All posts tagged Fraser Institute

Albertans want election-spending-limit law but are unlikely to get one from Redford PCs

by David Climenhaga on May 10, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Dave Hancock, Election Financing, Parkland Institute with 1 Comment

Generous corporate donor drops off cash at Tory headquarters. Actual donors, who may not be exactly as illustrated, will be determined later. Below: Parkland Institute researcher Trevor Harrison and Tory Human Services Minister Dave Hancock.

It’s a conundrum!

What should Alberta’s Tories do? A study by the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute released yesterday demonstrates something almost everyone already knew anyway – that most Albertans strongly support limits on election spending.

So not setting limits on donations from corporations and unions, or enforcing the rules about how donations are made – Hey, Daryl Katz, c’mon down! – potentially spells big trouble for the Progressive Conservative Party of Premier Alison Redford.

At the same time, pretty much everybody in Alberta is starting to sense that Ms. Redford and the members of her government couldn’t get elected dog catcher without loads o’ dough from corporations with deep pockets and unending schemes for laundering cash through friends, spouses, relatives, employees, subsidiaries, pet border collies and a tank full of goldfish, plus numbered companies registered by any or all of the above.

Choices … choices … although it’s not too hard to guess which choice the Redford government is going to make.

As Social Services Minister Dave Hancock put it recently about Mr. Katz’s controversial seemingly-illegal-yet-not-illegal-for-Tories $430,000 donation to Ms. Redford’s PC party – which was later divided up among the drugstore and hockey billionaire’s friends and relations for bookkeeping convenience and legal compliance – “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.”

Mr. Hancock, by the way, was touted in yesterday’s edition of the Edmonton Journal as “the government’s moral compass on social issues,” which actually sounds about right. He also appears to be a leading author of TripAdvisor reviews of coastal B.C. hotels, so one wonders if he too has almost had enough.

The Parkland report, authored by University of Lethbridge Sociology Professor Trevor Harrison and Harvey Krahn, chair of the University of Alberta’s Sociology Department, was based on public opinion polling done by the U of A’s well-regarded if pokey Population Research Lab, which is a smart-aleck blogger way of saying it’s almost certainly right regardless of how Conservatives as a group feel about people who commit sociology.

Of special note, according to the Parkland Institute, especially given the current controversy about the Great Katzby’s donations in the last exciting moments of the 2012 election campaign when everyone thought the Wildrose Party was about to win, “is the fact that fully 84 per cent of Albertans either agree or strongly agree that election spending limits should be introduced in the province.”

Let’s say the key part of that sentence again, just to make sure it registers: “84 per cent.” That’s what you call an unambiguous majority.

Interestingly, this strong level of support spanned all political parties and was seen in all regions of the province.

The Parkland study also indicated that Albertans get it about democracy not being just about voting – 62 per cent of the respondents said they believed that protest generally and protest groups in particular play an important role in the democratic process.

In addition, the survey showed significant levels of support for higher taxes and replacement of Alberta’s unflat-flat tax, which tilts the field in favour of the wealthy, with a progressive tax system

Less surprisingly, the survey indicated deep mistrust and dissatisfaction with the way democracy operates in petro-state Alberta. Voters who identified themselves either as non-partisan or as supporters of political parties other than Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservatives agreed with her sentiment the government doesn’t care what they think.

Roughly half of the NDP, Wildrose Party and non-partisan voters said they thought the government doesn’t care about their views. Liberals were more trusting, at 33 per cent. Actual Tories who owned up to their political preference, as one might expect, were more trusting still – with only about a quarter who reckoned they weren’t being listened to. Still, that’s a pretty high number for government supporters, it’s said here.

Notwithstanding the intuitive sense Doctors Harrison and Krahn got it basically right, the results were getting a little stale by the time the Parkland Institute put out its news release – the demon-dialler calls to the 1,207 respondents of the push-button survey were made almost a year ago, between June 5 and June 27, 2012.

In Parkland’s defence, the researchers didn’t get numbers to crunch from the PRL until the fall, and then, well, you know how busy the winters can be. Anyway, good research takes time to produce – which may be why the Parkland Institute, unlike the Fraser Institute, doesn’t put out a press release every week and a half.

Also unlike the Fraser Institute, no one in the media seems to have picked up the Parkland press release and reprinted it verbatim with no reaction. Whatever, the data remains informative.

The two sociologists estimated the margin of error for the survey at 2.8 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Indeed, if the poll had been conducted since the Katz Crowd’s contributions were revealed and the Redford Government’s 2013 “Screeching Smuggler’s Turn” (SST) Budget was published, the levels of support for controls on election spending and distrust in the government both might have squirted considerably higher.

Professors Harrison and Krahn speculated that the voter cynicism they identified in this survey might contribute to the spectacularly low voter turnouts habitually recorded in Alberta. This is almost certainly true – although you have to remember that’s a normal part of any conservative government’s reelection strategy in this part of Canada.

The feeling your vote doesn’t mean anything, after all, tends to induce feelings that favour the ruling party – like there’s really no point bothering to vote for whatever flavour of opposition you prefer.

Moreover, since dogcatchers aren’t elected in Canada there’s no way to test the PC Party’s fund-free electability in that regard.

Still, don’t expect any changes to Alberta election laws any time soon. Just sayin’.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Scoop: How the Fraserites slip their propaganda reaction-free into the media

by David Climenhaga on April 9, 2013 in Canadian Economy, Canadian Politics, Fraser Institute, Neoconservatism, Propaganda with 11 Comments

Is she embargoed or isn’t she? Fraser the Magician, at right, pulls a Fraser Factoid from a chest of charitable donations, assisted by federal Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, in uniform cap at left. Like the political figures and full-time lobbyists above, Fraser Institute research may not be exactly as illustrated … ever!

TORONTO

Have you wondered how the master manipulators at the Fraser Institute, those tireless missionaries of the market fundamentalist religion, always manage to get their stories into the media without any reaction from the vast number of critics of their shoddy, biased and ideologically motivated work?

One would think, after all, that journalists at Canada’s few remaining serious news organizations at least would want to phone up the most obvious opponents of the Vancouver-based lobby group’s questionable conclusions on any given topic and ask them what they think of them.

A check on their methodology from an acknowledged expert in the field might also be appropriate, from a journalistic point of view.

Cub reporters are usually taught in their first Journalism 100 class to do this sort of thing as a matter of routine. And yet, the Fraser Institute’s reports almost invariably appear without even a hint of the most basic reaction.

