” said a bemused Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason. But if Mr. Mason, or anyone else, would like to ask Mr. Fjeldheim any questions about the investigation, well, forget it! You see, Mr. Fjeldheim retired last month, and he’s not taking phone calls.

Speaking of unions, as we were a few minutes ago, can you imagine what would have happened if the $430,000 donation had been made to Mr. Mason’s NDP in the form of a cheque from, oh, say, the AUPE, and that the union has said it was really just a convenient way to deliver donations from a few dozen of its members?

You’d hear the cries of rage and hysteria all the way to Newfoundland! And do you think for an instant Elections Alberta would have ruled everything was just hunky-dory with the donation? Please!

Well, never mind children. Laws can be twisted into the shape of pretzels when it suits our rulers in this province, or ignored altogether for that matter.

As Dave Hancock, Alberta’s de facto labour minister explained the PC government’s thinking last month: “People should be able to organize their lives the way they want to, and if it’s more convenient for them to contribute through their company than personally, I don’t have a problem with that.” As previously noted, this convenience factor is unlikely to apply to union members.

Meanwhile, if you think this means you can break a law that they do find convenient, especially if it concerns something as insignificant as your right to work in a safe place and go home at the end of your shift in one piece, well, guess again.

That said, all the Redford Government’s blustering about what it’s going to do to AUPE may not be as simple as likes of Mr. Denis and Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk make it sound – owing to the fact we still live under the federal constitution bequeathed in part to us by Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

One can understand the government’s wish to make it appear as if it didn’t blink first, especially after all the noise Mr. Lukaszuk made about not negotiating with lawbreakers.

But to proceed with its plans in any way except by unconstitutional legislative fiat, it will have to prove in a court somewhere its unlikely claim the strike cost $1.3 million a day, and that the dues suspension should be applied to workers who did not participate in the strike.

This could take years and cost taxpayers millions with no guarantee of success – although I suppose Premier Redford’s political brain trust may have concluded swaggering about it now and spending our money on it later may pay off in the next election.

But remember, Alberta Health Services and its predecessor organizations never managed to impose on AUPE the dues suspension they demanded for an illegal auxiliary nurses’ strike in May 2000 – and that one was over money, not workplace safety.

If you’re wondering about all these illegal strikes, by the way, I guess that’s what happens in a jurisdiction where most strikes are illegal – and employees’ concerns are treated with disdain.

Regardless, the important lesson from today’s two big stories is quite simple: In PC Alberta, the law must be obeyed, unless you’re a Conservative and you don’t feel like it.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Mysterious 2011 review of Alberta Labour Code explained – corporate influence, of course!

by David Climenhaga on April 26, 2013 in Alberta Federation of Labour, Alberta Politics, Construction Competitiveness Coalition, Labour Relations with 4 Comments

Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan, right, speaks to yesterday’s AFL news conference at the Edmonton’s Shaw Conference Centre. Your faithful blogger can be glimpsed at the far right. Beside him, the CBC’s Charles Rusnell. Below: Rusnell, Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason.

Back in the summer of 2011, as Ed Stelmach’s reign as premier of Alberta ground toward its inevitable terminal moment, then-employment-minister Thomas Lukaszuk sent around a letter advising stakeholders he was about to commence a review of the Alberta Labour Code.

It had to be done, said the minister responsible for the province’s labour portfolio, “to ensure we remain competitive over the longer term.”

Major players in Alberta’s labour movement found this development disquieting, not because the Code doesn’t need revising, but because no one in labour had any idea how such a thought had come to enter the minister’s normally relatively empty headspace.

No one connected with a labour union had been given a hint anything was up – with the sole exception, it turned out, of the Christian Labour Association of Canada, a group condemned in labour circles as an employer-dominated union that works hand in glove with construction employers.

It also seemed like an odd time to launch a review, with the government about to change leaders. Moreover, the make-up of the two-member review panel hardly inspired confidence – a lawyer with tight connections to the Progressive Conservative government and another known for his anti-union views.

So union leaders could be forgiven for wondering what the heck was happening.

