All posts tagged Kevin Taft

Looking back in perplexity: where did all of Alberta’s money go again?

by David Climenhaga on February 28, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics with 6 Comments

First World money and Third World roads. If we’re so rich in Alberta, why do we seem so poor? A motorist negotiates one of Edmonton’s famed potholes. Actual Edmonton drivers may not have snappy uniforms like this fellow. Below: Author, professor and former Alberta Liberal politician Kevin Taft, the cover of Follow the Money.

There aren’t many surprises in Alberta – at least if you’ve been paying attention.

However, apparently paying attention is something you can’t expect either the government or the media to do.

Consider the news in the Edmonton Journal earlier this week that “Experts have warned of ‘Bitumen Bubble’ for years.”

Well, yeah…

This just in, reported the Journal: “…oil industry players have been warning about the phenomenon for more than a decade.” (Oil industry players, by the way, means big shots and their trusted flunkies, not the guy playing the piano in a house of ill repute. Just in case you wondered.)

Indeed, the Journal’s reporter noted, “a review of historical markets shows the gap between what Alberta oil sells for and the benchmark price for West Texas Intermediate has repeatedly hit $35 in the past two years.”

Well, it shouldn’t surprise us, I suppose, that Premier Alison Redford was surprised by the fact petroleum prices, known for their volatility, are volatile. There’s a long tradition of governments being surprised by the obvious – and this is not just true of Progressive Conservative governments, and it’s not just true in Alberta. But apparently that helps.

Which brings us to another related surprise. Don Braid, the Calgary Herald’s political columnist, who can usually be counted on to write a pretty good column, could be found shaking his head in astonishment recently about Ms. Redford’s astonishing claim that there’s almost no money any more because of the Bitumen Bubble.

“You have to wonder about a government that can pull off the remarkable stunt of going broke while the province it runs keeps getting richer,” Mr. Braid observed.

Well, actually, you don’t. You just have to listen to what former Alberta Liberal leader Kevin Taft, the best premier Alberta never had, had to say about this long, long ago.

As we said in this space back in January 2012, “Sooner or later, all conversations about the Alberta economy in the modern era come down to one key question: Where the hell did all the money go?” Indeed, where does it continue to go?

Or to put that another way, if Alberta’s so rich – almost double the GDP of the rest of Canada in recent years – how come it feels so poor? (And you only need to drive the potholed Third World roads of Edmonton to know how poor it feels!)

Dr. Taft, a former University of Alberta professor and director of the U of A’s Parkland Institute, answered this question, actually. It’s just that no one in the government or the mainstream media seems to have been paying attention.

So if we’re so rich, Dr. Taft, how come we’re so poor? Illuminate our fuzzification!

Last year working with researchers Mel McMillan and Junaid Jahangir, Dr. Taft wrote a book called Follow the Money, Where is Alberta’s Wealth Going?

Relying heavily on Statistics Canada’s CANSIM (Canadian Socioeconomic) and Financial Management System databases, Dr. Taft made a case that has not been effectively challenged by the government’s spokespeople, its apologists among the legions of far-right “think tanks” that serve as the Greek chorus for Alberta’s perpetual state of scarcity and crisis amid fantastic wealth, or far-right entities like the Wildrose Party that demand ever more vigorous attacks on public services.

So let’s review the places Dr. Taft was able to establish pretty convincingly are not getting our money:

  • It’s not going to government spending. For while government spending in Alberta seems to be perpetually managed incompetently by generations of Tories, who gyrate between throwing money at problems to massive and disruptive cutbacks, over the long term our government spends close to the Canadian average.
  • It’s not going to public services. “As a society, Alberta spends a steadily shrinking portion of its increasing prosperity on public services,” Dr. Taft showed in his book.
  • It’s not going to education. Comparing five-year averages to smooth out individual years’ ups and downs, spending on K-12 education went up 2 per cent, total, over 20 years.
  • It’s not going to health care. When you adjust for the size of the provincial economy, spending on health care puts Alberta last in the country. No matter how you measure it, “health care spending in Alberta and Canada is on a gradual long-term upward trend that is well within reason.” Over the long-term, smoothed out with five-year averages, health care spending in Alberta has been rising at about 1.2 per cent a year.
  • It’s not going to housing and social services.
  • It’s not going into savings. You can tell from a glance at one of Dr. Taft’s many useful charts that, as he puts it, “Alberta’s natural resource treasure wasn’t going into the Heritage Fund,” or any other savings pool.
  • And most of it is not going to personal incomes. Over the past 21 years, average personal incomes in Alberta rose about 35 per cent, accounting for inflation.