A typical example of this phenomenon was found in Thursday’s slipshod “study” by the Vancouver-based corporate boiler room, wherein the Fraser Institute’s crack research team made the dubious claim Canada’s public employees are “paid 12 per cent more than their private-sector counterparts,” and, what’s more, need to be brought quickly into line with the harsh discipline of the private sector.

Now, there was nothing at all new in this particular press release, which mirrored several others the Fraser Institute has produced over the past few months on individual provinces’ public sectors. Each one masqueraded as a legitimate piece of research. In other words, every time it was the same pig, with a slightly different shade of lipstick.

Like all the others, this latest version uses the same flawed methodology, failing even to take into account the occupations supposedly being compared. The true spread, it’s said by better researchers than me, is not 12 per cent but less than 1 per cent.

Using labour force data from just one month (April 2011), this particular example of Fraser Fakery came up with the 12-per-cent claim in effect by comparing Registered Nurses or government meteorologists with minimum-wage store clerks to gin up numbers that fit the Fraser paymasters’ ideological preconceptions.

Just the same, you’ve got to hand it to them. Whenever this happens, those of us who think the Fraserites are nothing more than full-time propagandists and unregistered lobbyists, paid to produce misleading and dishonest press releases done up as “analysis” and pass them off as legitimate, peer-reviewed research, are left to sputter and protest. Often, we will be advised by the reporters we call with our complaints to write a letter to the editor.

Alas, once the initial news hit has come and gone, the impression has been implanted in the minds of the public, no matter how meretricious the “research,” that the Fraser Institute is not only a legitimate research group but that its destructive policy prescriptions ought to be followed for the good of the nation.

Well, here’s the scoop. Here’s how they do it. And I must say, their scheme is devilishly – even admirably – simple.

The Fraser Institute simply sends out its press release with a note slapped on the top that says it’s embargoed until the next morning.

Now, embargoed, in the argot of the newsroom, means a news release or some other document has been given to the media in advance of the release date on the first page. In return, the media are asked not to reveal the contents to anyone until the publication time.

Just to be clear, we’re not talking about something like a budget lockup here, in which a journalist or news organization agrees not to release information until a certain time in return for an advance peek at the data.

Rather, it’s just a note placed arbitrarily atop a news release by a PR person – which is really all that the “researchers” at the Fraser Institute are – with zero moral or legal meaning. At best, it’s a request.

But apparently the naïve decision-makers in Canada’s “serious” media have concluded in their wisdom that this means they can’t call anyone for reaction until the information in the release has been published the next morning lest they give the scoop away. Perhaps, of course, that conclusion simply suits their ideological agenda.

Regardless, by then the damage has been done, the falsehood has been implanted in the public’s imagination and letters to the editor and follow-up stories are just so much “he-said-she-said.”

It’s said here that it’s time for us in what’s left of the Canadian reality-based community to demand an end to this shady and discreditable practice – if not by the Fraser Institute, which is incorrigible, at least by the journalists who play along. After all, they have to know it’s been designed to deceive.

If you’re a journalist and you think, “We can’t do that,” our text today comes from the Gospel according to E.C. Phelan, author of the 1981 edition of the Globe and Mail Style Book, which resides to this day in an honoured place on my bookshelf.

“For several years we have refused to honour release dates on material (mostly handouts) delivered to us and other media outlets in advance,” wrote Mr. Phelan, who no doubt would not have approved of the spelling of the word “honour” in the passage above.

I do not know if the staff of the Globe still lives by Mr. Phelan’s commands. If they don’t, they should. The soundness of his advice on this topic is obvious when we see how an organization like the Fraser Institute uses arbitrary embargoes to exploit the honourable instincts of some journalists as part of its ongoing campaign of deception.

In future, when journalists who want to do their jobs properly receive “embargoed” material from the Fraser Institute or the other organizations like it that have sprung up like mushrooms across Canada, they will be doing the right thing journalistically and morally if they nevertheless seek immediate comment from the people whose oxen the Fraserites are plotting to gore.

And what, pray, would the downside be? Do you seriously think the Fraser Institute would stop sending out its news releases to any mainstream media operation that ignored its fatuous embargoes?

Please! Press clippings are its fundamental reason for existence.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Never mind the details: Fraser Institute’s a leader in press release production

by David Climenhaga on April 8, 2013 in Canadian Economy, Canadian Politics, Fraser Institute, Neoconservatism with 10 Comments

Workers in the Fraser Institute’s Department of Press Release Production. Notice the large wads of U.S. cash with which they are presumably being pad. Actual Fraser Institute press release printers may not appear exactly as illustrated.

TORONTO

According to a press release issued last week by the Fraser Institute, which is one of Canada’s leading producers of press releases, government employees earn more on average than equivalent private sector workers.

One is tempted to respond by shouting, “It’s the market, Stupid!”

After all, when you’re comparing qualified professionals doing important public service work to unskilled workers in the retail sector, as the Fraser institute seems to be doing in this slapdash and amateurish “study,” one would expect the market to set higher rates of pay for the workers with skills and necessary qualifications.

What’s more, one would also expect the Fraser Institute’s extremely well-compensated “researchers” to understand the concept of the market above all things – since it’s the alleged superiority to market solutions for everything, the facts notwithstanding, that is quite literally their raison d’etre.

Indeed, the market was exactly what they pleaded in their own defence when they were exposed on the day of their latest press release as highly paid hypocrites by an Ottawa Citizen blogger, who noticed in a U.S. tax return that a dozen Fraser Institute staff members are compensated in the comfortable six figures for their tireless market proselytizing, and that their founder and “senior fellow” is paid more than the Prime Minister of Canada!

But never mind that blind alley, because in fact the Fraser Institute’s “analysis” in this “study” and all the others exactly like it – as has typically been the case with output of this organization over the past 38 years of its existence – is full of apples-to-oranges comparisons, deceptive omissions and intentional ignorance designed to achieve the propaganda goals of its corporate paymasters.

So while it might be accurate to say public employees have a marginal edge in earnings over their private-sector counterparts in most provinces, the Fraser Institute’s claim that public employees in Canada are paid on average 12 per cent more is almost certainly bogus.

The conclusion is based on labour force data for a single month (April 2011) and appears not to have taken occupation into account at all – PhD statisticians make more than 7-Eleven clerks, quelle surprise! The study doesn’t account for the level of government that employs the workers. It provides no figures on what the actual wages the group’s researchers are looking at are – just its magic “12% Delusion.” I could go on, but why bother?