Now we know – thanks to some assiduous research work by the Alberta Federation of Labour and some investigative journalism undertaken by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

Yesterday morning, CBC Edmonton investigative reporter Charles Rusnell revealed a tangled web of unregistered lobbying, donations to the Progressive Conservative government and Premier Alison Redford’s leadership campaign, and behavior by a well-connected coalition of construction companies and anti-union contractors that one lawyer quoted by the CBC suggested “crosses the line in the Criminal Code bribery provisions.”

Regardless of the merits of that claim, for sure substantial donations were made to the PCs and there was intense lobbying by the group, made up of companies and individuals who with one exception were not registered as lobbyists.

It appears quite clear from the correspondence uncovered by the AFL researcher that members of the group, which termed itself the “Construction Competitiveness Coalition,” tried to tie generous support of the PC Party to specific changes in legislation, namely the Labour Code, desired by member companies.

Many of the changes the CCC wanted were clearly designed to put construction trade unions out of business. The Code as currently written, they claimed at the time, was “making Alberta companies uncompetitive,” which likely explains where Mr. Lukaszuk got his breezy explanation for his actions.

The evidence reported by the CBC yesterday also suggests several influential government members – including then-premier Stelmach, Premier Redford and Mr. Lukaszuk – enthusiastically entertained the CCC’s lobbying efforts, although they must have known only one member, the virulently anti-union Merit Contractors, was registered as a lobbyist.

In fairness, Alberta’s lobbying law is subject to interpretation in places, allowing unregistered lobbyists 100 unregulated hours as freebies. But it is known that Ms. Redford’s leadership campaign received donations of $26,900 from CCC members, and all leadership campaigns received donations of at least $121,800 from the group’s members. The PC Party got $186,750 in donations from the anti-union coalition between 2009 and last year.

CCC members received close to $1 billion in government contracts and grants over a six-year period.

By the 2012 election campaign, many of the CCC’s ideas had made it into the PC Party’s official election platform, where they can be found on page 30.

Less than two months later, when Ms. Redford was premier and the CCC was growing dissatisfied at the pace of the changes it was looking for, Tom Brown, a senior vice-president of Ledcor, one of the companies in the CCC, fired off a sharp note to the executive director of Premier Redford’s Calgary office.

In it, Mr. Brown said of his company and PCL Construction, “We both made major contributions to Ms. Redford’s leadership campaign and to the PCs’ election campaign fund (in Ledcor’s case up to the legislated maximum). Other members of our Coalition were also significant supporters of both the Premier and the PC Party. … there will be huge disappointment and possibly misgivings within our Coalition if I do not have something concrete to report next week.” (Italics added by me.)

For all intents and purposes, it sounds very much as if Alberta’s anti-union construction companies demanded, and very nearly got, the chance to write their own governing legislation!

As Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason noted at a news conference with AFL President Gil McGowan yesterday, “what these letters and emails show is that the PCs have been more than willing to collude on changing laws that affect Alberta workers and their families with the usual group of funders, friends and insiders.

“The premier accepted significant donations from Merit and the rest of this coalition during the PC leadership race and the last election,” Mr. Mason said. “It’s very clear they weren’t asking for changes to the Labour Code – they were expecting them.”

By the way, Ms. Redford’s office fought hard to keep several pages of this correspondence secret – but was overruled by the province’s privacy commission when the AFL appealed.

The AFL has called for the review put into motion by Mr. Lukaszuk in 2011 to be scrapped immediately as it is obviously hopelessly tainted.

The labour umbrella organization also demanded a full investigation of the CCC and the government under the Conflict of Interest Act and the Lobbyists Act.

Observers of the continuing travails of Ms. Redford’s government can only shake their heads and wonder, “What next?”

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.

Blame Ralph Klein for Redford Government’s messy regional planning crisis

by David Climenhaga on April 17, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Municipal Government, Regional Planning with 3 Comments

Representatives of Edmonton region municipalities discuss regional planning issues at a recent meeting. Actual municipal reps may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths; Ralph Klein with Steve West.