So where is it going? It’s going to corporate profits, that’s where.

And the greatest corporate profits are in the oilpatch, naturally.

In fact, so much of our money is going into corporate profit, Dr. Taft shows, that we’re actually selling our collective property at a loss to pad the corporate bottom line!

“Profits in Alberta have grown at rates simply unknown in other jurisdictions, often well beyond double the rates in other provinces and the United States,” he wrote. “There is no such largesse for public services, and the government is drawing down public savings rather than building them, doing nothing to prepare for the future.

“The transfer of public wealth to private shareholders is blistering, and our own government, rather than fighting like an owner, or even thinking like an owner, is just happy to find investors who want to cash in.” (Those investors, Dr. Taft noted as an aside – well before this became a national scandal – are frequently state-owned companies from such places as China, Abu Dhabi and Korea.)

How blistering? Well, corporate profits were up 317 per cent in the same period health care spending rose 28 per cent, incomes went up 35 per cent and education spending increased 2 per cent!

One question Taft said he couldn’t answer from the data he worked with is where all the money goes once it flows into these bloated corporate profits. But you and I don’t need a book to tell us the answer to that one: Most of it leaves the country for places where it does nothing for Canadians.

No wonder, when you think about it, that corporate special interests and their paid representatives in Canada are so aggressive in defending their “right” to rapidly export even more of our resources via pipeline to wherever – the environment, the rights of Canadians, and due process be damned!

Of course, Dr. Taft’s conclusions were not reported very enthusiastically in the media, either here in Alberta or anywhere else in this country.

I guess that’s why the facts have taken the Calgary Herald and the government of Alberta by surprise.

Follow the Money was published by Detselig Enterprises of Calgary and costs $12.95, and it’s also available as an e-book.

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.

If you have any doubts left Alberta’s Conservatives are done like dinner, this should settle ’em

by David Climenhaga on April 19, 2012 in Uncategorized with 12 Comments

“I never thought I’d vote PC” … just embarrassing. Below: Ralph Klein back when he was premier of Alberta; Saddam Hussein.

If you have any doubts left there are only four more sleeps before the end of the Progressive Conservative Era in Alberta, look no further than the video and website called “I never thought I’d vote PC.”

Whether or not the PCs under Alison Redford had anything to do with this vain effort to encourage hip, edgy young people to vote for the clapped out Conservative party in a last-ditch effort to prevent a Wildrose Apocalypse, there could be no surer sign of the imminent demise of the once mighty Tory dynasty.

I mean, really, telling young voters you understand why they’d “rather gouge their eyes out than vote Conservative” in an effort to get them to vote Conservative is just … embarrassing.

“Danielle Smith thinks the Flintstones is historically accurate,” one of the characters in this desperate effort asserts about the Wildrose leader, straining not-quite-successfully for a light touch. Well, in fairness to Ms. Smith, she may have her doubts about climate change, but unlike the video’s talking heads she’s actually met Ralph Klein – who was, after all, the original Barney Rubble. (Or was that the other way around? Whatever.)

After this pathetic excuse for a Tory campaign, the tattered remnants of the Alberta Conservatives have less dignity left than Saddam Hussein when he was hauled out of his hidey-hole in Tikrit by the soldiers of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division! This little video squib is just the final excruciating evidence before our eyes notice that the moribund Conservatives’ best-before date has passed.

It doesn’t even matter if the Tories didn’t do it, as the videographer who made it claims. The very fact that somebody, anybody, thought this would be an effective way to stampede voters into voting for the Conservative party is incontrovertible proof that after 41 years it’s finally hit the political equivalent of skid row.

Indeed, there would be a mild irony if the Conservatives in fact had nothing to do with it – after all, the Liberals under straight-arrow Kevin Taft got blamed by Ed Stelmach’s Tories back in 2007 for those “No Plan” ads that someone else had actually cooked up.

From the script, it could have been the Tories or the equally moribund Alberta Liberals that came up with it. It certainly wasn’t the NDP, which you’ll notice is the only opposition party not to be mentioned in the soundtrack. But then, the NDP makes the current crop of Alberta “strategic voting” advocates almost as uncomfortable as the Wildrose Party, possibly because it too stands for something more than simply being in power.

That’s the Alberta Conservatives’ big problem right there: Nowadays they only exist to be in power. And they’ve been in power so long they still can’t imagine it being any different – which may be why they didn’t exert themselves until so late in this campaign there was no chance of a reversal. Then again, maybe they just forgot how to campaign after all those easy years.