When a Canadian Union of Public Employees researcher did a better study using census data in 2011 – I know, I know, CUPE’s a public sector union and has a dog in the fight – he found the difference between Canadian public and private sector workers in 2011 to be less than 1 per cent.

CUPE used census data and looked at 500 different detailed occupations to find, first, that there isn’t much of a difference between public and private sector pay when the same jobs are compared honestly, and, second, that what difference exists is explained by the fact there’s a much smaller wage gap for women in the public service than the private sector.

Indeed, back home in Alberta, when the Fraser Institute trotted out the same analysis of Alberta public employees’ pay and claimed Alberta public employees earn 10 per cent more than their private sector counterparts, a more detailed analysis using the data form the long-form census showed Alberta public employees earn an average 2 per cent less than their private-sector counterparts doing the same or similar work.

I guess that’s why the Fraser Institute’s friends in the federal government were so anxious to get rid of that long-form census!

What’s actually shocking about the Fraser Institute’s latest claims is, given the difference in the marketability of the skills needed by a public sector shrunken to its bare essentials and those wanted by the de-skilled private sector, that the pay gap is so small.

But then, the Fraser Institute’s job isn’t really to provide honest comparisons. As has been said in this space before, its “researchers” are nothing more than full-time propagandists and unregistered lobbyists, paid to produce this nonsense and pass it off as legitimate, peer-reviewed research. Thanks again to their friends in the federal government, they are bankrolled by all of us through the organization’s charitable status while its many technically prohibited political activities are winked at by the thoroughly politicized Canada Revenue Agency.

The Fraser Institute purports to be a “think tank” – or, as it risibly puts it on its website, “Canada’s leading public policy think tank.”

In fact, as noted above, about the only category in which it can honestly claim to be a Canadian leader is in the production of press releases.

So far in the first 98 days of 2013, the Fraser Institute has issued 21 news releases. That’s one roughly every four and a half days for those of you without a calculator.

In 2012, the Vancouver-based organization published 54 releases, better than one every week.

Astonishingly, virtually all of them touted research that found “market solutions” always work better than public services. The few that didn’t announced appointments and awards designed to give the “institute” its faux academic image, or that the University of Pennsylvania has ranked it the “top think tank in Canada.”

Please! If this is top work, you really have to wonder about either the mushrooms they put in the omelets they serve in University of Pennsylvania’s cafeteria! Either that or the sophomoric efforts of all those other think tanks.

The Fraser Institute achieves this volume of press release production in part by recycling the same shoddy research over and over again into new press releases.

So the same meretricious research on which last Thursday’s dubious claim that Canadian public sector workers enjoy a 12-per-cent premium over workers in the private sector, for example, was trotted out at least three times before – for Alberta on Jan. 22, British Columbia on Jan. 24 and Ontario on Feb. 20.

In each case, the media picked up the story with naïve credulity and ran it without a word of reaction or criticism by experts in the field or opponents of the Fraser Institute’s views.

Next: How the Fraser Institute always manages to get it news releases to run in the media without opposing comments. 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.

The 10% Delusion: Fraser Institute gins up fake facts about Alberta public sector pay

by David Climenhaga on January 30, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Fraser Institute, Public Policy, Public Sector Pay with 13 Comments

Women clerical workers, as the Fraser Institute would like to see them.

The Fraser Institute didn’t write the book “How to Lie With Statistics,” a guy named Darrell Huff did, but they might as well have!

You’ve got to have a little respect for the tireless political lobbyists at the Vancouver-based “institute” – they just never flag in their efforts to twist facts like pretzels to fit their paymasters’ ideological agenda.

The full-time political lobby group’s recent “study” purporting to demonstrate that public sector workers in Alberta earn 10 per cent more than their private sector counterparts is a typical example.

This in itself is not troubling. After all, the Fraser Institute’s “researchers” are nothing more than full-time propagandists and unregistered lobbyists, paid to produce this nonsense and pass it off as legitimate, peer-reviewed research – bankrolled in part by all of us through its charitable status while its many political activities are winked at by the Canada Revenue Agency.

To their credit, sort of, these Fraser Institute apparatchiks normally base their spurious and misleading conclusions on actual facts – giving rise, as in this case, to a species of data we have come to know as “Fraser Facts.”

What is troubling – indeed shocking – is the habitual willingness of mainstream media to reprint this baloney without even giving its opponents an opportunity to comment on it, let alone critically examining it for themselves.

Naturally, the Fraser Institute’s propagandists count on journalists to not read past the first few lines of their press releases – or in the case of particularly conscientious hacks, the executive summary. It is hard not to see something more sinister at work, however, in the media’s consistent failure to seek out balance when reporting on Fraserite findings, as every journalist is taught she must do in J-School.

In this way, Fraser Facts go down in the popular imagination as actual facts, unshakeable ideological building blocks upon which is built the foundation of our understanding of the important policy questions of the day.

And so, for example, we have the fanciful claim there’s a 10-per-cent difference between public and private sector wages in Alberta, and moreover a 14-per-cent gap in B.C. (Stand by for Fraser Institute news releases making similar claims in every Canadian province because, whatever their deficiencies as researchers may be, they make up for them with their public relations skills, which are without parallel.)

Count on it that you’ll be hearing “the 10% Delusion” trotted out at political meetings and in letters to the editor from now until the day everything is privatized and the perfect ideological nirvana is in place – and then watch out!

Don’t, by the way, expect to be collecting a pension while you’re watching out, because one of the principal goals of the Fraser Institute’s research in to deprive working Canadians of fair defined-benefit pension plans and leave us all at the mercy of the “wealth management” industry, which is no doubt among the generous and anonymous corporate donors who support the group’s work, as it scoops away our savings a percent at a time into corporate profits.

So here’s question the media could have asked, and didn’t, about this latest Fraser Institute study: Does it compare apples and apples?

Research done by an economist employed by the Canadian Union of Public Employees – which like the Fraser Institute can be said to have a dog in this fight – found the difference between Canadian public and private sector workers in 2011 to be less than 1 per cent.

Obviously there’s a difference in methodology here. So, did anyone in the media think to compare the research methods used? (Rhetorical question: The answer is clearly, “Nope!”)

The problem with the Fraser’s conclusions is that they do in fact make the proverbial comparison between apples and oranges – and it’s worse that merely comparing, say, police officers’ public sector salaries to security guards’ private sector salaries. But now that we’ve mentioned it, who would you rather have coming to your house when you think you’ve heard a burglar? Obviously, such differences in training and responsibility are pretty significant – and a good thing it is, too!

