All posts tagged Ken Kowalski

Choosing a Speaker for Alberta: Your chance to vote … sort of

by David Climenhaga on May 1, 2012 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Your blogger with yet another of the candidates to be called Mr. Speaker, the dulcetly mellifluous Gene Zwozdesky, looking none too thrilled about this photo opportunity in Speakerly garb.

I have been surprised by the amount of interested generated by my post suggesting there is a three-way or possibly four-way race for the job of Speaker of the Alberta Legislature, now that Ken Kowalski has retired.

Readers will recall that the four named here are:

  • Laurie Blakeman, Liberal MLA for Edmonton-Centre
  • Robin Campbell, Progressive Conservative MLA for West Yellowhead
  • Wayne Cao, PC MLA for Calgary-Fort
  • Gene Zwozdesky, PC MLA for Edmonton-Mill Creek

It occurs to me that Albertans ought to have a chance to express their views in this important matter. Thus I refer you to the short poll at the right above, which asks you to vote on which of the suggested candidates you think should be named the speaker.

This kind of poll is by definition unscientific. But how is that any different that what we have been subjected to for the past two years, one wonders?

I have set the poll to run for one week. Vote early and vote often!

Click here for more details on the quartet of MLAs.

Calculating the odds in the race for Alberta’s Legislative Speaker

by David Climenhaga on April 27, 2012 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
Your blogger with Robin Campbell, Ken Kowalski’s possible replacement as Speaker of the Alberta Legislature. Below: Laurie Blakeman, Gene Zwozdesky, and Wayne Cao with you-know-who.

JASPER, Alberta

Just when you thought it was safe to go out of the house again, there’s another election!

But you don’t get to vote in this one, even though it’s pretty important to Alberta just the same.

Next on the agenda for the Alberta Legislature: the 87 newly elected MLAs need to elect a Speaker to preside over their … er … deliberations.

Sounds routine, but in a funny inside-baseball way, the Speaker’s job is almost as important as the premier’s. The Speaker, after all, is the person who gets to set the tone of debate in the Legislature and can go a long way to make it civilized, or hyper-partisan.

The last Speaker, Ken Kowalski, one of the Tory old guard not-so-subtly given a shove in the general direction of the door in Premier Alison Redford’s pre-election House cleaning, was a Speaker of the partisan school – although I am sure he would dispute that assessment.

As befit a guy who was first elected to the Legislature in 1979, he was a consummate insider, someone who still knows where all the bodies are buried. He’ll also take home a “transition allowance” of $1.2 million, which will give the Wildrose Party something to talk about in its first week on the job in its unanticipated role as Opposition.

Yesterday, Mr. Kowalski could be heard musing on the radio about how the Legislature was certain to go to hell in a handbasket without him and some of the other Tory old-timers there to guide things in the right direction. All I can say about that, Ken, is it’s exactly the way I feel about Canadian journalism. You’ll just have to get used to the notion nobody is listening.

There seem to be three – or maybe four – candidates for the job. They are, in alphabetical order:

  • Laurie Blakeman, Liberal MLA for Edmonton-Centre, who has been openly campaigning for the job for weeks if not months.
  • Robin Campbell, PC MLA for West Yellowhead, who like Ms. Blakeman has been openly asserting his interest for a spell now.
  • Wayne Cao, Progressive Conservative MLA for Calgary-Fort and one of the two best singers in the Legislature, who must be included in this list because he is now Deputy Speaker. He may or may not be interested in the job.
  • Gene Zwozdesky, PC MLA for Edmonton-Mill Creek and the Mel Torme of provincial politics, the Velvet Fog itself, who is tied with Mr. Cao as the Legislature’s best crooner.

Nothing is known here about Ms. Blakeman’s singing voice, but yesterday she sent around an email stating she wants to replace Mr. Kowalski. “An unusual choice but not unheard of to have a non-government member serve as Speaker,” she wrote. “In part I am doing this to see a return to the role of a non-partisan Speaker. A Speaker attending daily caucus meetings sends a mixed message. As well, it would help to have a Speaker who has served in Opposition and understands the challenges, especially with a combined opposition of 25.

“My eight years of experience as Official Opposition House Leader should serve me well, but mostly I just love parliamentary process,” she added.

Ms. Blakeman would be a great Speaker, I suspect, but her chances are probably not as good as they might have been if the seat count in the House had been closer after Tuesday. The odds are against her succeeding.

Still, the vote’s theoretically an open one and a candidate without the premier’s enthusiastic approval has won before. That victor was Mr. Kowalski himself, in 1997, who apparently did not have a fan in then-premier Ralph Klein but nonetheless defeated Mr. Klein’s choice for the job, Glen Clegg.

I heard Mr. Zwozdesky’s name come up for the first time in this connection yesterday morning on CBC radio, which in its wisdom hasn’t bothered to post an online link. He’s apparently campaigning for the job too. As a natural conciliator, someone who knows all the Parliamentary ropes – the former choir conductor was first elected as a Liberal in 1993 – Mr. Zwozdesky would also make a terrific Speaker.

By the way, Mr. Zwozdesky was also a professional Ukrainian dancer for a while, and you have to think that would help in a job like keeping order in the Legislature!