Regardless of the reason, if they’re pinning their hopes on strategic-voting by twentysomethings, they’re in for a big disappointment.

That’s why we can predict some things about the future with relative confidence: If Ms. Smith and the Wildrose Party coast to a large majority on Monday, it likely won’t take long for the Conservatives simply to evaporate into thin air, with most of the party’s MLAs petitioning to join the Wildrose ranks – completing the radical right’s reverse takeover of moderate Alberta Torydom.

Indeed, if this is a harbinger of the next couple of days, Ms. Smith’s biggest problem will be how to keep her caucus in line while keeping her cabinet small enough to avoid having to appoint some of her party’s most egregious kooks, who also happen to be its most faithful troopers.

Just in case, though, I wonder if the Wildrosers will trot out Preston Manning in the next couple of days to counter the effects of Peter Lougheed’s endorsement of Ms. Redford.

And I wonder if Ms. Redford will announce she’s stepping down on Monday night or wait till Tuesday morning.

And I wonder if Doug Horner ever thought, when he entered politics as a standard bearer for Alberta’s eternal Conservatives, that one day he might become the Leader of the Opposition?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

On the trail of the party crasher … and where’s Kevin Taft now that the Liberals really need him?

by David Climenhaga on March 30, 2012 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
Third (or fourth) party leader Raj Sherman crashes Premier Alison Redford’s party this afternoon. Sheesh! Ms. Redford must be thinking: “Oh butt out, Raj!” Below: Kevin Taft; Dr. Sherman – “Uh oh! Here he comes!” – accompanied by an uncomfortable looking local candidate Bruce Miller. (This photo by David Cournoyer.)

When Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman crashed the premier’s “photo opportunity” early this afternoon, it got me thinking how the Conservatives aren’t the only Alberta political party that needs their old leader back. I mean, really, where’s Kevin Taft now that the Liberals need him?

Planning his retirement, presumably, without having to worry about Ms. Redford’s panicky decision this morning to suspend “from this day forward” the retirement payments to departing MLAs.

Leastways, notwithstanding the wording of Ms. Redford’s announcement, which was designed to get the government off the hook of the no-pay committee brouhaha, it’s hard to imagine she can strip the generous retirement payments from MLAs like Dr. Taft and Speaker Ken Kowalski who have already announced they’re on the way out the Legislature’s door. Good luck making that idea stick, Ms. Redford!

Getting back to the point of this story, alert readers will recall how with Dr. Taft at the helm, the Alberta Liberals enjoyed province-wide support about 25 per cent at this point in the 2008 election campaign. Today, with the unsteady hand of former Conservative Raj Sherman on the tiller, they’re at … what? Eleven per cent? Thirteen if they’re lucky?

At the risk of mixing transportation metaphors and prompting a response from The Angry Grit Commenter, it’s hard to imagine that with numbers like those the Liberals aren’t heading for a trainwreck on April 23.

That may have been why Dr. Sherman changed his schedule and showed up today at Ms. Redford’s uninformative but entertaining lunchtime photo opportunity in Edmonton’s Westmount district. What the heck, there were bound to be TV cameras around!

The grinning Liberal leader barrelled through the door of the Duchess Bakery on 124th Street seconds after the Premier had arrived and tottered across the room as if to say he’d just strolled by and noticed her.

For her part, Ms. Redford was trying to sip a latte and chat up some customers, many whom just happened to have strolled in themselves from Culture and Community Services Minister and local Edmonton-Glenora MLA Heather Klimchuk’s office right across the street. (Said one nonpartisan customer to me, “Who is that lady in the orange coat?” I was a good boy and resisted the temptation to respond: “Just someone from the NDP, Dear.”)

When Dr. Sherman, who had been spotted a few minutes before lurking in a doorway up the street apparently keeping a weather eye out for the premier’s NDP-orange bus, dashed up to Ms. Redford’s table, the premier did not look amused. Indeed, she bore an expression like the one she wore minutes before as she broke a fake board with her hand at the Tae Kwon Do studio up the block. Ms. Klimchuk managed a diplomatic half-smile. Dr. Sherman did not look embarrassed. But local Liberal candidate Bruce Miller, accompanying him, looked uncomfortable.

Tacky? Nowadays, who knows? I don’t suppose most of the actual voters in attendance knew who Dr. Sherman was either.

But you’ve got to know it’s not something the professorial Dr. Taft, who will go down in history as the best premier Alberta never had, would have done.