In fact, however, the methodology of the Fraser “study” is inferior to this. It doesn’t appear to compare occupations at all! This may be a convenient way to reach conclusions that fit the Fraser Fact finders’ biases, but it hardly lends confidence to their conclusions, if only anyone had bothered to check.

Do you think there might be a difference in training and responsibility between a Registered Nurse (a job typically found in the public sector) and a retail clerk (typically found in the private sector)? And who would you rather have caring for you as you cling to life in hospital? Just asking.

Should RNs be in the private sector? Well, no. But that’s another question – not the one the Fraser Institute is pretending to answer with this bogus study.

CUPE’s research last year looked at 500 different detailed occupations and found, first, that there isn’t much of a difference between public and private sector pay when the same jobs are compared honestly, and, second, that what difference exists is explained by the fact there’s a much smaller wage gap for women in the public service than the private sector.

And this, it is said here, goes to the heart of the Fraser Institute’s true objectives in publishing and publicizing this malarkey – and also why they and their paymasters hate public service unions like CUPE so.

One thing the emphasis on fairness in public service has done is bring male and female wage rates much closer together.

Since the private sector employs large numbers of women, and since its objective is to pay everyone less, this presents a major problem for those who are determined to take advantage of the effects of large workplace pink-collar ghettos to lower everyone’s wages. To put this in its most basic way, treating women fairly costs corporations money, and they don’t like it one bit.

So the point of the statistics cooked by the Fraser Institute can be seen as an attack on the public sector’s habit of treating women more fairly than the private sector does.

Indeed, CUPE’s research indicates that when you compare just men, the private sector on average pays men 5.3 per cent more than the public sector. Almost certainly, the difference is quite a bit larger here in Alberta. Of course, that’s not the kind of number that helps the Fraser Institute’s case, so it doesn’t get mentioned in their “research.”

Women in the private sector, according to CUPE’s research, got paid an average 4.5 per cent less, which I guess from the Fraser Institute’s perspective is OK.

It’s not reasonable to expect the Fraser Institute to stop perpetrating these fantasies. It’s their job.

We should be able to expect the media – understaffed as it is nowadays – to do its job and stop acting as if this nonsense was carved on stone tablets and brought down from Mount Sinai.

At they very least they could start referring to these Fraser Institute “studies” as what they really are – to wit: “press releases.”

As for the Fraser Institute, I’m sure they’d prefer it if you didn’t read Mr. Huff’s book.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Redford Tories’ conundrum: Progressive reason versus Conservative passion

by David Climenhaga on January 17, 2013 in Alberta Politics with 2 Comments

They kissed us once. Will they kiss us again? Alas, in Alberta right now, there’s no way to be cert- cert- certain. Alison Redford chats with a typical Alberta voter last spring – although, Alberta politicians and their supporters may not turn out to be exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Ms. Redford, Finance Minister Doug Horner.

Here in 14 words is the conundrum that faces the Progressive Conservative government of Alberta Premier Alison Redford: you can be progressive, or you can be conservative, but you can’t be both.

So which is it?

The problem that confronts Ms. Redford’s PCs is that they aren’t really sure themselves.

Progressive? Or Conservative? Great taste? Or less filling? Breath mint? Or candy mint?

This, it is said here, is the source of the real pain that shows through the Redford Government’s commentary about how we all need to reduce our expectations for the provincial budget scheduled for introduction on Thursday, March 7.

Yeah, I know, Alberta Tories have a long history of saying things are going to be terrible come budget time, then laughing at us behind their hands when we all heave a huge sigh of relief after things turn out not to be as quite as bad as forecast.

That’s a perfectly plausible explanation for much of the gloom and doom about declining petroleum revenues that is emanating from Ms. Redford’s inner circle nowadays.

It’s also true that Ms. Redford probably promised more than she could sensibly deliver in the desperate final days of the 2012 election campaign, when it looked very much as if the ultra-conservative Wildrose Party might actually win a majority. That was when she told Albertans that thanks to a heaping dosage of political Retsyn ™ her party could be a breath mint and a candy mint!

But neither of those cynical explanations account for the level of genuine angst apparent in the Red Tory Budget Blues that are playing continually in Alberta these days.

After her first 2013 meeting with her PC caucus, Ms. Redford warned that falling petroleum prices – which with metronomic regularity catch Alberta PC governments by complete surprise – mean tough choices, deep cuts, reduced expectations, haircuts all ’round, programs under the microscope, tighter belts, (insert spending-cut metaphor of choice here), yadda yadda.

Finance Minister Doug Horner has also joined this chorus of Gloomy Thursday, a tune so melancholy many listeners that hear it are immediately tempted to jump off a fiscal cliff!

But their real problem is that old habits die hard. The Alberta PCs have been a party of deep fiscal conservatism and knee-jerk austerity for so long that the instinct to cut in a crisis is bred in the bone.

Like a Civil War surgeon presented with a health care problem, the only thing they can think of is a hacksaw and a broom handle for the patient to bite down on while they cut. So they can’t help telling us that if you think that image is painful, just wait for the Budget Speech on March 7 – and they mean it!

After all, that strategy has worked for years for the Alberta Tories, at least once the quasi-NDP government of their founder, Peter Lougheed, came to an end in the mid-80s just as the neoconservative verities of Ronald Reagan, the Fraser Institute and General Augusto Pinochet began to really take root around the globe.

Many believers in that worldview remain influential in Tory ranks.

The trouble is, in the Alberta of the early 21st Century, that territory has been ceded to the Wildrose Party led by former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith and abetted by the unprogressive federal Conservatives of Prime Minister Stephen Harper who campaigned tirelessly for the Wildrosers last spring.

And those voters, it now seems clear, are not coming back. To them, Ms. Redford is beyond the political pale, and nothing she says or does will assuage their bitterness at her defeat of former finance minister Ted Morton, the worst premier Alberta never had, and her rejection, however temporary, of their Paleolithic values.

Faced with the grim prospect of defeat at the hands of these unreconstituted market fundamentalists and social conservatives, Ms. Redford’s strategists did a clever and rather courageous thing – on very short notice they cobbled together a new coalition with small-l liberal supporters of the Alberta New Democrats, Liberals and Alberta Party who preferred a soft Tory government to a hard-edged Wildrose premier. If that meant fewer seats for the parties they traditionally supported, well, the Devil take the hindmost!

The Redford Tories built this instant coalition by promising things that were traditionally anathema to many of their party’s core supporters: public services, investment in health care and education, commitment to inclusive values.