The foundations of the regional planning crisis that prompted a frustrated Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths to threaten Edmonton-area municipalities with forced amalgamation were laid by the destructive policies announced by premier Ralph Klein’s sidekick Steve West back in 1993.

On Oct. 7 of that year, Dr. West, the Vermilion veterinarian and MLA who acted in a variety of portfolios as Mr. Klein’s minister of dismantling public services, marched to the front of a meeting of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association and proclaimed that the government would be pulling the plug on the province’s internationally respected system of regional planning.

The great minds of the Klein government didn’t like it because they’d decided it was an extra layer of bureaucracy, and there’s nothing neoconservatives like more than smashing public services – especially, in Alberta, regulatory services that get in the way of the wishes of big businesses and small rural municipalities.

It is fair to say that if Mr. Klein and Dr. West had kept their neoconservative paws off Alberta’s 1977 Planning Act – which was a model for the world of how to reduce and solve conflicts like those that now bedevil the Capital Region – the government of Premier Alison Redford wouldn’t have to resort to potentially politically radioactive threats to get the Edmonton region’s municipal officials to behave themselves.

It is mildly ironic that the Progressive Conservative Party cluelessly trying to unravel the mess is the same one that created it 20 years ago. Then again, the Redford Government is also in full crisis mode dealing with such other direct impacts of Alberta’s “Kleintastrophe” as the ongoing mess in health care, so perhaps there’s a pattern here.

The Planning Act, which was still in force when Dr. West gave the shocked mayors and councillors their marching orders in 1993, required regional planning commissions around the province’s larger centres to draft binding regional plans.

The process – which was hated by rural municipalities that wanted a free hand to do what they felt like to attract business and despised by neoconservative ideologues like Dr. West who put the rights of business above all else – forced municipalities in a region to give up some power so they could work in concert, if not in harmony.

The result of this planning system in Alberta was high-quality regional planning from which, in many ways, we continue to benefit today.

By 1995, the Planning Act was history, replaced by Dr. West’s Municipal Government Act, from which all mention of legislatively mandated regional planning had been purged.

One result of this act of vandalism by the Klein Government is the chaotic and acrimonious situation we now face in the Edmonton region – in other words, what happens when the there’s no supervision fording the children to play nice in the sandbox.

Former premier Ed Stelmach made some tentative changes to try to encourage co-operation, but without a mandatory process for planning they were doomed to failure.

According to the Edmonton Journal, Mr. Griffiths gave Edmonton area municipalities six months to stop scrapping or face forced amalgamations and redrawn boundaries. “Infighting like this, I don’t know. It’s quite absurd, really,” Mr. Griffiths told a local newspaper.

That’s the thing, though. It’s not absurd. It’s the logical outcome of not having a mandatory planning process and fair regional distribution of tax revenues.

“Come September, if we haven’t turned the tide on this and it’s just getting worse, it can’t be allowed to continue,” Mr. Griffiths said, imagining that he was putting his foot down.

Alas for him, the kind of arbitrary redrawing of boundaries he seems to imagine would solve the region’s problems would likely drive voters in several well-off Edmonton suburbs and rural fringe areas with independent municipal governments into the arms of the Wildrose Party. This is especially true in low-tax Sherwood Park, which as part of Strathcona County is the Capital Region’s second-largest city and also legally the world’s largest hamlet.

A gentler solution to the regional planning disaster that might actually make sense would be to reintroduce the mandatory regional planning process contained in the 1977 act.

But that would require admitting that the now sainted Mr. Klein got it wrong, and moreover that the market fundamentalist verities of his and this era are not the economic gospel.

One thing that is increasingly clear about the Redford Government is that it has a knack for making enemies. So don’t expect whatever solution Mr. Griffiths comes up with to make it any friends!

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.

Remembering Ralph: Discussing union bargaining styles over the proverbial drink with the premier

by David Climenhaga on March 29, 2013 in Ralph Klein with 14 Comments

Ralph Klein, then premier of Alberta, with Dan MacLennan, then president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, at the premier’s Klondike pancake breakfast on the south lawn of the Legislature in Edmonton.