Given the qualities he offered, this would have been the perfect election for Dr. Taft.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Kevin Taft follows Alberta’s money and finds out where it all went

by David Climenhaga on January 31, 2012 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments
Your blogger, with another doomed politician, this time the author of Follow the Money, Where is Alberta’s Wealth Going? Just in case you’re thinking of being sarcastic, the sign says “Red Deer Public Library.” Below, the cover of the book.

Sooner or later, all conversations about the Alberta economy in the modern era come down to one key question: Where the hell did all the money go?

I guess you could rephrase this: Where the hell is all the money going? Regardless, it’s been going somewhere and, over the past couple of decades, that destination has been a matter of lively discussion among Albertans and other Canadians.

This question is so often asked because, while Alberta is known to be rich – Alberta’s GDP per person in 2008 was $81,121, compared with $44,121 for the rest of Canada – to those of us who live here it feels poor.

Whether it’s the shabby condition of downtown Edmonton, our rundown capital city, our pothole strewn streets, the constant sight of desperate street people, the Third World conditions in our Emergency Rooms, the periodic mass layoffs of teachers, university professors and health care workers, or the unending whine by Conservative politicians that we simply can’t afford quality health care, good education or other public services, it always feels as if the whole lot of us are just one paycheque away from the bread lines.

Here we are, plunk in the middle of the snowbelt, and most years even how we’re going to afford to clear the streets is a constant source of worry and debate.

As a weird counterpoint to this constant refrain, we are also constantly reminded how lucky we are to live here in the Richest Place on Earth, the Very Best Province in the Whole Wide World, etc. etc.

So if we’re so rich, how come we’re so poor?

Well, now we know the answer, thanks to an important book by former Alberta Liberal Party leader Kevin Taft, who has been described in this space as the best premier Alberta never had. Follow the Money, Where is Alberta’s Wealth Going? was published with the assistance of the Alberta Federation of Labour by Detselig Enterprises Ltd. of Calgary. It costs $12.95, and it’s also available as an e-book.

The AFL also financed the production of a short video documentary about Dr. Taft’s research by filmmaker Tom Radford.

Before he became an MLA in 2001, Dr. Taft was an education professor at the University of Alberta. After the 2008 election, in which the Alberta Liberals under his leadership were badly trounced by then-premier Ed Stelmach’s Progressive Conservatives, he threw up his hands and resigned the leadership of the party.

This was probably a mistake, as the Alberta Liberal leadership was then held for a spell by David Swann, a well-meaning but ineffectual Calgary physician, and more recently was captured by Raj Sherman, the former Conservative who is now leading the party away from its long-held principles and away from its remaining core supporters.

But if Dr. Taft’s departure from politics was a bad thing for Alberta’s Liberals, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the rest of us, as he’s recast himself as an author on political and economic topics who has the skills and credibility to definitively answer such questions as the ones posed above. What’s more, he manages to do it in a readable way without sounding too much like a Liberal Party partisan – even going so far as to confess that he was wrong as Liberal leader to join the chorus that bays constantly for less spending on public services.

Working with researchers Mel McMillan and Junaid Jahangir and relying heavily on Statistics Canada’s CANSIM (Canadian Socioeconomic) and Financial Management System databases, Dr. Taft makes a case that I doubt can be effectively challenged by the government’s spokespeople, its apologists among the legions of far-right “think tanks” that serve as the Greek chorus for Alberta’s perpetual state of scarcity and crisis amid fantastic wealth, or far-right entities like the Wildrose Party that demand ever more vigorous attacks on public services.

Before we give away the ending – it won’t surprise you – let’s talk about the places Dr. Taft was able to establish pretty convincingly are not getting our money:

  1. It’s not going to government spending. While government spending in Alberta is incompetently managed by the Tories, gyrating between throwing money at problems to massive and disruptive cutbacks, over the long term our government spending is close to the Canadian average.
  2. It’s not going to public services. “As a society, Alberta spends a steadily shrinking portion of its increasing prosperity on public services.”
  3. It’s not going to education. Comparing five-year averages to smooth out individual years’ ups and downs, K-12 education went up 2 per cent, total, over 20 years.
  4. It’s not going to health care. When you adjust for the size of the provincial economy, spending on health care puts Alberta last in the country. No matter how you measure it, “health care spending in Alberta and Canada is on a gradual long-term upward trend that is well within reason.” Over the long-term, smoothed out with five-year averages, health care spending in Alberta has been rising at about 1.2 per cent a year.
  5. It’s certainly not going to housing and social services.
  6. It’s not going into savings. You can tell from a glance at one of Dr. Taft’s many useful charts that, as he puts it, “Alberta’s natural resource treasure wasn’t going into the Heritage Fund,” or any other savings pool.
  7. And most of it’s not going to personal incomes. Over the last 21 years, average personal incomes in Alberta rose about 35 per cent, accounting for inflation.

