All posts tagged Ken Chapman

Tweet! Tweet! Character counts in Alberta Party leadership race, and maybe not just the way you’re thinking…

by David Climenhaga on February 10, 2011 in Uncategorized with No comments
Tweet! Tweet! Little birdies are telling us things. Is Alberta ready for their message? Below: Glenn Taylor, Dave Taylor, Ken Chapman, Robin Campbell.

OK, people, if Tweets can win an election, maybe Glenn Taylor will be the next premier of Alberta.

“Glen Who,” you wonder?

@TWEET: “You know, Glenn Taylor, the Mayor of Hinton… He’s running for the leadership of the new Alberta Party!” (85 characters)

“Oh, I thought he would. He’s already their only MLA…”

@TWEET: “No! Wait! Not that Taylor. That’s Dave Taylor, old style politician the Alberta Party had to hook up with to start getting counted in the polls. This is different.” (135 characters)

“Uh… OK?”

@TWEET: “This is Glenn Taylor, mayor of the mining and mill town by the Jasper Park gate, a new style politician committed to doing things a new way for a new day!” (123 characters)

(Faintly.) “Oh. OK. That Taylor…”

@TWEET: “You bet! You’re going to be reading a lot about him, mostly in 140 characters or less!” (70 characters)

That’s enough twittery levity. Let’s get down to business. The important thing from the media’s perspective – and fair enough – is that Mr. Taylor, the one who’s the mayor of Hinton, that is, as of Tuesday is the first official candidate for the leadership of the new Alberta Party. That rates a good news hit.

The Alberta Party, as alert readers will recall, is the new political movement, or something, that insists it will practice politics in a new way, is determinedly attempting to occupy the space the 48-year-old Mr. Taylor defines as “the vast territory between extreme left and extreme right” and which has made quite a splash among Alberta’s chattering classes.

The problem, Alberta Party doubters are bound to point out, is that while the province’s political cognoscenti may be chattering about the new party that’s not interested in “the politics of yesterday,” nobody else is. Indeed, as the most recent poll of Albertans’ voting intentions shows, the party hasn’t even registered as a blip on the provincial radar.

Well, never mind that, says blogger Ken Chapman, the party’s most avid supporter, and now Mr. Taylor’s too, by the sound of it.

Mr. Chapman is a principal author of the party’s Tweet-your-way-to-power strategy and surely the most enthusiastic participant in social media among Canadians over 55, present company included! As he said of the poll in question in a comment on this blog earlier this week, “it is pretty useless now given it was done before Dave Taylor joined the Alberta Party, Ed Stelmach announced he was quitting as Premier and David Swann took a dive too.”

Well, maybe. But that’s among the key questions in this whole affair. Can an essentially unknown party become a contender for power virtually overnight led by a basically unknown candidate (say, a mayor from Hinton)? Even if everything has changed, which ain’t necessarily so? If it can, can it do it on the basis of Tweets and other social media, rather than hard work in the traditional political trenches?

Alberta Party supporters are sure to point to the successful campaign by Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, in which a relatively unknown candidate came to prominence almost overnight, and which used social media creatively.

We’ll see, one supposes. But a mayoral campaign in one municipality, even a big one, is a different creature than a political campaign throughout a province in which large numbers of voters are tied in and loyal to particular political parties. What’s more, Mr. Nenshi was a remarkable campaigner, and there was more to his adequately financed campaign than just Tweets. It is true, however, that he drew some talent from Alberta Party ranks and will no doubt return the favour.

But the jury remains out on all these questions, as it is on the question of what the Alberta Party really stands for. You can only get so far on saying you’re neither left nor right before voters start asking probing questions about what the heck that means when it comes to specific policies.

And will the Alberta Party’s new-fangled, social-media-reactive supporters have the patience to stick around and plug on if their first provincial campaign fails to produce results?

Finally, there is the matter of Mr. Taylor – both Messrs Taylor, actually – who sounds suspiciously like an old style politician who does politics in the old style way.

He’s a small-town mayor, after all. He’s a former New Democratic Party candidate and trade union official. None of these are bad things, obviously – but not one of them is conducive the idea of doing politics in startling new ways that resist ever being pinned down to specific policies or positions. Savvy old-style voters wouldn’t stand for it.