The scene: Just before Christmas 2001 at the Legislative Press Gallery’s Holiday “Gala,” a conversation takes place amidst of a swirl of intoxicated journalists, politicians, public relations flacks, lobbyists and other political hangers on.

The cast: Ralph Klein, premier of Alberta, clearly feeling no pain; your blogger, only on his second beer, then the PR guy for the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the provincial civil service workers’ union; and Peter Elzinga, Mr. Klein’s chief of staff.

Offstage but nearby, Larry Booi, president of the Alberta Teachers Association, then in an increasingly snarly round of negotiations with Mr. Klein’s government. Dan “Buff” MacLennan, the affable jail guard who was president of the civil servants’ union.

RALPH (Effusively, waving his arm): Hey Dave, how are ya?

DAVE: I’m fine, Mr. Klein. You?

RALPH: Doin’ fine, fine… Wush ya doin’ now?

DAVE: I’m working for AUPE…

RALPH: Yer workin’ for Buff? I like Buff!

DAVE: Yeah, I like Buff too. He’s around here somewhere…

RALPH: I like Buff! I like the way Buff negotiates…

DAVE: Speaking of negotiating, Larry Booi’s around here too. Maybe you should have a chat with Larry…

RALPH: Larry Booi? I don’t like the way Larry Booi negotiates! I like the way Buff negotiates!

PETER ELZINGA: Uh, Ralph, I think we’d better get going…

Actually, this scene happened, pretty much the way I’ve described it here. A few days later, in a similarly well-lubricated state, Mr. Klein – who died at 70 in Calgary today – famously showed up at an Edmonton men’s shelter and, as the CBC put it in his obituary, “got into a heated argument with a homeless man.”

It was soon the talk of the town that the premier had thrown a pocketful of change at the man before his driver hustled him back to the limo. Like a lot of us, Mr. Klein could be tetchy when his desire to be liked was thwarted. Or maybe he just mistook the guy for Larry Booi!

To me this short conversation cast a lot of light on the principal reasons for Mr. Klein’s political success and his principal flaws, which paradoxically contributed to his success.

He was congenial, often very warm. He wanted to be liked, maybe desperately. If he wasn’t responded to the right way, well, things could turn stormy. In other words, he had a contradictory nature – as most of us do.

He had friends in unexpected places – like Buff, with whom he had a genuine friendship, to almost everyone’s astonishment except the two of them, and maybe Ralph’s brother Lynn, who was a union activist in B.C. That friendship did no harm, it is said here, to AUPE’s ability to recover from the thrashing Mr. Klein gave the union’s members in the years before Mr. MacLennan appeared on the scene.

Mr. Klein also liked his former colleagues in the media, and met them almost daily in the halls of the Legislature. When he did, he was prepared to answer whatever questions were thrown at him. What a contrast that is to tightly controlled and secretive Conservative politicians nowadays like Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Alberta Premier Alison Redford, for whom message discipline is the sine qua non!

Mr. Klein also drank too much, as is well known. This, it is said here, impaired his judgment in bigger ways than just his conduct in the foyer of the men’s shelter. But that made him an entertaining fellow to hang around with, which is to say that there was something to the popular perception he’d be a good guy with whom to have a drink.

Two days after the brouhaha in the men’s shelter, when the story became general public knowledge, Mr. Klein gave an emotional news conference at which he promised to foreswear the bottle and behave himself. Whether or not he really did so was long a matter of speculation. I’ll say this for him, to my knowledge, no one ever saw him intoxicated in public again.

Not surprisingly, a majority of Albertans admired him for his honesty – and some of them loved him for it.

They loved him a little too much, it could be argued, because they overlooked some pretty dubious policies as a result – but his willingness to man up and admit fault was a big part of Mr. Klein’s appeal, and a significant part of his success. What a contrast, it must be said again, to Conservative politicians like Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, when faced with the same kind of revelations.

Indeed, it’s easy to assail Mr. Klein’s polices, which were in many ways a catastrophe for Alberta notwithstanding the steady stream of propaganda to the opposite effect, but let’s leave that argument for another day, shall we?