So where is it going? It’s going to corporate profits, of course. And the greatest corporate profits are in the oilpatch, naturally. In fact, so much of our money is going into corporate profit that we’re actually selling our collective property at a loss to pad the corporate bottom line!

“Profits in Alberta have grown at rates simply unknown in other jurisdictions, often well beyond double the rates in other provinces and the United States,” Dr. Taft writes. “There is no such largesse for public services, and the government is drawing down public savings rather than building them, doing nothing to prepare for the future.

“The transfer of public wealth to private shareholders is blistering, and our own government, rather than fighting like an owner, or even thinking like an owner, is just happy to find investors who want to cash in.” (Those investors, Dr. Taft notes as an aside, are often state-owned companies from such places as China, Abu Dhabi and Korea. Which makes our “ethical oil” what? Semi-ethical?)

We’re giving away our resources, people, and we’re getting very little in return. “It was going to profits,” Dr. Taft summed up in his conclusion, “and it was doing so at an astonishing rate.”

How astonishing? Corporate profits were up 317 per cent in the same period health care spending rose 28 per cent, incomes were up 35 per cent and education spending increased 2 per cent!

One question Dr. Taft says he couldn’t answer from the data he worked with is where all the money goes once it flows into these bloated corporate profits. But you and I don’t need a book to tell us the answer to that one: It leaves the country for places where it does nothing for Canadians.

No wonder, when you think about it, why corporate special interests and their paid representatives in Canada are so aggressive in defending their right to rapidly export even more of our resources via pipeline to wherever – the environment, the rights of Canadians, and due process itself be damned! This does not, however, explain why so many of our Conservative Western Canadian politicians behave the same way.

Dr. Taft’s highly readable work is important to Canadians who don’t live in Alberta, because the philosophy of government in Alberta is now in the process of being exported to the rest of Canada, thanks to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and because the way we are developing our resources has profound implications for the economies of other Canadian provinces. Our mighty oil-pumped Loony, for example, is contributing to the decline of the manufacturing economy of Central Canada.

Moreover, Dr. Taft’s conclusions are also not going to be something that you’ll hear reported very enthusiastically in the media, either here in Alberta or anywhere else in this country. Was it just a coincidence that at the same time Dr. Taft’s book was being released, a “research paper” worthy of a Grade 9 class project that argued Alberta was paying its public employees too much was being released to massive media fanfare by a claque of neo-Con ideologues associated with the University of Calgary? Whatever the motivation, that was the research that got all the publicity.

No, if you want to read what Dr. Taft and his research partners have to say, you’re going to have to make an effort find it yourself. If you come across a review, it’s most likely to be on a blog like this or in an alternative publication.

Talk to your bookstore, ask the reference desk at your public library to order it or purchase the book online. It’s worth the effort.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Sorry, an Order of Canada for Ralph Klein is not appropriate

by David Climenhaga on January 27, 2012 in Uncategorized with 21 Comments
Ralph Klein, as premier of Alberta. Below: Kevin Taft, an Order of Canada gong.

Does the kind of man who would call immigrants to Alberta from Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada “bums” and “creeps” deserve the Order of Canada?

Surely one would think not! But anything can happen in the weird and wacky world of Canada’s “honours system,” so one supposes that, with a noisy campaign under way by the corporate media and various far-right bloviators, an Order of Canada for Ralph “Katastrophe” Klein is a virtual inevitability.

Still, just because one has been the premier of a Canadian province shouldn’t be an automatic ticket to a membership in the Order, nor has it been since the honour was established in 1967. But the Edmonton Journal seemed to think it ought to be, arguing in a recent editorial that since Mr. Klein got a lot of votes, he should therefore be welcomed to the Order. Klein biographer Don Martin made much the same argument.

One would also think that it would be more appropriate to use the Order to honour people who built things up, rather than those who tore them down, although in fairness the Order’s criteria seem to be a little vague. The website of the Governor-General, the vice-regal personage who administers the Order, says it “recognizes a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation.”

It’s still a free country, so presumably what constitutes those qualities is open to a fairly broad range of public interpretation. Still, once he had left his job as the mayor of Calgary, where he contributed to the creation of the city’s light-rail transit system, Mr. Klein didn’t really do much but knock things down, although there are those who might try to make a case that some of the things he attacked needed attacking.