As for Mr. Cao (who has a much nicer voice than you’d think from this clip), he’s a bit of a dark horse in this race, but he is Deputy Speaker, so he has to be considered. His Wikipedia biography says he was born in North Vietnam but escaped on an American helicopter from the southern city of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. He came to Calgary in 1976 by way of California.

Like Mr. Zwozdesky, Mr. Cao is a conciliator and has a track record as the deputy in the Speaker’s chair. Like Ms. Blakeman, however, he’s probably a long shot if he’s even interested in the job.

Then there’s Mr. Campbell. The fact I’m writing this in his riding is purely coincidental. He’s a former official of the United Mine Workers Union and he was the PC caucus whip under former premier Ed Stelmach. His Wikipedia biography is startlingly uninformative.

Mr. Campbell is no dummy. But he’s not a warm and fuzzy kind of guy like Mr. Zwozdesky or Mr. Cao, and if you don’t count his once being a “union boss,” he doesn’t have oppositional experience like Ms. Blakeman. He strikes me as the kind of MLA who would continue Mr. Kowalski’s partisan approach to being Speaker.

So, this being Alberta, that likely means he has the inside track for the job.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Easter Weekend Campaign Update: Apparently 41 years in power makes you stupid!

by David Climenhaga on April 9, 2012 in Uncategorized with 8 Comments
Alberta’s listless governing Conservatives are getting creamed in the sign battle by the Wildrose Party, and even by the impoverished NDP. Above and below: NDP signs in Edmonton. Below: Yogi Berra, evidently as puzzled about this as the rest of us.

We know that being in power for more than four decades makes you lazy. Who knew 41 years in power would make you stupid too?

How else can we explain this strange, listless, disengaged Progressive Conservative campaign? How else to account for the foolish choices that preceded it?

The strategic brain trust now running Premier Alison Redford’s Conservative party lit a fire and stood back while the whole rickety Tory edifice began to burn to the ground.

Did anybody think to call the fire brigade? They couldn’t: Ms. Redford fired the political equivalent of the fire department last December when she stopped listening to the grizzled veterans in her ranks, then forced them out. These were politicians like Speaker Ken Kowalski who knew how to play politics with their elbows up and had proved it for 30 years.

At the time, when everyone (me included, mea culpa), still assumed the Conservatives were a shoo-in no matter whom they had chosen as their leader, sudden “generational change” must have seemed like a good idea. As history shows, it seldom is. Here in Alberta, it was utter folly for the Conservatives.

How else can you explain the fact the premier didn’t call the election when common sense says she would have won it handily – while she was riding the wave of her victory immediately after tabling her first budget?

This is conventional wisdom in politics, and for good reason, because it works. It is legitimate, too, because the premier who does it is not trying to govern without a mandate.

What were they thinking?

How else can we explain the fact the head of this pathetic campaign team actually thinks it helps the Tories’ cause to publicize the fact a fit young cabinet minister got in a scuffle with a constituent on the voter’s doorstep – and was given the bum’s rush by the cranky 67-year-old? Yeah, the old guy was a Wildrose supporter – so what? Who doesn’t sympathize with him?

As an aside, while campaigning unsuccessfully for city council, I too was ordered off a resident’s porch. The prudent response? Repeat after me: “OK! No problem, Sir! Have a nice day!” This seems to work well, disarms the grumpy homeowner and frees up the police for more important duties.

Speaking of Tweets, how do we explain the fact the Tory campaign team thought it was a good idea to send out Tweets mocking journalists and attacking potential allies in the period leading up to the election call?

How else can we explain the almost total absence of Conservative commercial advertising, positive or negative? There must be some, but I’ve missed it. A PC billboard? I can’t find it. The PCs are known to have millions of dollars in their campaign fund – what are they saving the money for? The post-election bun-fest?

On the topic of negative advertising, Prime Minister Stephen Harper gets it – and by the sound of it federal Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair gets it too, and thank goodness for that! If you can, you get in there and define your opponent first!

You think that’s bad? Well, sorry, but that’s the way it works. It may be unfortunate, but if you want to succeed in politics you’re going to have to use negative ads if you’re not starting from a position of overwhelming strength. If you’re too squeamish to do so, you’re never going to get to implement your program. So which is more important to you, feeling good about yourself or making where you live a better place?

It sounds very much to me as if Ms. Redford’s Tories believed their own rhetoric when they said they wanted a nice positive campaign instead of fighting this election like it was worth winning. So they sat around the campfire singing Kum-Buy-Ah while the skilful fear-mongers behind the Wildrose campaign defined them as enemies of freedom who were conniving to steal your property.

Either that or they simply assumed they were so far ahead it never occurred to them that they’d actually have to persuade Albertans to vote for them.

OK, forget commercial campaign advertising. What about old-fashioned election signs? In most ridings, the PCs hardly seem to have bothered printing signs – which are a key part of the name recognition required to win any local campaign. They’re not only being whupped by the Wildrose Party on this front, they’re getting creamed by the impoverished NDP! Indeed, in some ridings, many constituents haven’t even received a leaflet from the Conservatives!