Indeed, there are those who say Mr. Taylor has modelled his career on the old-style success story of Robin Campbell, the former United Mine Workers local president turned Conservative MLA and party whip who is now MLA for West Yellowhead, the provincial riding that includes Hinton.

It’s fair to assume Mr. Taylor is moving on to new approaches because he feels the old approaches didn’t work. But it will be interesting to see how the Alberta Party’s supporters take to Mr. Taylor’s blue-collar mill-and-mining town background, which is sure to assert itself at some point.

In the mean time, however, Mr. Taylor’s boosters are certain to do their best to elevate him to the Tweetheart of the social media set.

So stand by for plenty of Tweets about this! (4,400 characters)

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

That five-year plan: Why Ed Stelmach and his Conservatives can’t fix Alberta’s health care mess

by David Climenhaga on December 1, 2010 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments
Alberta Health Services headquarters in … oh, I admit it, this is the Romanian Parliament, said to be the heaviest building in the world. Alas, Alberta institutions appear all too much like they are illustrated. Below, Messrs. Zwozdesky and Liepert.

A Velvet Fog rolled over Edmonton today, but it failed to obscure the health care shambles that dogs the Conservative government of Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach.

Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky – known as the Velvet Fog for his normally mellifluous ways – waved a “five-year health action plan” at a hastily arranged news conference in hopes of diverting attention from yesterday’s embarrassing leak of a political strategy to foist privatized health care on Alberta after the next election.

We’ll leave it to the mainstream press to provide the details of today’s meaningless document, which was rushed into print days ahead of schedule to cover up the government’s latest embarrassment.

The trouble with the Conservative plan rattled off by an uncharacteristically nervous Mr. Zwozdesky and a rattled looking Dr. Chris Eagle, the new CEO of Albert Health Services, is that it’s unlikely to mean much if the Conservatives manage to get re-elected.

“These five-year plans are good for about a year and a half, when the next election is,” said a blunt spoken NDP Leader Brian Mason after the lunch-hour newser. “Anything they promise today will be meaningless in the future. … You can’t trust them, and you particularly can’t trust them on health care.”

Liberal Leader Dr. David Swann, himself a physician, cut to the chase about the problems with health care delivery in Alberta: “This structure simply cannot work. … We need a new organizational structure.”

The structure Dr. Swann was talking about is barely two and half years old. But the fact is, Mr. Stelmach’s Conservatives contributed significantly to Alberta’s current health care crisis when they eliminated the province’s nine regional health authorities in May 2008.

From the moment they announced the disastrous decision to roll the regions plus the Alberta Cancer Board, the addictions commission and the mental health board into a single entity, the Alberta Tories touted the alleged cost savings of amalgamating health services in a huge centralized bureaucracy. They still do, although to date few savings have materialized.

While it is true some duplication was eliminated, for example among traditionally over-paid top executive positions, Albertans can see clearly now that that there are also huge dis-economies of scale in the central-planning approach to health care foisted on an unwilling Alberta by former health minister Ron Liepert.

As blogger Ken Chapman recently commented, “a lot of good work and service capacity was lost in the process, especially in the Capital Region.”

It is likely that Mr. Liepert cooked up this tragic plan – tragic because Albertans are literally dying needlessly while they wait in emergency wards because of it – for all the wrong reasons.

Of course, he’s never said why he really did it, but it is reasonable to conclude that the political need to be seen to be doing something, the desire to break the political power of the Calgary Health Region’s sometimes outspoken leadership and the urge to mess up health care delivery just enough to open the door to privatization all played a role in creating this disaster.

The acerbic and undiplomatic Mr. Liepert compounded the problem by hiring the similarly acerbic and undiplomatic Australian economist Stephen Duckett to head the giant new health care enterprise.

In all of this, Mr. Liepert had Mr. Stelmach’s complete support.

When Mr. Liepert became a lightning rod for Albertans’ anger at the growing crisis in health care, the premier replaced him with the more-sensible and diplomatic Mr. Zwozdesky. But, really, by then it was too late.