His famously offensive remarks about Canadians from more eastern regions of the country were also made while he was Calgary’s Chief Magistrate, of course, not after he had ascended to the more august role of premier of an entire province.

Mr. Klein’s principal modus operandi in provincial office seemed essentially to be to take a complex area of activity in which government was involved, throw all the cards in the air and see where they landed. Usually someone else had to pick them up and put them away.

Thus he left our health system in chaos – unlike Tommy Douglas (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1981) who contributed mightily to creating the system of medicare from which all Canadians now benefit.

His government sold off publicly owned health facilities to private interests – unlike Peter Lougheed (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1989) who can be credited with building a network of modern public hospitals throughout Alberta.

However, as the Journal rightly points out, Mr. Klein did give us each a payment big enough to purchase an iPod or a Walkman, and “finally erased the provincial debt.”

Actually, if memory serves, Mr. Klein and his government announced several times that they had finally erased the debt. In reality, of course, they did no such thing. Mr. Klein merely pushed it off on another generation – of politicians, and of all Albertans – to deal with.

To lift a useful household analogy from Kevin Taft, the former Alberta Liberal Leader during the Klein era and the best premier Alberta never had, this is like refusing to repair your house for 30 years, then leaving it to your children with holes in the roof, vermin living under the front porch and rusted cars with no wheels and no engines sitting in the driveway, partly obscured by weeds. All Mr. Klein did was hand off the cost of maintaining Alberta to future generations – for whom the repairs will be more expensive, more complicated and more stressful.

Someone should have a quiet word with former Premier Ed Stelmach, for example, and suss out what he really thinks about Mr. Klein being admitted to the Order. Of course, Mr. Stelmach is too courtly a politician to say aloud what’s actually on his mind, but here’s betting it wouldn’t be all that complimentary if he were inclined to speak up.

After all, it was Mr. Stelmach who had to deal with the social debt and wear the infrastructure deficit that Mr. Klein’s irresponsible government created and left behind. Arguably, along with declining petroleum prices and a recession caused in the back rooms of the banking industry, it was part of what crippled his premiership. It will fall to the rest of us to sort out the chaos in health care created by Mr. Klein, presumably in hopes of justifying widespread privatization, an achievement we will struggle for a long time to accomplish here in Alberta.

Mr. Klein’s greatest claim to fame during his years as premier was that large numbers of Albertans said they thought he’d be a great guy with whom to have a beer. Ask the (sober) residents of an Edmonton homeless men’s shelter how much fun Mr. Klein really was after he’d had a few.

Some of us would rather have a couple of brews with Steve Fonyo (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1985-2009). Mr. Fonyo had his failings, as do we all, but he personally raised $14 million to fight cancer, and he deserved and continues to deserve the honour for that effort.

Mr. Klein’s current physical and mental infirmities are a tragedy with which any of us can feel sympathy and empathy. But he was a catastrophe as a premier, and hardly a unifying force in his treatment of Canadians from elsewhere. Awarding him this great honour – as debased as it may now be owing to the continued presence in its ranks of certain unsavoury characters – is not appropriate.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Liberal Conservative appoints conservative Liberals to battle progressive conservatives, true conservatives

by David Climenhaga on January 20, 2012 in Uncategorized with 8 Comments
I’m with him… Conservative Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman with his new chief of staff, Jonathan Huckabay. Below: Jeff Melland, from his Facebook page.

Earlier today, Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman emailed out a press release announcing big changes to his staff.

Key among these were the additions of Jeff Melland, a former spokesthingy for the British Columbia Liberal caucus, and Ryan Pineo, a former Legislative Assistant with the same West Coast Liberals.

Mr. Melland will be moving to Edmonton and taking up his duties on Feb. 1, said Dr. Sherman’s release. Mr. Pineo, by the sound of the statement, has already started work as Dr. Sherman’s executive assistant. Dr. Sherman, according to his news release, is “very excited about my new team.” (Emphasis added; explanation to follow.)

Makes sense, you say? Liberals helping Liberals, right?

Nothing is that simple. Given the permutations and transmogrifications among the various parties of the right in Western Canada – not to mention their occasional name changes, both formal and informal – it’s very hard to keep track of what’s going on without a program and a GPS unit.

This is where it starts to get complicated. I’ll try to explain.