Do Ms. Redford’s advisers actually imagine they can win this battle with a good TV debate performance Thursday night? Well, good luck to them! At least three other people who are going to be at that event are pretty good debaters too.

Does the Tory campaign team have some 11th hour surprise to win this campaign? If they think they do, it had better be the political equivalent of a hydrogen bomb, because otherwise it’s going to be too late and too little for them to recover.

Some current projections suggest the Wildrose Party could win more than 50 seats – and those are based on the best polls from the PCs’ perspective!

Books will be written on how the Wildrose Party won this election, but that’s not the real story. The real story will be how the Tories blew it.

Well, it ain’t over till it’s over, as Yogi Berra famously said, but this one sure feels like it is. As befits this weekend’s solemn Easter celebration, if Premier Redford and the PC government are resurrected now, it will be because of a miracle from on high!

As for the rest of us, my advice is to batten down the hatches, vote NDP and keep voting NDP. That way at least there will be one opposition party that knows what it’s doing.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

No breakfast for Conservative champions? Alberta’s Tories as churlish as ever

by David Climenhaga on February 16, 2012 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Doug Griffiths, apparently still wearing black, has sent a message on behalf of his premier to Alberta politicos: resistance is futile, and will not be tolerated. Below: Edmonton City Councillor and AUMA President Linda Sloan; Chief of the premier’s staff, Stephen Carter.

As Ken Kowalski, the venerable and soon-to-retire Speaker of the Alberta Legislative Assembly might have put it: “Well! That didn’t take long!”

No sooner had the mainstream media proclaimed the Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford on their way to yet another huge victory than the word was all over the Interwebs that the Tories themselves were returning to their traditionally prickly ways.

A wise old Alberta political hand told me many years ago that this province’s Conservatives don’t really like being challenged by anyone, and even being so bold as to chat with an MLA from an Opposition party in public can be enough to get you and your cause into hot water.

So you can imagine the kind of trouble you could get in for saying something like, oh, the Tories had out municipal grants on the basis of how well a municipality’s voters behave come election time!

But for the last year or so, as Alberta’s Natural Governing Party for the first time in a generation has been contemplating the possibility that things might not go quite as would normally be assumed, so its visage has not been as stern toward those miscreants who toed the line with insufficient enthusiasm.

But the same day the mainstream media was penning predictions that the Redford Tories would return by another massive majority – maybe the most massive majority ever – Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths was pounding out a letter of his own, excoriating the president of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association for her naughty suggestion and setting out her punishment for the world to see.

Linda Sloan, you see, had had the temerity to say to a journalist that the government hands out the municipal moolah based on political performance. Ms. Sloan, who is also an Edmonton city councillor who can be prickly herself on occasion, told the Edmonton Journal that “I don’t think it’s fair to pick communities one way or the other based on what their provincial voting record has been.”

Fair enough, except that the Redford Regime denied it all, with the premier’s Chief of Staff, Stephen Carter, Twittering hotly that Ms. Sloan was a lair, and a malicious one at that.

For his part, Mr. Griffiths’ sharp letter advised Ms. Sloan that unless she came to the throne on bended knee, tugging her forelock, the Conservative caucus and cabinet would boycott the AUMA’s breakfast tomorrow morning.

“Your comments are deliberately inflammatory and erroneous, and are not a sound way to build a strong relationship between governments whose ultimate purpose and focus is to build stronger communities,” Mr. Griffiths, or his executive assistant anyway, huffed. “Please be advised that as a result of your comments in the media, neither I, nor any of my Cabinet or Caucus colleagues, will be attending the AUMA breakfast on Feb. 16, 2012.”

What’s more, he went on, “you have chosen to make false accusations in the newspaper while claiming you want to work together. The situation can be remedied if you apologize and retract your erroneous statement.” (Emphasis added.) Click here to read the entire letter.

Now, to those of us in the hoi polloi, this may sound plain silly, but it would have been a major humiliation to any leader of the municipal politicians’ league.

As a consequence, apparently, Ms. Sloan grovelled sufficiently to satisfy the government, denying that she ever said any such thing as was reported in the Journal. For its part, the Journal, which is standing by its story, reports that peace reigns again in the Tory valley.

As a result, presumably, the breakfast is on again and the PC Party’s Legislative stalwarts will be able to sit down peaceably to their eggs and bacon as most of you are reading this.

As a gesture of good will, Ms. Redford lightly tapped Mr. Carter’s wrist for his overly enthusiastic Tweeting.

Meantime, though, we are all on notice again. Don’t cross an Alberta Tory government not matter how big its majority is. It can be meaner than a snake!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Liberal MLA Blakeman to run for Speaker, again

by David Climenhaga on December 12, 2011 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
Edmonton Centre MLA Laurie Blakeman with Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman last summer when they were both running for the leadership.

Well, Ken Kowalski is marching into history, so why the heck not?

At any rate, earlier today, Edmonton Centre Liberal MLA Laurie Blakeman sent along a Twitter message saying she’s still the nominated candidate for her party, then went on to say: “Excited by idea of running for Speaker – best qualified but still need PC votes.”

The four-term MLA has sought the job before, and not gained much purchase with the vast Tory majority in the Assembly at any given time.