Mr. Klein was an entertaining and engaging character, well liked because he was genuinely likeable. Like all charming people, his charm reflected the fact he actually liked the people he was talking to – at least when he was talking to them. People who were not his political or ideological fellow travellers were therefore sometimes welcome in his orbit, and occasionally they were even listened to.

He was largely the author of his own political successes – the many claims of the political advisors who rode his coattails to power and influence notwithstanding. You’ll note that most of them haven’t had that many political successes to brag about since, and not for lack of trying.

Mr. Klein was always more popular with the Marthas and Henrys of Alberta than with political insiders of many stripes. Even after the lean and hungry types within his own Progressive Conservative Party who had their eyes on his job started pushing him toward the door in 2006, engineering a 55-per-cent vote in a leadership review, his support among ordinary voters remained much stronger.

And what a strategy that little coup turned to be for the PCs, who stumbled when they chose Ed Stelmach and, it surely could be argued, stumbled more seriously when they unexpectedly picked Ms. Redford.

Mr. Klein remembered his friends, even when he didn’t agree with them. Years later, when I nominated Mr. MacLennan for the Alberta Order of Excellence – an idea that must have left the selection committee feeling chest pains and dizziness – Mr. Klein called me right back and immediately wrote an enthusiastic letter of support.

Prime Minister Harper said of Mr. Klein today that, “while Ralph’s beliefs about the role of government and fiscal responsibility were once considered radical, it is perhaps his greatest legacy that these ideas are now widely embraced across the political spectrum.” Unfortunately this is true.

Mr. Klein’s political and economic legacy did not end with his life on Good Friday. It will still be with us on Easter Monday and for a long time after, even if Ralph, King of the Albertans, no longer is.

It is a paradox, like the man himself, that the Klein Era that ended in September 2006 hasn’t ended yet.

Still, I for one won’t have any problem hoisting an alcoholic beverage tonight to the memory of Ralph Klein, the man.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

‘Excellence in commercialization’? University ‘mandate letters’ are dumb, but unlikely to mean much

by David Climenhaga on March 27, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Alison Redford, Campus Alberta, Education, Post-Secondary Education, University of Alberta with 10 Comments

Contemplating the idea of Campus Alberta, which is not negotiable. Alberta post-secondary students, faculty, administrators and board of governors members may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Something really important, the Campus Alberta logo.

There’s really no need for Albertans concerned about higher education to get their knickers in a twist about the provincial government’s “mandate letters” to post-secondary institutions or the premier and her deputy’s maunderings about the state of political science and engineering education in this province.

Nothing much will come of these ambiguous notes, even if anyone can figure out exactly what their authors had in mind.

Anyway, it’s said here they’re just a diversionary tactic to distract voters from the real scandal: the deep and destructive cuts in post-secondary funding, especially the $43 million hacked out of the University of Alberta, which will go much farther than jargon-rich and barely literate mandate letters to reduce the institution from its present international status to that of the third-rate provincial technical school the Redford Government apparently has in mind.

“Hey,” the letters practically scream, “we’re not like that premier Ed Stelmach guy! This time we’ve got an actual plan!” And it involves “excellence in commercialization.” Really! I’m sorry to report I didn’t make that up.

But instead of getting mad about the fact the plan in question seems to boil down to cutting the crap out of every course that’s not endorsed by the Chamber of Commerce and the Pipeline Division of the American Society of Civil Engineers, plus making sure the “Campus Alberta” logo is displayed everywhere, tout le monde Alberta has been in an uproar about Premier Alison Redford’s slapstick comment that “in order for us to be excellent, we can’t be mediocre everywhere.”

Well, God knows, though, we’re trying!

Ms. Redford asked, presumably rhetorically: “Do we need to have a political science faculty at every university, at every university and post-secondary institution across this province where every single one of them is aspiring to be the same? Do we? I don’t think so.”

This was apparently taken as a grave insult by political scientists everywhere, except most likely the ones at the University of Calgary’s cult-like “Calgary School,” until recently home to former Wildrose campaign manager Tom Flanagan, who probably reckon they’re a deadbolt cinch to become “Campus Alberta’s” single grand unified province-wide economics and poli-sci department.