Now, facing a temporary decline in resource revenues, their deepest instinct is to backslide – just when what the situation calls for is a modest tax increase, a recommitment to small-l liberal values, a willingness to live with deficits a little longer and the courage to stay the course on health, education and social spending.

If they respond to their the primitive instincts of their political lizard brain, they will likely lose the new and still fragile coalition that saved their bacon in 2012, but they won’t win back the right-wing rump they have already lost to the Wildrose Party.

So reason tells them to stay the course. But passion tells them to abandon it. The resulting pain they feel is real.

To paraphrase the breath mint ad of yore: They kissed us once. Will they kiss us again? Alas, in Alberta right now, there’s no way to be certain until March 7.

Right now, they don’t even know themselves!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Misleading with statistics: the Fraser Institute on health care and ‘value for money’

by David Climenhaga on January 16, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Fraser Institute, Health Care, Health Insurance with 7 Comments

This just in! The latest mainstream media news straight from the Vancouver studios of the Fraser Institute, complete with no fact checking!

No sooner noted than illuminated – yesterday morning mainstream media was credulously reporting another “Fraser Factoid,” this one a report by the far-right political lobby group purporting to show Albertans get poor value for the money they spend on public health care.

Actually, since in this case the market-fundamentalist “think tank” had little choice but to rely on publicly available and legitimate research to tease out its predictable conclusions, the news couldn’t be made to seem as bad as the report’s author doubtless would have preferred.

Indeed, from the perspective of those of us who live here in Alberta where the Progressive Conservative government of Premier Alison Redford has committed itself to keeping our system of primary health care in the public sector, the news hidden in the real numbers was actually pretty good.

So the Fraser Institute’s propagandists had to grudgingly admit that, even according to their biased interpretation of facts from a single year, 2010, Alberta has “the highest quality of clinical performance” – that is, the best “mortality rates, hospital re-admission rates, and patient safety.”

What’s more, according to the Fraserites (and notwithstanding the constant brouhaha in the media often stirred up by the same people), Alberta is not doing badly for wait times either, and ranks No. 3 for the number of procedures performed per capita.

In other words, despite their stream of negativity and propaganda, Alberta’s public health system is delivering the goods and serving most citizens pretty well. Right?

Of course, that’s not where the Fraser Institute wants us to go. So if they can’t persuade us that a publicly financed and publicly operated primary health care system is getting lousy results, because the indisputable facts say otherwise, they’ll try to get us to think instead that we’re not getting value for our money.

This is a point you may wish to dispute if you’ve actually had to use the Alberta health care system lately – as my family has – but it’s the Fraser Institute’s story, and in the absence of more helpful facts, they’re stickin’ to it.

To this end, the lobbyists employed as researchers by the Fraser Institute have concocted an arbitrary index, the Provincial Healthcare Index 2013, that purports to compare a highly subjective collection of equally weighted performance indicators with clinical data harvested from such sources as the respected Canadian Institute for Health Information.

The reliable stooges of the mainstream media were quick, naturally, to emphasize this negative point yesterday, racking up another score for the foreign and domestic billionaires who bankrolled the Vancouver-based propaganda mill to the tune of $9.9 million in 2011.

For example, the stenographer from the Edmonton Journal, my hometown daily website, dutifully noted in the lead sentence of his story that this means we Albertans get “less value for money compared with most other provinces.” Needless to say, there was not a word of reaction from the government or any other stakeholder in the health care system.

So, based on the 2010 numbers he crunched, the Fraser Institute researcher reported that Alberta spent the most per capita among Canadian provinces on its health care system with the sole exception of Newfoundland. Quebec spent the least, the report said.

Not every researcher agrees that this is the right way to look at the data, of course – although, from the Fraser Institute’s premeditated perspective, it’s the best way of coming to the conclusions they desire and to explain away Alberta’s otherwise strong performance.

In 2012, former Alberta Liberal Leader and University of Alberta professor Kevin Taft published a book called Follow the Money, Where is Alberta’s Wealth Going? In it, Dr. Taft concluded Alberta spends the least per capita of all Canadian provinces on health care when you adjust for the size of the provincial economy.

This has not changed. CIHI’s projected numbers for 2012 show Alberta will again have the lowest health care expenditure of any province as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, at 8.67 per cent. That compares to Quebec, the Fraser Institute’s supposed low-cost example, which is expected to spend the most per capita, 12.7 per cent!

By the way, health care spending in Alberta is not rising particularly quickly, according to Dr. Taft, who reported that over the long term – smoothed out with five-year averages to account for Alberta’s horrible record of wildly fluctuating health budgets – total spending rose about 1.2 per cent a year, in line with the rest of the country. “Since 1994, public spending on health care in Alberta has ranged from around 4 per cent to around 5 per cent of GDP. … This is far below the spending rate of other provinces, which consistently averages about 7 per cent,” Dr. Taft wrote.

Getting back to the Fraser Institute’s key claim – the conclusion to which their research is intended to lead us – the group’s news release about its report states that, “on a national basis, Canada’s health care system provides very poor value for money in comparison with universal-access health care systems in other developed nations.”

This is a highly dubious proposition, to say the least, but it is designed to set the stage for the Fraser Institute’s true full-time objective, the aim of 100 per cent of its constant political activities – influencing government policy in the direction of total privatization and, where that is not yet possible, partial privatization, of public services.

Accordingly, the Fraser Institute is a constant advocate of “choice” in health care, provided through private insurance for medical services that may not, they coyly suggest, meet everyone’s needs.

In addition to introducing the controls, co-payments, denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions and high costs of private insurance, as most Canadians still understand despite the tireless efforts of the Fraserites for the past 39 years, “choice” in heath care is not choice at all – it is more and better service for the wealthy and impoverishment, sickness and death for those of us who cannot pay.

Imagine the cost of insurance coverage – let alone the full cost of treatment, which can range from $20,000 to $180,000 in the United States – to pay for something as common and simple as an emergency appendectomy operation!

So if media coverage of the Fraser Institute’s latest “report” about the supposed poor value for money delivered by Alberta’s and Canada’s health care systems left you with the feeling another shoe was about to drop, this is it: In every case, we will all find out soon, those wonderful European universal-care systems the Fraser Institute touts as delivering better value (without a shred of evidence for this dubious claim in the report that makes it) include a substantial component of services that must be privately insured.

As the report’s author promises, “an assessment of the relationship between value for money and specific provincial health-care policies is left for future research.” Don’t expect to be surprised by what this research will conclude!