Still, with the Alberta Liberals floundering under the leadership of former Conservative Raj Sherman, hope springs eternal. Maybe this time can be different. Ms. Blakeman could certainly do the job with aplomb.

And becoming Speaker would solve a problem for Ms. Blakeman, who earlier this year ran for the leadership of the Alberta Liberals and lost to Dr. Sherman. She has clearly seemed disaffected since. Her personal political website makes no mention of her party affiliation.

Rumours have suggested she might follow the example of her caucus colleague and fellow leadership candidate, Hugh MacDonald, and announce her retirement from politics, or petition to join the NDP caucus, which would have been a good fit for the experienced and genuinely liberal politician.

This provides another option – if an unlikely one. Unless the outcome of the next general election is closer than appears probable right now, Premier Alison Redford’s Conservatives seem much more likely to reward one of their own with the important and well-compensated post.

Mr. Kowalski, the Legislature’s longest-serving member, announced Friday that he is stepping down.

Premier Alison Redford enforces generational change in Alberta government

by David Climenhaga on December 10, 2011 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
Alberta Speaker Ken Kowalski and other former PC ministers line up to wait for their transition allowances. Tory politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Mr. Kowalski, former Premier Ed Stelmach, Iris Evans, Lloyd Snelgrove.

Civilization as we know it in Alberta has ended.

Ken Kowalski, 66, is stepping down. The Speaker of the Alberta Legislature and its longest-serving MLA – “the dean of the Legislature,” in Press Gallery-speak – made the announcement this morning in a news release that looked as if he’d typed it up himself late last night on his home computer.

“As I enter my 33rd year as an elected person, I have decided that I need to take back my life and find a private life,” Mr. Kowalski said in his unexpected announcement. “As a result, I am withdrawing my candidacy for the PC Association of Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock and will not be a candidate in the next provincial election in Alberta.”

When he goes, of course, Mr. Kowalski will pocket a nice little payout of more than $1.3 million dollars.

He joins a rapidly growing list of Progressive Conservative MLAs – many of them cabinet veterans and former party movers and shakers – who are streaming for the exits.

On the list so far: former premier Ed Stelmach, 60, the man who started it all when he announced his intention to resign in January 2011; Iris Evans, who is just days away from her 70th birthday and served as health minister under premier Ralph Klein; Ron Liepert, 62, the bull in Alberta’s political china shop, health minister under Mr. Stelmach and now finance minister; Lloyd Snelgrove, 55, president of Treasury Board under Mr. Stelmach.

Lesser lights include former energy minister Mel Knight, 67; former children’s minister Janis Tarchuk, 56; Richard Marz, 67; Barry McFarland, 63; and Ken Allred, who will be 71 in a couple of weeks. By the time this is posted, this list will probably have grown: at any rate, expect neo-Con grandee Freddy-Lee “Ted” Morton, 62, once the Finance Minister and now the mighty Minister of Energy, and Gene Zwozdesky, 63, another former health minister, to join the list before long.

There are two reasons why generational change is happening so dramatically right now in the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party:

The first: Premier Alison Redford, 46, has decreed that it will be so.

Do not doubt this. Like Mr. Kowalski, most of the departing old-timers are mouthing platitudes about how it’s time for them to recover their private lives, pursue their hobbies, travel or whatever. As Mr. Allred, the MLA for St. Albert, gamely told a local bi-weekly newspaper, Premier Redford had nothing to do with it: “I have got other things I want to do in life.”

But the reality is that Ms. Redford and her political aides and allies have made it abundantly clear behind the closed doors of the caucus room that the time has come for the relics of the PC caucus to move on. This is a calculated political decision to renew the Alberta Tory Party and make it acceptable to a new generation of voters – exactly what Ms. Redford was elected by party members to do.

It is said here that many of the retiring MLAs mentioned above would have preferred to hang onto their seats for another four years, and had tried to cut deals to do just that with candidate Gary Mar, who was the front-runner in the Conservative leadership campaign last summer and fall. Their fates were decided as surely as Mr. Mar’s on the night of Oct. 2 when party voters spoke and said “Alison Redford.”

The second reason: The need to depart swiftly has been clearly tied to the financial wellbeing of veteran caucus members.

They’ve been warned: They can have their huge payouts if they go now, but if they linger, the big bucks may not be there when it’s time to retire. What would you do if you had to choose between $1.3 million to go immediately, or a pig in a poke and maybe a quarter of that after three or four years on the backbenches? It’s not quite a hanging in a fortnight, but nevertheless it would concentrate an MLA’s mind wonderfully!

Alberta MLAs’ generous “transition allowances” – brought in by Mr. Klein as a way to eat his cake and have it too after eliminating similarly generous Legislative pensions during his mid-1990s privatization and cutbacks spree – pays three months’ salary for every year of service based on a member’s three highest-paid years in office.

In addition to Mr. Kowalski’s $1.3-million-plus payout, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Mr. Stelmach will receive a transition allowance of a little over $1 million, and most of the rest the following: Mr. McFarland, $709,500; Ms. Evans, $698,700; Ms. Tarchuk, $645,400; Mr. Marz, $544,200; Mr. Snelgrove, $513,000; Mr. Knight; $513,000; and Mr. Liepert, $348,700. And this is not to mention their remaining pensionable earnings.