When Mr. Duckett embarrassed the government on Nov. 19 with his notorious Cookie Walk, he was fired at a cost to taxpayers of $680,000. But that decision came far too late to mean anything.

For all these reasons – history, hubris, ideology – Alberta’s Conservatives under Mr. Stelmach’s leadership simply cannot fix this crisis.

This would not be so bad if an opposition party were waiting in the wings with the convictions and vision to restore health regions with enough administrative tweaks to solve the overabundance of independence that Mr. Stelmach’s Conservatives were clumsily trying to address.

Instead, alas, the most likely successful challenger is the far-right-wing Wildrose Alliance, a party that proposes a solution sure to make the situation even worse – the chaotic reintroduction local hospital boards throughout Alberta.

Of course, under former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith, the Wildrose Alliance is a party deeply committed to “free-market solutions.” The Alliance leadership knows well that the introduction of hundreds of hospital boards will ease the transition to a much-higher degree of privatization in the system.

It also knows that unenforceable legislative limits on waiting times for Emergency Rooms – a dangerous policy foolishly backed by Legislative Opposition parties that should know better – will help achieve the same ends.

What Alberta really needs is a return to health regions, a structure that sensibly balances economies of scale with unique regional needs.

The Conservatives have made much of the fact medical services were not delivered in identical ways in all regions, as if this were some sort of disadvantage to the party’s rural heartland in particular. In fact, the population-based funding system in use for a time in Alberta made sense as a way to balance the different needs of different regions.

Think about the needs of the population in the old Northern Lights Region based in Fort McMurray, which is biased toward young people and young people’s health problems, and that of the former Palliser Health Region in Medicine Hat, weighted toward an older population and its needs.

Different blends of health services for different populations makes sense. It can deliver better service at a lower cost. It also responds more quickly to changing needs. This is why, of course, health regions remain the favoured way to deliver health services elsewhere in Canada.

A centralized province-wide health board, by contrast, simply can’t respond as effectively as a region could. Got an Emergency Room problem in Lethbridge or Red Deer? Well, they’re still working on a provincial admissions policy in Edmonton… And so we find ourselves in our present fix.

Even needed short-term solutions, such as opening more continuing care beds to ease the crunch in emergency departments, take longer when they must be solved by a bloated super board.

That’s a large part of why, in fact, rural Alberta liked regional health boards. As William Munsey of New Sarepta, an Alberta Party board member, recently pointed out on his blog, rural Albertans are not naïve about what they need from government or unprogressive in their core values.

Obviously, they realize the quality of their local health services will decline under the centralized model being provided by the Conservatives, and that it will all but disappear under the privatized approach favoured by the Wildrose Alliance.

The profound wish of Albertans in every part of the province is to see this crisis solved and our province return to the world-class medical services we had just a few years ago.

The promise that Mr. Zwozdesky trotted out today is for more of the same. If this keeps up, Mr. Stelmach’s Conservatives are going to find themselves on life support!

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Alberta Party Update: Piiinnng! We have contact with an object drifting toward the surface!

by David Climenhaga on November 9, 2010 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments
Searching for signs of the Alberta Party. Below: Party President Chima Nkemdirim; Party organizer Michael Walters.

For months now, the motto of the Alberta Party seems to have been “Run Silent, Run Deep.”

While party supporters were drinking coffee and Listening Big in kitchens across the province, it was pretty hard for an uninvolved observer like Yours Truly to figure out where the heck this was all supposed to lead, except possibly to more Capital Letters.

Somewhere, someday, we were told, it was going to result in a Big Policy that all Albertans could get behind, and when that day came, the Alberta Party would be ready to run a full slate of candidates in a general election.

Meanwhile, as the Alberta Party engaged in what it called “the Big Listen,” the rest of us pretty much heard nothing but the Big Echo. We knew the Alberta Party was out there somewhere, thrashing through the murk, but all we were getting back was the occasional sonar ping.

What’s more, while this was going on, a lot of Alberta Party movers and shakers were more involved in a couple of municipal elections that had interesting results – and potential impacts, good and bad, on the new political phenomenon.

But now the Alberta Party is about to surface, with a policy conference in Red Deer on the weekend, and we have all had a chance to take a peek at the policies it will be voting on, the products of all those endless cups of coffee.