First of all, we need to remember that Dr. Sherman is a former Progressive Conservative, who was fired by former Conservative premier Ed Stelmach for criticizing his former conservative party when he was still a member of it. Last September, Dr. Sherman was elected as the leader of the Alberta Liberals, who were still Liberals in the normal Canadian sense of that word, when the party threw its leadership vote wide open to non-Liberals as well as members of the party.

That situation seems to have left the current eight-member Alberta Liberal caucus divided into two groups: Seven traditional Liberals, and Dr. Sherman, who with some of his unelected candidates is known as “The Sherman Team.” Of the seven Liberal Liberals, three have announced they don’t intend to run again in the next Alberta election.

Until a few days a go, the Liberal caucus had nine members, but Bridget Pastoor, an MLA from Lethbridge, crossed the floor to join the Conservatives. So now she’s a traditional Liberal who has become a Conservative, under a Conservative Party led by Premier Alison Redford, who some Albertans accuse of being too liberal. But let’s not worry about that right now.

The B.C. Liberals, by the way, really are Conservatives, and have been for years.

That would be why, over in British Columbia, Liberal Premier Christy Clark has just hired a well-known Conservative to be her chief of staff. Now, that particular Conservative, the one hired by Ms. Clark, is a fellow named Ken Boessenkool, who is a former adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Calgary MP who nobody is going to call a Liberal. Back in the day, Mr. Harper, Mr. Boessenkool and a couple of well-known dual-citizens signed the famously Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto. But never mind that just now either.

Getting back to Dr. Sherman, the Conservative who leads the Alberta Liberals, who are still Liberals, he apparently hired the B.C. Conservatives who are called Liberals to help him do well enough in the election to turn the Liberal Liberals into either Conservative Conservatives or Conservative Liberals. Capische?

By the way, some of the old Alberta Liberals who are still Liberals and still MLAs, including the leader before last, Kevin Taft, turned up at an event last night sponsored by the Alberta Federation of Labour to publicize a book by Dr. Taft and a movie about it that describes how Conservatives like Dr. Sherman have been mismanaging the Alberta economy.

Since Dr. Taft is one of the Liberals who won’t be running again, there’s a school of thought he’s “gone rogue” and is openly clashing with Dr. Sherman over the more conservative direction he is trying to steer the Alberta Liberals.

Regardless, somewhere along the line, you may have noted that there is also a British Columbia Conservative Party, which calls itself “B.C.’s only true conservative party.” But they are not really conservatives exactly. They are really Wildrosers, except from British Columbia, although the Wildrosers, who are from Alberta, say they are really conservatives.

The Wildrose Party used to be called the Wildrose Alliance. It is running to replace the Progressive Conservatives under Ms. Redford, who replaced Mr. Stelmach. Neither of them, according to Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith, are true conservatives either. Mr. Harper, for whom Mr. Boessenkool used to work, is widely thought to back the Wildrose Party in Alberta because it’s more conservative than the Conservatives.

So, the Alberta Liberals are being turned into Conservatives, the Alberta Progressive Conservatives are Conservatives, the Wildrose Party are conservatives, the B.C. Liberals are conservatives, and the B.C. Conservatives are conservatives and they all want you to believe they are the only true conservatives. If this sounds like Protestant churches to you, you may have a point.

After Conservative party members elected her Alberta premier in October, Alison Redford appointed as her chief of staff a fellow named Stephen Carter, Up to then, Mr. Carter was best known for running the successful campaign of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nensihi, who is seen as a liberal and who as associated with the Alberta Party, a party that is considered to be pretty much the same as the old pre-Conservative Alberta Liberals.

(I’m waiting for someone to write and tell me that Glenn Taylor, the leader of the Alberta Party is a former New Democrat. Well, you can’t have everything. If he still has his NDP card, we’ll send someone around to pick it up!)

Dr. Sherman, meanwhile, appointed his former Conservative legislative aide Jonathan Huckabay as his chief of staff. Mr. Huckabay also stayed with Dr. Sherman during the spell he was an Independent. He also once taught political science for a year at the Instituto Technologico y Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.

So, to sum up the chief of staff changes, Ms. Clark is a Liberal with a Conservative chief of staff, Ms. Redford is a Conservative with a liberal chief of staff, and Dr. Sherman is a Conservative Liberal with a former political science teacher from a Mexican college as chief of staff.

Dr. Sherman also appointed Earl J. Woods, a former CBC broadcaster, as his senior communications advisor. Mr. Woods will have his work cut out for him. And he thanked Rick Miller, his former chief of staff, who is stepping down to run as a Liberal Alberta Liberal and Communications Director Brian Leadbetter, who sensibly took a job doing public relations for a school board.