Whether or not Ms. Redford’s strategy will bring success remains to be seen, but it seems a better bet than leaving a generation of tired old Tory warhorses still in harness while voters grow increasingly antsy and began to think seriously of voting for alternatives like the Wildrose Party, led by the 40-year-old Danielle Smith.

It doesn’t hurt that the Conservative Party is well placed as the province’s Natural Governing Party to attract a new generation of candidates likely to both be loyal to Ms. Redford and to appeal to Alberta’s habitually conservative voters.

Meanwhile, pandemonium must now surely reign in Mr. Kowalski’s Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock electoral district, a large rural riding northwest of Edmonton.

The best laid plans of Wildrose candidate Link Byfield – rather like those of his leader when Mr. Stelmach last year announced his plan to quit – have been blown to smithereens. The money he spent taking pokes at Mr. Kowalski in the local weekly newspaper has gone swooshing down the drain.

There will likely be a dozen candidates for the nomination the Speaker is giving up, many of them credible people who believe Mr. Kowalski’s old job will be a sinecure. Look for a packed nomination meeting attended by literally hundreds of community members.

This being Alberta, not only has everything changed, but everything remains exactly the same!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Remember where you heard it first! Former St. Albert city councillor James Burrows gets Wildrose nomination

by David Climenhaga on August 26, 2011 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
Former St. Albert city councillor James Burrows on municipal election night 2010. The TV monitors in the background did not display particularly good news for Mr. Burrows. Now he has the Wildrose Alliance nomination for the St. Albert riding. Below: St. Albert Conservative MLA Ken Allred.



ST. ALBERT, Alberta

Timing is everything, I wrote of former St. Albert city councillor James Burrows back in February 2010: “If Mr. Burrows can get the Wildrose nomination, the timing could be perfect for him.”



Well, the party announced yesterday that Mr. Burrows has indeed got its nomination for the St. Albert riding in the next general election. But if a week is a long time in politics, a year and a half is darned near an eternity, and it’s a different Alberta now than it used to be back then.

So it remains to be seen if the timing will be as good for the ambitious and locally controversial former three-term councillor and sometime Alberta Liberal, who was turfed from office by a mere 14 votes in the October 2010 civic election, as it looked as if it might be back in the spring of 2010.

One could argue, of course, that what’s really interesting isn’t what party Mr. Burrows, 47, is going to run for, but whether or not Ken Allred, St. Albert’s 70-year-old Conservative MLA, will run again.

There was a day when it was widely rumoured that Mr. Allred would himself switch to the Wildrose Alliance, or perhaps retire, but he’s played his cards pretty close to his vest on his plans. Here’s a bet, though, that Mr. Allred will run again for the Tories, now that the wind again appears to be blowing their way with Premier Ed Stelmach about to go over the side.

He has vocally endorsed far-right Conservative leadership candidate Ted Morton, so it is possible the outcome of the leadership race will now influence his decision whether to stay or to go.

If Mr. Allred seeks re-election, he won’t be the only retirement-age Alberta Conservative politician re-considering another kick at the electoral can now that the Tory elevator seems to be going up again as the Wildrose elevator goes down. A week ago, Alberta Speaker and longest-serving MLA Ken Kowalski announced that he will be seeking his tenth term since 1979!

No doubt part of Mr. Kowalski’s motivation is the desire to hand his annoying Wildrose opponent in the Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock riding, far-right bloviator and sometime “senator in waiting” Link Byfield, his metaphorical ass. But the real story is that these kinds of decisions by politicians who could gracefully fade into the woodwork strongly suggest that no matter whom they choose as leader, the Alberta Tories no longer fear the Wildrose Alliance as much as they did a year ago.

So this could be bad news for politicians like Mr. Burrows, for whom not too long ago the Wildrose Alliance have looked like a certain ticket to electoral success.

Mr. Burrows has no shortage of detractors in St. Albert, but he has also proved in the past he knows how to get elected whether his political enemies like it or not. If he hadn’t been suffering from a cold the week before the 2010 municipal election, it’s likely he would have been able to squeeze another 15 or so votes out of the electorate. And he’s sure to work harder for a prize like a seat in the provincial Legislature.

It’s not clear if being a former Liberal will help or hinder Mr. Burrows in one of the few Alberta regions with a strong history of voting for Liberals. Traditional Liberal voters may distain him as a turncoat gone over the loony right, or may find him less threatening than a candidate from the party’s scary ultra-right.

Or they may simply not care, because St. Albert is a rare Alberta where other parties win votes from time to time too.

Despite their historical strength in the region, the Alberta Liberals don’t yet appear to have found a candidate to nominate in St. Albert. Perhaps local Liberals are waiting for the outcome of their leadership race?

Nor have the New Democrats, who could benefit from warm feelings for Jack Layton and the lingering Orange Wave.

Meanwhile, while they have barely registered in any polls so far this year, the Liberal-like Alberta Party, has two potential candidates fighting over the nomination in the riding – former New Democrat Tim Osborne and St. Albert fire fighter local firefighter Victor Fernandez.