Despite a lot of enthusiasm among certain Alberta-Party-connected Alberta bloggers, though, the question remains: Has anything changed?

Before we answer that, however, readers may require a short refresher on the Alberta Party phenomenon.

The Alberta Party got its start in the murky past as yet another right-wing prairie fringe party, but one whose founders had the foresight to register a terrific name. As a result, it seems to have been the target of two successful reverse takeovers – first by a group of conservatively inclined Alberta Greens, and then earlier this year by a group of ambitious Blue Liberals and Red Tories.

The party as currently constituted covets centrist voters of the type that typically drift left toward the Alberta Liberals and right toward the Alberta Progressive Conservatives. Since Albertans have never really cottoned on to the Liberals and these days are so sick of the Conservatives they’re thinking seriously about voting for the far-right Wildrose Alliance, the Alberta Party might seem like a natural home for a lot of them.

Moreover, the party’s approach to building a political movement – the seemingly endless kaffeeklatsches – was unorthodox enough that, while it has passed largely unnoticed among rank-and-file voters, it attracted lots of attention among the chattering classes. This includes two of Alberta’s best-known political bloggers – Dave Cournoyer and Ken Chapman – who are Alberta Party partisans. It also includes the Conservatives of Premier Ed Stelmach, who recently announced their own version of the Big Listen.

OK, enough backstory. Has anything really changed, other than encouraging coffee futures to perk up?

Well, some prominent Alberta Party supporters have enjoyed significant successes in the campaigns of Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel and, especially, in the unexpected come-from-behind victory of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi.

Among them, Calgary-based party President Chima Nkemdirim, a former Liberal associated with the Nenshi campaign, and Michael Walters, hired by the party as a full-time organizer in August, said to have helped the Mandel campaign. Speakers at the convention include Mr. Nkemdirim; Richard Einarson, also of the Nenshi campaign; Patricia Mitsuka of the Mandel campaign; Gayle Rondeel, a town councillor from Rimbey where the entire previous council was swept away in a wave of voter disgust; and Bill Given, the Mayor of Grande Prairie.

But whether this helps or hinders the Alberta Party is less clear. Some of these folks may land jobs with civic administrations, or transfer their enthusiasms to municipal politics. On the other hand, no doubt valuable lessons have been learned about organizing and campaigning.

The choice of convention speakers seems designed to give party supporters the impression their party is on the right track – without acknowledging that municipal and provincial politics in Alberta can be very different fields indeed.

Also new, the party has finally released its policy resolutions for debate. Alas, these resolutions – which surely will all be passed as written – don’t tell us much more about the Alberta Party than we knew back when it was still rigged for silent running. They are sweetly anodyne – which is to say, mostly soothingly meaningless.

I mean, really folks, “Be it resolved that Alberta should be the best place in the world to earn a living – no matter who you are, what you do or where you’re from.” Yeah, sure. I guess we can all go for that….

From the convention, presumably, the party’s supporters expect to move on to what they call the Big Momentum, “a multi-pronged strategy with email, website, social media, personal, and mail components, driven by the relationships and networks we’re developing through our conversations with Albertans.”

It’s easy to unkindly dismiss all this as merely a Big Deal. But before we do so, one supposes, we should wait to see what really happens at the party’s convention on the weekend.

Still, the agenda of this conference, and the wording of its resolutions, suggests an excess of caution and a focus on process, neither of which bodes well for a political movement that needs to capture the imaginations of those of us still numbered among the Great Unwashed.

While the jury remains out on whether the Alberta Party’s efforts will yield meaningful results, the evidence to date suggests nothing much has changed.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Civic election hangover: the future still looks bleak for a progressive Alberta

by David Climenhaga on October 22, 2010 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments
Edmonton’s City Centre Airport, visible in the photo’s upper left, and its surrounding neighbourhoods. Photo snatched from Daveberta.ca. Below: Calgary Mayor-elect Naheed Nenshi; Blogger Ken Chapman.

Popular wisdom in the first hours after the Edmonton civic election quickly sprouted around the idea the results were a big humiliation for the right-wing Wildrose Alliance Party.