As noted in this space yesterday, in spite of claiming to be an educational and research group and despite enjoying charitable status granted by a strangely distracted Canada Revenue Agency, the Fraser Institute operates as a full-time political lobby that pushes for the adoption of market fundamentalist policies in open violation of the CRA’s rules for charities.

Yesterday’s Fraser Institute exercise – credulously swallowed hook, line and sinker by the mainstream media – is merely another example, and far from the most egregious one.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

In 2011, Fraser Institute continued to take Koch Brothers donations and file tax returns claiming no political activity

by David Climenhaga on January 15, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Fraser Institute, Taxes with 9 Comments

Michael Walker, right, President of the Fraser Institute Foundation and former director of the Fraser Institute, looks at a copy of the Edmonton Sun with a well-known columnist from that newspaper. The great public intellectuals of the Canadian right may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Consistent Fraser Institute donors Charles and David Koch.

In 2011, the market-fundamentalist Fraser Institute continued to accept substantial funding from the U.S.-based Koch Brothers, the far-right New York billionaires who have helped bankroll the extremist American Tea Party.

A U.S. tax filing for a foundation controlled by Charles Koch (pronounced “coke”) and his brother David show the organization, which specializes in funding extreme-right-wing advocacy groups, donated $150,000 to the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute in 2011.

The “charitable” Fraser Institute is a Vancouver-based “think tank” that produces a steady stream of shoddy and ideologically motivated “research” designed to advance market fundamentalist political goals.

These “Fraser Facts” – information that is not quite true, but “truthy” enough to persuade a casual reader the group’s market-fundamentalist nostrums might hold water – are frequently uncritically reported by Canadian mainstream media in its familiar role as willing stooges for Fraser propaganda.

A typical Fraser Fact was the report released by the group this month that found Hong Kong, controlled by the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China, to rate higher on its “Index of Human Freedom” than Canada.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, by the sound of it, agrees with this assessment – although even the dutifully right-wing National Post seemed to find this particular factoid a trifle farfetched.

The latest donation from the Charles Koch Foundation means the Fraser Institute is now known to have received well over half a million dollars from the extremist U.S. billionaires since 2007.

In addition to Koch family donations, and perhaps more seriously, in its 2011 Canadian tax filings, both the Fraser Institute and its foundation, both of which have been granted charitable status by the Canada Revenue Agency, continued to claim to have engaged in zero political activity throughout the year. (To read this claim, use the CRA’s search tool and look for “Fraser Institute.”)

The Fraser Institute has made the same claim in every Canadian tax filing since 2000, despite CRA rules that state unequivocally “a registered charity cannot be created for a political purpose and cannot be involved in partisan political activities.”

The CRA defines partisan political activities as anything that “involves direct or indirect support of, or opposition to, a political party or candidate for office,” actions it would be fair to say are undertaken continuously by the Fraser Institute.

In addition, the CRA defines political activities very broadly as anything that “explicitly communicates to the public that the law, policy, or decision of any level of government in Canada or a foreign country should be retained (if the retention of the law, policy or decision is being reconsidered by a government), opposed, or changed…” The CRA even defines as political activities as “attempts to sway public opinion on social issues.”

By this definition, as has been argued here before, essentially 100 per cent of the Fraser Institute’s activities meet the CRA’s test for political activity, well in excess of the 12 per cent limit imposed by Canadian tax legislation for such charities.

Perhaps, given the dubious quality and ideological purpose of its research, it should come as no surprise that the Fraser Institute reports year after year that it engages in no political activity when it manifestly does the opposite.

Nevertheless, it should deeply concern law-abiding and tax-paying Canadians regardless of their political views that the CRA turns a blind eye to these misleading claims by this group in official filings to the Government of Canada while launching spurious investigations of other charities because the Harper Government disagrees with their purposes.

Canadians should also note the foreign sources of Fraser Institute funding at a time that various far-right AstroTurf groups and politicians in Mr. Harper’s party assail the same environmental charities now under the CRA’s microscope for accepting donations from abroad.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Why wait? Read 2013’s shocking political headlines right now on Alberta Diary!

by David Climenhaga on January 1, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, International Affairs with 4 Comments

The Dagny Taggarts, a synchronized skating team from Ottawa get ready to do their popular routine, “Where Is John Galt?” Defence Minister Joan Crockatt is in the front row, second from right. Below: Senator Tom Flanagan; U of C economics student Kim Jong-un, in full Calgary drag; Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk, ecstatic for his boss; and Nobel Prize winner Raj Sherman with the author. Actual events may not turn out exactly as predicted.

Why wait for 2013’s headlines when you can read them here on Alberta Dairy right now? In a spirit of transparency bordering on clairvoyance, Alberta Diary consulted the Red Top Institute of Political Commentary, headed by Perfesser Dave and made up of a cab driver from each of the communities in Alberta large enough to license insufficient numbers of taxis. Here are the Institute’s predictions of the major Alberta political news stories in each month of the coming year, made by an all-Albertan panel of the favoured sources of professional journalists throughout the world, which Perfesser Dave hopes will result is numerous grants from the bazillionaire American plutocrats who bankroll the Fraser Institute. Warning: Actual events may not turn out exactly as predicted, sort of like similarly scientific Fraser Institute studies in that regard.

January: Allaudin Merali returns to Alberta Health Services

Alberta Health Services CEO Dr. Chris Eagle announces that former Chief Financial Officer Alauddin Merali would be rejoining the province-wide health agency and resuming his duties as CFO. “When we looked at how much Mr. Merali’s lawsuit was going to cost us, seeing as we fired him in a big fat hurry after Fred Horne called us, and we don’t have a legal leg to stand on anyway, we thought we’d just say ‘to heck with it’ and ask him back,” Dr. Eagle said. “We would never have done this if the price of oil wasn’t collapsing,” he added, “but Doug Horner told us we had to.” Dr. Eagle added, “we’re putting him in the basement next to Lynn Redford’s office.” Premier Alison Redford was not available for comment, either about Mr. Merali or her sister, who also works is a senior executive position for AHS.

February: Finance Minister Doug Horner launches leadership bid as oil heads lower

With oil prices heading south of $50 per barrel, Legislative insiders say Finance Minister Doug Horner has established a committee to explore the possibility of another bid for the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party in the event Alberta Premier Alison Redford decides to step aside. He’s reported to have observed that his family has been in politics in Alberta longer than almost anyone else, and they might as well stick around and be the last ones in charge before the place shuts down. Petroleum markets have been hit by a glut of oil and gas supplies in the United States and a worldwide economic slowdown that has significantly reduced demand and prices. Ms. Redford was not available for comment, although her spokesperson, Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk, said he would be sending out a Tweet later urging Albertans not to move just yet to Saskatchewan and B.C., which he referred to as “mudslide country.”