NOTE: A reader informs me that Alex V. Bosse is seeking the Liberal nomination. Readers can look at his tweets at http://twitter.com/#!/ALXV5 .

Internet buzz predicts Speaker Ken Kowalski’s imminent retirement

by David Climenhaga on June 21, 2011 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments
Your blogger lectures Speaker Ken Kowalski on something or other at the Alberta Legislature as one of Mr. Kowalski’s aides desperately searches for an avenue of escape. Below: Link Byfield, Lloyd Bertschi.

As Alberta Speaker Ken Kowalski might say after a particularly spirited rendition of the national anthem by occupants of the Legislative galleries, “Well, now!”

The Internet is abuzz with predictions that Mr. Kowalski, after three decades and two years as a Conservative MLA, nine consecutive terms in all, is about to retire from politics.

If this is true, one of the seemingly eternal verities of Alberta politics will have at last come to an end. Mr. Kowalski, after all, is one of the great characters of the Alberta political scene. Once the deputy premier, he apparently fell into disfavour with premier Ralph Klein in the mid-1990s. At any rate, he disappeared from Cabinet. But it was not long before he reinvented himself and persuaded the House to elect him Speaker in 1997.

Now Mr. Kowalski appears both to be unbeatable in his own riding if he chooses to stay and entitled to enjoy his retirement if he decides to go. Enjoyable his retirement should be, seeing as a year ago he was reported to be in line for a comfortable payout of close to $1.3-million from the people of Alberta.

The rumour about Mr. Kowalski’s looming departure seems to have been spread by Joan Crockatt, a former journalist of a conservative turn of mind who nowadays, according to her online biography, “serves as a media consultant specializing in strategic communications.” Ms. Crockatt is also an ardent Tweeter, and of late several of her Tweets have chirped cheerfully about the possibility Mr. Kowalski will soon hit the road.

Various other Daves in the blogosphere have picked up this storyline, with Dave Heyman of the Allpolitics.ca blog commenting that Mr. Kowalski’s departure “throws wide open” the race in the Speaker’s Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock riding northwest of Edmonton. Mr. Heyman added that the Wildrose Alliance candidate in that riding is Link Byfield.

However, Dave Cournoyer over at the Daveberta.ca blog contributed a note of caution to Mr. Heyman’s analysis by noting that Mr. Heyman himself has taken of late to advising Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith on her political plans. This factoid is newsworthy on its own, as Mr. Cournoyer pointed out, since Mr. Heyman has also spent spells acting as a media spokesthingy for such well-placed Tories as Premier Ed Stelmach and Energy Minister Ron Liepert, not to mention helping out with the Calgary mayoral campaign of Liberal MLA Kent Hehr.

It is perhaps worthy of note at this point that the trio of Mr. Heyman, Ms. Crockatt and Ms. Smith worked together as journalists at the Calgary Herald during that newspaper’s unfortunate labour dispute in 1999 and 2000. (In the interests of full disclosure, the author of this blog post was walking a picket line outside the same building at that particular moment in history.)

The point of mentioning this, of course, is that while it may very well be that Mr. Kowalski is contemplating retirement, it is also likely quite possible that the Wildrose Alliance and supporters of its neo-conservative nostrums – whomever they might be – would very much like you to think that Mr. Byfield has a credible chance of winning in Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock.

Anything is possible, one supposes, but as noted here recently, Mr. Byfield, scion of the now-vanished far-right Alberta Report publishing empire founded by his father Ted, may be fairly described as a somewhat eccentric candidate. A founder and participant in such oddball Astroturf organizations as the Society to Explore and Record Christian History and the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy, which exists to resist the “expanding influence” of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms or so says the Wikipedia, Mr. Byfield is probably best known as Alberta’s still-waiting Senator in Waiting.

Indeed, in the event Mr. Kowalski chooses to depart, much more likely than Link Byfield, MLA, is that some local Conservative grandee with access to the Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock riding association’s quarter-million-dollar war chest will come forward and sweep to victory on Mr. Kowalski’s coattails.

The name of Lloyd Bertschi, Mayor of Morinville, the largest community in the riding, and former president of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association, springs to mind in this context.

Regardless, whether or not Mr. Kowalski decides to retire remains to be seen. While he has clearly relished the position as Speaker over the years, what he concludes is likely to happen in the next general election will surely play a key role in his decision-making.

He has put his boot upon members of all parties in the Legislature at times, and more than a few would be happy to see him go. Moreover, if the Conservatives were to lose a significant number of seats to the Wildrose Alliance in the next election, the party could well be disinclined to see one of their own serve as Speaker.

In such circumstances, Mr. Kowalski would lose his not insubstantial power and be thoroughly marginalized by those in his own party who have been displeased by his rulings in the past. Facing that possibility, pulling the plug and retiring might not seem like an unrealistic option.

As is so often the case in the Legislature, we must await Mr. Kowalski’s ruling.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Is the Wildrose Alliance’s loony fringe finally beginning to emerge at nomination meetings?

by David Climenhaga on June 15, 2011 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
The Wildrose Alliance waits at the crossing (in the Buick, not the train). Below: Cory Morgan.