(If this works out, maybe we can extend the idea to primary school and just have one Grade One reading class for the entire province, delivered by TV right after the Pepsi commercials. No wonder the Alberta Teachers Association signed off so peaceably on years of zeros!)

Where was I? Oh yeah, there was a similar uproar when the Deputy Premier and Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk, a former schoolteacher himself, started to ramble about the state of the province’s five engineering schools. “You don’t want to have five mediocre engineering schools. You’re better off having two really good engineering schools. There’s no doubt about it.”

Since, as my fellow blogger Dave Cournoyer pointed out on his Daveberta.ca blog, there’s also no doubt about it that there are actually only two engineering schools in the province of Alberta, a lot of Alberta engineers took this to mean that premier’s deputy took their work for, like, mediocre.

I wouldn’t know about that, although observation suggests their work stands up better than the loony theories of the Calgary School’s publicly paid ideologues.

There’s not much danger of anything much coming from these risible mandate letters because in every community where there’s a university with a campus and a history – and that would be all of them except Athabasca, where the university is only a virtual entity – there’s a community of well-connected and well-off people, many of them graduates and lots of them Tories, who will fight tooth and nail to protect it.

So it is preposterous to suggest, as the University of Alberta’s mandate letter does, that universities’ boards and administrations will sign on to anything much in the letter, whoever’s signature is forcibly affixed to the bottom on their behalf.

It’s even more preposterous to say, as Mr. Lukaszuk apparently did, that the whole scheme is not negotiable. Well, we’ll see about that!

Like bureaucracies everywhere, university officials will refuse to co-operate, drag their feet and argue publicly and vociferously with the government’s largely misconceived plan to somehow meld 26 universities, colleges, technology institutes and what have you into a bizarre Great Plains version of the University of California, only with higher fees, inferior offerings and no palm trees.

Indeed, the University of Alberta Board of Governors is already mailing out open letters.

They’ll keep it up until the nuisance goes away – which the way Ms. Redford and Mr. Lukaszuk are going about things, may not take too long.

And if Ms. Redford and Mr. Lukaszuk try to slap them down, graduates, students, faculty members, retirees, local business types and other dear friends will step into the breach with alacrity.

They’ll even, mark my words, resist about the only good idea in this whole dumb scheme – complete transferability of student courses between the institutions of “Campus Alberta.” Although, in fairness, you’d have to forgive a legitimate economics department for questioning the credentials of a “Calgary School” student who’s been taught Ludwig von Mises was an economist or Ayn Rand was a philosopher!

Expecting this to actually happen makes about as much sense as making under-funded universities guarantee they’ll ensure “Alberta’s economy is competitive and sustainable” – one would have thought that was the government’s job – or that they will develop “engaged critical thinkers, ethical citizens, entrepreneurial spirit.”

And don’t forget the need to “enhance your work with business and industry to maximize the responsiveness to regional economic and social needs.” Like, I guess, producing of compliant and obedient low-wage workers – so scratch “engaged critical thinkers” above!

Then we get to the really important part: “Actively engage in and promote the Campus Alberta brand, including the Campus Alberta logo on all institutional correspondence.”

Got that? Keep your eye out for the Campus Alberta logo. Especially as the next election draws nigh.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Education minister’s bluff called by apoplectic schoolteachers! Now what?

by David Climenhaga on February 27, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Alberta Teachers Association, Jeff Johnson, Labour Relations with 7 Comments

The trading pit: Is this what Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson sees when he thinks of the Alberta Teachers Association? Actual Alberta schoolteachers may not be exactly as illustrated. Then again, these days … Below: Mr. Johnson and ATA President Carol Henderson.

OK, Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson’s bizarre attempt to bluff the province’s 35,000 unionized schoolteachers into signing a contract has failed. Now what?

One week ago, Mr. Johnson mailed the president of the Alberta Teachers Association and the Chair of the Alberta School Boards Association a rambling letter setting out the government’s latest bargaining demands in what’s turned out to be a rocky round of negotiations with the province’s teachers.