March: Trio of Liberal MLAs cross floor to join NDP Legislative caucus

Alberta Liberal (Liberalberta) MLAs Laurie Blakeman, David Swann and Kent Hehr all cross the floor to join the Alberta New Democrats, increasing the NDP caucus to seven and making the New Democrats the third party by size in the Legislature. All three are thought likely to contest the NDP leadership, along with NDP MLAs David Eggen and Deron Bilous, when New Democrat Leader Brian Mason retires next year and moves to the United States to take up an important position with the New York City Transit Authority. “I’m finally going to get to run the train,” Mr. Mason said proudly. The remaining NDP MLA, Rachel Notley, continues to refuse to consider a leadership bid.

April: Defence Minister Joan Crockatt censured for misspelled Tweets

Conservative Party strategists ask Canadian Defence Minister Joan Crockatt to give up her Twitter account after a series of embarrassing late-night Tweets in which she spells Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair’s name five different ways and accuses him of willfully transmitting Dutch Disease to Canadians who weren’t told he had the condition. To pass the time previously spent Tweeting, Ms. Crockatt said she had joined the Dagny Taggarts, a synchronized skating team that acts out the stories of author Ayn Rand on the ice. She said she is also considering marketing a line of high-fashion clothing based on old Shriners’ uniforms. Conservative Party insiders said Prime Minister Harper considers Ms. Crockatt’s punishment the end of the matter, although he would think about demoting her to Minister of Winter Sports Clothing and making her move to Helena Guergis’s old office if there are any more Tweeting incidents.

May: Tom Flanagan appointed to Canadian Senate

Prime Minister Harper announces that his former aide and Calgary School professor Tom Flanagan has been appointed to the Canadian Senate. “As an American, Dr. Flanagan knows exactly what I have in mind for the Canadian Senate, which would be the American Senate,” the Prime Minister said. A special provision will suspend the normal requirement that Canadian senators not serve past the age of 75, the prime minister said. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be get to move back to Ottawa, where I was born and grew up,” said Dr. Flanagan, at a press conference on Parliament Hill, a remark that confused several members the Ottawa press gallery. “It sure has changed, though, since I was a lad there,” observed Dr. Flanagan, who is 106. “They even seem to have rerouted the Illinois River to the north side of town!” The PM and the professor have patched up their differences over Dr. Flanagan’s book on how he made Mr. Harper the prime minister and won the federal government for the Conservatives. “I explained to Stephen that it was just a misunderstanding,” Dr. Flanagan said. “The publisher forgot to say it was supposed to be a work of fiction.”

June: Jason Kenney weds Hungarian in secret ceremony

The marriage of Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to a woman he met at a street market in Hungary last summer stuns and shocks his friends and political associates. Little is known of the identity of the bride or the details of the ceremony, although one Ottawa insider is said to have cell-phone video of fellow Calgary MP Ron Anders sobbing throughout the service, which appears to have taken place outdoors at a campground. Sun News Network political commentator Ezra Levant turned down a request to serve as best man and refused to attend the rites. There is apparently some disagreement between Mr. Levant and Mr. Kenney about whether the European country is a safe destination for on-air political commentators. Alberta’s Mr. Lukaszuk, who serves as Premier Redford’s representative in matters involving European protocol, said he would not be sending a gift to Mr. Kenney and his bride.

July: Pope visits Fort McMurray, blesses Alberta oil sands

Accompanied by Prime Minster Stephen Harper, Pope Benedict XVI, flies into Fort McMurray, where the leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics worldwide blesses the Alberta oil sands, conducts services for a huge throng of worried Newfoundlanders and prays for an increase in petroleum prices. The Papal aircraft is accompanied by a flight of J-20 stealth fighters from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, which the RCAF-FARC is said to be considering purchasing for the bargain-basement price of $35 billion. The Prime Minister is also said to have been persuaded by former British PM Tony Blair to become a Roman Catholic, since that would make it easier for him to get a great diplomatic gig after he retires from politics and because it’s been sort of a tradition with Canadian prime ministers, the better ones from Quebec, anyway.

August: Danielle Smith quits; Ted Morton to lead Wildrose Party

Saying that explaining the basic concepts of market doctrine MLAs from southeastern Alberta “is just too much work,” Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith announces she is leaving politics to move to Vancouver and join the Frasertarians, a New Age religion that worships Ayn Rand as the “Ascended Master and Mistress” and the late economist Milton Freedman as the “Missing Messiah.” After an emergency meeting of the party leadership at a retreat in the Rocky Mountain town of Cochrane, a press release is posted on the Wildrose website saying former Conservative finance minister Ted Morton has been asked to lead the party. Wildrose House Leader Rob Anderson is reported to be in the southern Alberta community of Cardston conferring with someone named Craig Chandler about plans to establish a new party, which will be even farther to the right than the Wildrose Party. Mr. Chandler will draft the Wild Rosehip Tea Party’s constitution, an area where he is said to have experience if not expertise.

September: On ‘sabbatical,’ Kim, Jong-un commences studies at U of C

Saying he on “on sabbatical” from his duties as leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-un commences studies in political science and economics at the University of Calgary. “I was very disappointed when I got here to learn that Professor Flanagan would no longer be teaching classes because of his duties in Ottawa,” said Mr. Kim. “My late father and I have both admired the professor and studied his advice for many years and I felt there were still some things I could learn from him.” However, Mr. Kim said, “I am looking forward to meeting and taking classes with other signatories of the Firewall Manifesto. As you know, it has been necessary from time to time to remind the American and Japanese imperialists of the DPRK’s own Firewall Doctrine, under which a Wall of Fire can be called down upon them at any time if they do not respect the territorial integrity of the DPRK. We were always encouraged by the existence of people who thought like us in the Canadian West.” Mr. Kim said he also hopes to make a “Gangnam Style” video with Justin Trudeau before returning to the Korean Peninsula in 2015. “Justin has enough star power to put a small satellite into orbit, although only for peaceful purposes!”