It’s been said here that the biggest problem Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Alliance would ever have is the kind of candidates the right-wing party attracts.

Ms. Smith, after all, is a pretty smooth politician who intends to insinuate her market fundamentalist nostrums into the Alberta sensibility rather as Prime Minister Stephen Harper is trying hard these days to keep his worser instincts under control and take an incremental approach to moving Canada far to the right.

To achieve her goal, she needs candidates who don’t remind potential Wildrose voters of extras from a gothic horror flick set in the Wild West. So, as I wrote way back in January 2010, “the moment of maximum danger for the upstart political party will come … when it must choose local candidates to run in the provincial election expected in 2012.”

The party’s problem, I argued at that time, was related to its success up to that point. To put it bluntly, it was going to attract no shortage of potential fruitcakes from the party’s extremist fringe to its nomination races, and some of them would likely be chosen, because thanks to Ms. Smith the party now enjoys some credibility.

“Ms. Smith will find keeping those committed social conservatives singing from the same hymnbook and out of trouble is like herding cats,” I predicted then.

Well, we’re a lot closer to an election now and Ms. Smith’s Alliance party is starting to nominate candidates. While most of these people are complete unknowns to most Albertans, yet to reveal their true colours, a few of them have familiar names.

Likely the most prominent is Link Byfield, of course. Alberta’s sometime Senator in Waiting (say what?) is the Missing Link no more, but has resurfaced to challenge Alberta’s historically most successful politician, Speaker Ken Kowalski, in the Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock riding northwest of Edmonton.

The Wikipedia used to note that Mr. Byfield was the president of the Society to Explore and Record Christian History, although that factoid seems now to have mysteriously and conveniently disappeared into the cybervoid, although his brief Wikibio does still note that he was the founder of something called the Citizens Centre for Freedom and Democracy, which stands, among other things, “against expanding influence of the Charter of Rights.”

Well, OK!

As a matter of fact, Mr. Byfield has run for the Wildrose Alliance before, back in 2008, but that didn’t count for much in those pre-Danielle Smith days. Anyway, Mr. Byfield is old news by now, and in Alberta’s fermenting political culture, that amounts to being almost an establishment figure.

More recently we have learned, thanks to Dave Cournoyer’s useful Daveberta blog, that a fellow named Cory Morgan is among the candidates seeking the Wildrose nomination in the controversially renamed Calgary-Klein riding. In his on-line bumf, Mr. Morgan describes himself as a sort of neighbourhood guy who likes free votes in the Legislature, fixed election dates and health reform of the softly worded and undefined kind that is larded throughout Wildrose Alliance documents and websites nowadays.

Like Mr. Byfield, Mr. Morgan was a Wildrose Alliance candidate in the last provincial election, in the Calgary-Mountain View riding, where he captured close to 900 votes. But as previously noted, that was back in the day when the Alliance was just another loony far-right fringe party, as opposed to a loony far-right party that’s no longer on the fringe.

So, presumably, this means he might have a fighting chance of capturing the Wildrose nomination in Calgary-Klein.

There doesn’t seem to be any mention on his site, however, of Mr. Morgan’s past role in Alberta politics, including being a founder and former leader of an entity called the Alberta Independence Party and before that a member of the Separation Party of Alberta, a group whose agenda had little to do with the butterfat content of dairy products. (The Separation Party was once also known by the delightfully evocative moniker Alberta First Party, although thankfully it was never called the German-Albertan Bund.)

Mr. Morgan ran as a candidate for the AIP in Banff-Cochrane in 2001, bringing in 538 votes, and for the SPA in Highwood in 2004, capturing 299 votes.

But heck, why should this stand in his way? Well-known Alberta sovereignist Ted Morton attended the AIP’s founding convention in 2001 (in fairness, as an “observer”) and today he’s a credible candidate for the leadership of the Alberta Conservatives. And that Stephen Harper guy signed the sovereignist Firewall Manifesto with Dr. Morton in 2001, and all those facts long ago disappeared down the Memory Hole.

So with Ms. Smith’s nicely tailored coattails to ride on, it’s possible a candidate as far out as Mr. Morgan could nevertheless move his vote tally into four figures, or even into the winner’s circle!

Just the same, Mr. Morgan seems like just the kind of fellow Ms. Smith should be worrying about. He is the kind of politician, in other words, who might say exactly what he thinks during an election campaign, setting fire to the Wildrose Alliance’s electoral hopes.

It won’t take much, remember, as public opinion polls have already shown, to send nervous Albertans scurrying back to the comfortable old Progressive Conservatives once the accident-prone Premier Ed Stelmach is finally out of the way.

Politicians like Mr. Morgan and quite possibly Mr. Byfield as well sound like just the kind of fellows who could put paid to Ms. Smith’s hopes. And, remember, there are plenty more where they came from!

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

No secular schools in Morinville? There’ll be hell to pay!

by David Climenhaga on March 9, 2011 in Uncategorized with 2 Comments
Overtly religious Morinville school sign. Well, it doesn’t say which god! Below: Morinville Community High School’s overtly religious logo; Education Minister Dave “Go-Talk-to-the-Courts” Hancock.