The logic went like this: The Wildrose Alliance under Leader Danielle Smith stepped into the municipal fray to keep Edmonton’s City Centre Airport open. Edmontonians elected a progressive mayor and a council mostly committed to closing the airport and redeveloping the site. Ergo, the election was a big loss for the Wildrose Alliance.

“The results are a slap in the face, not just to the Envision Edmonton airport campaign, but also, more obliquely, to the Wildrose Alliance, which had tried to make the airport issue its entrée into Edmonton politics,” opined Edmonton Journal columnist Paula Simons the day after the election.

“The significant increase voter turnout in the big cities shows that people want change and it is not good enough to merely offer a choice between very right-wing Progressive Conservative Party agenda and extremely right wing Wildrose Alliance Party agenda,” wrote Ken Chapman in his excellent blog.

While there are some signs of hope to be found in the municipal election results in both Calgary and Edmonton, alas, both these fine commentators are likely greatly overstating the case for optimism.

Simons’s analysis in particular hangs on the notion the Wildrose Alliance’s principal objective in Edmonton really was to save the City Centre Airport and see pro-airfield candidates become the victors on Monday.

Not that the Wildrose Alliance would have minded such an outcome, of course, but to frame the election result that way is to misunderstand the party’s true strategy. Actually saving the airport was never the principal Wildrose objective or even a vague goal.

On the contrary, the Wildrose Alliance’s main aim remains simply to boost its support in the Capital Region by 3 per cent or a little more, which is what it needs to achieve its secondary objective of getting New Democrats or Alberta Liberals to win in a part of the province where the Alliance itself is unlikely to gain many seats in a provincial general election.

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, the more non-Conservative MLAs elected in the Capital Region – even if they are New Democrats, members a party diametrically opposed to the ideology of the Alliance – the better the Wildrose Alliance’s overall position in Alberta.

The more New Democrats and Alberta Liberals that are elected in the Edmonton area, the more likely it is the Conservative government of Premier Ed Stelmach will sink into a minority. With the Wildrose Alliance much stronger in southern Alberta, this outcome increases the chance the Alliance can become the Official Opposition. Indeed, although this is unlikely for the moment, if the Alliance picked up sufficient rural support, it could even become the government.

Since the Conservatives and Wildrose Alliance are essentially in accord on ideology, moreover, such an outcome increases the chance a shaken minority Conservative Party would drop Mr. Stelmach and elect a new leader even farther to the right, say, Finance Minister Ted Morton. In such circumstances, the Conservatives at the very least would ape far-right Wildrose policy nostrums, including more privatization and vicious legislative attacks on the rights of working people, which are the ultimate goals of the people financing both parties.

So if Edmonton Journal columnist David Staples is right, as the Wildrose Alliance surely hopes, and the civic election result means “bitterness over issue will continue to fracture Edmonton,” that is precisely the best outcome Ms. Smith could reasonably hope for.

Indeed, Wildrose Alliance strategists are far more likely to be concerned by the civic election outcome in Calgary, which shows a genuine appetite among voters there for new faces and progressive policies. However, Calgary’s long history of electing popular liberal mayors while overwhelmingly supporting far-right provincial and federal politicians suggests we should be cautious about reading too much into the election of Naheed Nenshi as mayor of Cowtown.

Meanwhile, with few new faces or ideas among the Liberals and New Democrats, both those parties remain mired at their historic minimum support levels and focused on their traditional election strategies. The upstart Alberta Party may be doing something, but it remains very unclear what that might be or if the party can do anything useful in time for a provincial election. More likely it will achieve nothing more than to further fracture an already fractured progressive vote.

The mainstream media and the Alberta chattering classes for obvious reasons will continue to frame the issue as a contest between the Conservatives on the far right and the Wildrose Alliance on the even-farther right. To paraphrase Mr. Chapman, “the single-minded media focus” is certain to remain “on the culture wars between the right wing parties for political power.”

Add to all this the danger many progressive voters will be tempted to cast ballots for the Wildrose Alliance out of mischief and fatigue with generations of Conservative mismanagement, and the political landscape in Alberta remains bleak for those of us who hope for genuinely progressive change at the provincial level in Alberta.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.