While not particularly generous, it could be argued the government’s parsimonious position wasn’t all that far from the ATA’s modest last offer – a four-year deal with no pay increase in the first three years and a 1-per-cent lump sum in the fourth versus a four-year-deal with no pay increase in the first two years and 1 per cent and 3 per cent in the final two years.

The two sides also have differences over workload issues and how to resolve them. Still, veteran labour negotiators have bridged far bigger gaps when everyone agrees to sit down and act like grownups.

However, Mr. Johnson – who according to his official Legislature biography has a background selling photocopying machines and as a “futures trading floor pit boss” – blew the idea of playing nice to smithereens when he included a threat in his letter to cut teachers’ salaries if they wouldn’t agree to his proposal by March 7, when the provincial budget is scheduled to be tabled in the Alberta Legislature.

He’d already publicly mused about using legislation to force the teachers to live with whatever sort of a deal he wants to impose on them.

Well, maybe that kind of thing works when you’re a pit boss on the notoriously chaotic futures trading arena. But in labour negotiations it’s like waving the proverbial red flag in the face of a big angry bull.

Teachers all across the province – key members of the unnatural coalition that unexpectedly re-elected Ms. Redford and her government last April – collectively blew a gasket.

Yesterday, ATA President Carol Henderson told Mr. Johnson he could drop dead, although not in quite as many words.

“Teachers do not respond well to ultimatums,” she advised a news conference where, surrounded by teachers from throughout the province, she said the ATA’s Executive Council has unanimously rejected the government’s demand.

So if Mr. Johnson and the government of Premier Alison Redford had imagined they could force a deal with teachers to be signed by the time the budget comes down in eight days, that idea’s now done like dinner.

It’s almost as if Mr. Johnson had the misapprehension teachers couldn’t add up simple sums – they teach arithmetic, for heaven’s sake – and figure out that whatever they agreed to now could have no possible impact on a budget that is already written, sent to the printers and has quite possibly already rolled off the press!

It’s hard to imagine the pandemonium of negotiations among the ATA and various school boards across the province, which is apparently what’s on the agenda now that Mr. Johnson’s bluff has been called, being anything except protracted, acrimonious and politically deeply embarrassing for the government.

And if the government steps in now and legislates any deal for the teachers, it’s almost certain to destroy the progressive coalition that came to Ms. Redford’s rescue on April 23.

So what could Mr. Johnson have been thinking when he drafted his ridiculous letter – which seems to have been specially designed to wreck one of the few areas where the Redford Government has been doing quite well, labour relations with public sector unions?

After all, the fiasco that now seems very likely is sure to make us all forget the five years of labour peace with teachers shrewdly negotiated by the government of former premier Ed Stelmach, Ms. Redford’s unlucky predecessor, who nowadays looks pretty good.

In an excellent blog post yesterday, Daveberta.ca author Dave Cournoyer suggests the whole strange episode goes back to the deep divisions within the Progressive Conservative caucus over Ms. Redford’s leadership.

Mr. Cournoyer suggests Tory caucus members who supported other leadership candidates – which would be pretty well all of them – blame teachers for joining the party and electing Ms. Redford as leader.

“The tension is said to have led to more than a few heated arguments behind the thick wooden doors of Tory caucus meetings,” he wrote, considerably understating widespread rumours of screaming matches between the education minister and the premier. Well, she can hardly fire Mr. Johnson – the third education minister in as many years – without suffering another black eye.

So now, according to this way of thinking, disgruntled supporters of candidates such as Gary Mar, Ted Morton and Finance Minister Doug Horner are out for revenge against Alberta’s teachers.

On the face of it, this interpretation is almost as bizarre as Mr. Johnson’s negotiating strategy. After all, while teachers may have voted for Ms. Redford’s leadership, they also voted for her government – saving many a Tory MLA’s job in April 2012.

What’s more, they would almost certainly have done so again, had Mr. Johnson not blundered into their negotiations.

Still, as Sherlock Holmes so famously observed, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

And it’s getting so that Albertans need the assistance of a famous “consulting detective,” and not a fictional one either, to figure out what this government is up to!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.
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