Nothing terrifies a Canadian provincial politician more than a fight over Roman Catholic education, and with good reason. It’s a political time bomb with a sizzling fuse. It’s an issue on which it is simply impossible to reach a compromise that will make all voters happy, and one that is sure to enrage large groups of electors.

Supporters of publicly financed Catholic education are well organized and determined to defend their rights, which have roots deep in Canada’s constitutional history. Supporters of secular public education can be aggressive too, although they’re usually happy enough if there are adequately funded schools for their children as well.

Suddenly, thanks in no small part to an excellent report in the Globe and Mail, long-simmering anger over the ridiculous way the Alberta government provides public education in the Edmonton bedroom suburb of Morinville has boiled over the sides of the pot.

From the perspective of the Conservative government of Premier Ed Stelmach, this couldn’t happen at a worse moment – just as the party is trying to reinvent itself by choosing a new leader, fend off a significant challenge by the far-right Wildrose Alliance Party, which has its own “market-based solutions” for education, and prepare for a looming provincial general election.

The situation in a nutshell is this: Morinville, which was once a village of a few hundred almost exclusively French-speaking and Roman Catholic farmers, has grown into a thriving Edmonton bedroom community of about 7,000 people, predominantly English speaking and as diverse most other Canadian communities.

Many of these new residents have young families owing to the lower cost of housing in the town. For the same reason, the place is likely to continue to grow, so more families with children, significant numbers of them not Catholic, will be moving in soon.

There are four “public” schools in Morinville – all parochial Catholic schools. The “public” school board – for so it is legally designated – is the Catholic school board. The separate school board … well, despite the fact that well over half the families with kids registered in Morinville schools are now not Catholic, there are no secular schools in Morinville, separate or otherwise. None!

So if you live in Morinville and you want to educate your children where you live, they’re going to a Catholic School, where, as Catholic educators boast, Catholicity infuses the curriculum. Indeed, as the superintendent of schools recently wrote, “through faith-based encounters with learning, our students come to understand a journey of life which extends from knowing the Christ within, to acting as Christ for others….”

Protestants, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and others in Morinville, not to mention the non-religious, may not appreciate their children being proselytized with this particular brand of Christianity at school. But there you have it – that’s just the way it is today in Morinville.

Morinville’s schools come under the Greater St. Albert Catholic Regional Division, based in the city of St. Albert, population 60,000, 16 kilometres south on Edmonton’s northern boundary.

The situation is symbolically as bad, although practically somewhat better, in St. Albert, which also used to be a predominantly Catholic farming village but many years ago became for all intents and purposes part of metropolitan Edmonton.

There, the real public school board is legally the separate school board and it’s called the Protestant School Board. Its mandate is to provide secular education, no matter what the signs on the schools say. Indeed, it’s legally a parochial board because that’s the only way in Alberta to get public funding for a separate school board.

The separate school board, of course, is legally the public school board, and its mandate is to provide parochial Catholic education – in Morinville as well as St. Albert. (Full disclosure: Your blogger lives in St. Albert and his children are graduates of the excellent program at Bellerose Composite High School, run by the thoroughly secular Protestant School Board.)

Notwithstanding all this back-story, the fight in Morinville is really pretty simple. When a few non-Catholic families started to campaign for a secular public school for their children in Morinville, their school board told them get lost. Earlier this year, the board voted unanimously that there would be no secular education offered in Morinville.

The debate soon grew heated in the pages of the community press, with supporters of the school board’s position claiming only a dozen or so families are really involved in the campaign for secular education. Other non-Catholic families soon emerged with claims of how their kids had been ostracized and bullied in the region’s Catholic schools for opting out of parochial classes. Others told of how their elementary school kids had come home and announced they were now Catholics.

Morinville Town Council, not surprisingly, ducked the issue and ran for the bushes.

Most provincial politicians would love to do the same. Indeed, Alberta Education Minister Dave Hancock tried to do so by telling the Edmonton Journal, in the words of the paper’s reporter, that “a solution that satisfies those seeking secular schooling in Morinville may ultimately have to be settled in the courts.” Unfortunately, the Journal seems not to have followed up on the minister’s brainstorm.

There can be little doubt former Deputy Premier and Conservative leadership candidate Doug Horner is thanking God that Morinville is not part of his adjacent riding. That doesn’t reduce the problem for the provincial government as a whole, however, or for Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock MLA Ken Kowalski, the Speaker of the Alberta Legislature.

And it doesn’t help that the provincial government – pressed hard by the fiscally hawkish Wildrose Alliance Party – is crying poverty and making vows of fiscal prudence. After all, Morinville isn’t really big enough to support two public school boards.

Alas, no amount of bobbing and weaving by provincial representatives is going to work. The number of non-Catholic Morinville families demanding true public education for their children in their own community is only going to grow and keep on growing.

Indeed, the situation is helping to fuel an inconvenient campaign by former Conservative education minister Dave King, a relic of the era of premier Peter Lougheed, to disestablish all Protestant and Catholic separate schools in Alberta.

Cost or no cost, the Alberta Government is going to have find both a way and the money to build secular public schools in Morinville or there will be, to borrow a page from Christian theology, hell to pay!

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

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