October: Raj Sherman quits, Darshan Kang to take over as Liberalberta leader

Liberalberta Leader Raj Sherman takes Albertans by surprise when he announces he will soon be stepping down as leader of the Liberalberta Party. “I’ve already achieved what I came here to do,” Dr. Sherman told an extremely small group of supporters. “You’ll know what I’m talking about very soon,” Dr. Sherman added mysteriously. Darshan Kang, the only remaining member of the Liberalberta Caucus, will become interim leader until a joint leadership convention is held with the Alberta Party in the spring of 2014. The Liberlbertans will publish advertisements in all Alberta community newspapers asking any Alberta Party members to come forward and identify themselves.

November: President Obama says cold fusion is product of ‘new Manhattan Project’

U.S. President Barack Obama announces in Washington that the work of a top-secret “new Manhattan Project” has resulted in the creation of a cold fusion reactor that will solve the world’s energy problems forever and end the threat of global warming using only water and peanut butter. Oil prices plunge to below $5 a barrel for sweet Saudi Arabian crude. Former PC leadership candidate Gary Mar is reported to have returned from Hong Kong to Calgary, where he is raising funds for another run at the Progressive Conservative Party leadership, should Premier Alison Redford decide to step down. “We all know that Alberta has a great future as a top producer of world-class beef and barley, and as the No. 1 holiday destination for Americans thanks to the steep decline in the value of the Loonie,” Mr. Mar said. Ms. Redford, who was reported to have been admitted for a period of rest at the Ralph Klein General Hospital on Third Way Trail in south Calgary, was not available for comment.

December: Raj Sherman awarded Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Economics

The Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm, Sweden, announces that former Albertalberal Leader Raj Sherman had been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine. The Emergency Room physician and former politician will receive the prize for having come up with all the answers to the problems faced by Alberta Health Services in just 18 months, then offering them to Mankind, the committee said. He will be honoured at a dinner of fermented herring and köttbullar (Swedish meatballs) in Stockholm later this month. The committee also awarded Dr. Sherman the Nobel Prize for Economics, for the same reasons. Dr. Sherman is the first winner of two Nobel Prizes in a single year. Dr. Sherman will take up a teaching post at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, where he said he has really good contacts. “See,” he told reporters who met him at Arlanda Airport near the Swedish capital, “I really was the smartest man in Alberta!”

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Stephen Harper model for Wildrose power: promise free votes and deliver the Borg Hive

by David Climenhaga on December 19, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, Wildrose Party with 6 Comments

Singing along: What we were promised by the Reform-Conservative platform. Below: What we got.

Alberta’s Wildrose Party blossomed at the edges of the same muddy spring whence sprang the federal Reform Party of Preston Manning and Stephen Harper.

As is well known, the Reform Party went on to engineer the hostile takeover in 2003 of the old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, after renaming but not successfully re-branding itself as the Canadian Alliance.

By this mechanism the Reform Party evolved over a short time from a populist Prairie uprising into the most autocratic and secretive government in Canadian history, including wartime governments, under Mr. Harper’s mailed fist.

As we watch the iron discipline exerted on Mr. Harper’s obedient Conservative caucus this month in Ottawa – passing massive “omnibus” budget bills and even whipping through unconstitutional and amateurish anti-union private member’s bill with barely a whimper of protest – it behooves us here in Alberta to cast our minds back to the promises the Reform Party made at its beginning.

Because, as we are now invited to forget, the Reform Party’s platform in 1997 promised us high on its list of reforms that there would be more free votes in Parliament. This, said the party’s platform that year, would have the effect of “reducing the power of party discipline over individual MPs and senators while strengthening the powers available to citizens.”

This and many other pledges – fiscal responsibility, a more civil political discourse, the promise of a competent and businesslike government – all turned out to be fantasy or outright lies.

It is said here the free-votes promise – which was not just broken, but turned on its head – is a particularly useful litmus test for the likely future performance of a Wildrose Government, infested as that party is with the same cynical Reform Party operatives that plotted the coup that seized the national PC Party in 2003 and has held it ever since.

The Wildrose Party made the same promise, in almost exactly the same words, in the run-up to the 2012 Alberta election – and is about as likely to keep it.

According to a Globe and Mail story published on April 9, two weeks before the election that saw PC Premier Alison Redford receive the mandate she had sought, the Wildrose Party was promising a government it led would permit free votes on any bill.

The Legislature, Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith said in a news release, would become “a place where Albertans’ voices are heard.”

This is not likely, given the way our Parliamentary system must operate – unless the Wildrose Party proposes to ignore the Canadian constitution. But it may well prove to be an effective if meaningless promise to cynically manipulate Albertans who willfully refuse to understand the operations of our system of government – of whom there are many.

As the Reform Party’s Task Force on Democratic Populism promised back in 1996, “when a Reform MP speaks and votes in the Parliament of Canada, he or she represents: (1) the principles, policies and platform of the Reform Party of Canada on which the MP was elected; (2) the views and interests of constituents, in particular the consensus of a majority of constituents, if such a consensus can be determined; and (3) the application of the Member’s own knowledge, judgment and conscience to the issues at hand. For Reform MPs, where (1), (2), and (3) are in conflict, it is (2) – the consensus of the will of the majority of constituents – which takes precedence.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, we know how that one worked out!

So let me make a not-so-bold prediction, things will turn out precisely the same way if Ms. Smith becomes the premier of Alberta.

A Wildrose provincial government would be as autocratic, dictatorial and tightly regimented as Mr. Harper’s so-called Conservative government has turned out to be.

We have already had a hint of this in the promise by former Harper confidante and strategist turned Wildrose campaign manager Tom Flanagan to tightly control the messages emanating from Wildrose candidates in the lead-up to the next Alberta provincial election in 2016, or whenever it takes place.

Said Dr. Flanagan last month at the Wildrose annual general meeting in Edmonton: “The lesson for the future – message discipline. You’ve got to stick with the script.” Count on it, given Wildrose’s experience in 2012 with bozo eruptions by candidates, that this will be ruthlessly enforced.

Of course, in the Reform/Conservative/Wildrose mindset, there really is no contradiction between tough party discipline and “free votes.” As Ted White, the former Western separatist and chair of the Reform Party’s 1996 task force explained to a questioner who wondered why the party would bother developing policies if they were to be guided entirely by the opinions of constituents, there was nothing to worry about: “The people’s views on all contentious issues would coincide with those of the party rank and file.”

If this sounds suspiciously like the principles of author George Orwell’s Ingsoc understood through the application of Doublethink, there is probably a sound reason for that. Or maybe the Borg Hive would be the more appropriate metaphor for the 21st Century.

Regardless, if the Wildrose comes to power in Alberta, as is already the case in Parliament, reality will be what the Party says it is.

Continuing on the same theme, Mr. White is now a Fraser Institute functionary.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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