I hope that cleared things up!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Federal Liberal adoption of Alberta Liberal leadership voting rule is sure end badly

by David Climenhaga on January 15, 2012 in Uncategorized with 9 Comments
Your blogger with Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman. Below: Federal Liberal Leader Bob Rae.

If he loses his seat in the next provincial election, will Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada?

He can if he wants, if the timing works out. And what the heck, he’s even a Liberal now. It’s said here that losing his seat is a virtual certainty.

At any rate, we are reliably informed that the federal Liberals yesterday adopted the same nutty leadership voting rule as their Alberta counterpart, the one that will allow any interested Canadian to vote for their next party leader.

According to a report in the Toronto Star yesterday, “Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae implored party members to back the move, calling it a ‘historic change’ to the party’s makeup.”

Oh, it’ll be historic change, all right. But one suspects Mr. Rae will wake up this morning, shake his head and say, “what was I thinking?” If not this morning, eventually.

According to the Star’s report of the federal Liberals’ national convention Friday, yesterday and today in Ottawa, the rule will create a new class of party “supporters” who are not dues-paying, card-carrying members but who will get to vote in party elections anyway.

Anyone from Alberta who’s been paying attention will be familiar with this scheme, as it’s essentially the same one adopted by the Alberta Liberals last summer in the run-up to the provincial party’s leadership vote.

But that innovation did not play out exactly as advertised. Dr. Sherman, an Emergency Room physician and mercurial former Conservative who had been fired by then-premier Ed Stelmach for going over the top criticizing his own party’s health care policy, handily defeated a stalwart and effective Liberal MLA named Hugh MacDonald and several other candidates for the party leadership.

It was said in this blog immediately after the Sept. 10 Alberta Liberal vote that there were two schools of thought about Dr. Sherman’s election:

“One is that the former Progressive Conservative Parliamentary Secretary for Health, who was fired from his post and kicked out of the Tory caucus last November by Premier Ed Stelmach is a remarkable politician who has the power to shake up Alberta politics and challenge the government from the centre. …

“The other is that the MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark is a divisive and impulsive one-issue politician who will be the final stake driven through the heart of the moribund Alberta Liberal Party. As veteran NDP campaigner Lou Arab observed in a Tweet moments after the results were announced to a mostly empty gymnasium at the University of Alberta: ‘Raj Sherman is built for speed, not distance. This will end badly for the Liberals.’”

Subsequent events suggest Mr. Arab got it right.

Mr. MacDonald, MLA for Edmonton-Gold Bar, pulled the plug later in September, disgusted at the outcome of the leadership race and the way it was conducted, announcing he would not run in the next election. At the end of November, Lethbridge-East MLA Bridget Pastoor crossed the floor and joined Premier Alison Redford’s Conservatives.

Two other MLAs, former party leader Kevin Taft, Edmonton-Riverview, and Harry Chase, Calgary Varsity, had already announced they wouldn’t run again. That means only four MLAs from the party’s current eight-member caucus will even be running again, at least as Liberals. To date, the Alberta Liberals have nominated only 23 candidates for 87 provincial seats in an election that must take place in March, April or May.

Now, you can argue that the Alberta Liberals’ problems stem from Dr. Sherman’s leadership, or from external problems, but it’s said here that an election process that allowed a high-profile outsider with extremely shallow roots in the party to seize the leadership is a significant part of the problem.

This is not to say the same thing will happen to the federal Liberals if their party administration, which is sure to be larger and more effective, can keep control of the process. But one thing is certain – if the federal Liberals for any reason can’t put forward a promising, high-profile candidate with deep roots in the party, anyone can get elected, and that anyone can turn out to be very bad for the party, as seems to have happened in Alberta.

The problem is not that members of other parties will put up candidates to make mischief, or even vote for candidates that they think are weak. This is unlikely. Rather that “supporters” without deep roots in a party will be swayed by a high-profile candidate who means well, but may not be the the best bet for success when all aspects of party leadership are considered.

This idea is often touted as being a little like the U.S. primary system in its ability to raise a party’s profile and test potential leaders. That metaphor might work if Liberal Party elections were run by Elections Canada, but not in what is still seen as a private party election that will only attract a tiny portion of the electorate. Indeed, the small number likely to vote relative to the total population increases the potential for mischief.

If the federal Liberals hope to spread Alberta political culture to the rest of Canada, a strange idea for a party that has not exactly been a historical success here, it seems like it will be a hard sell in places where multiple party membership is not considered normal political behaviour.

As things stand – and the Alberta experience illustrates – if you are looking for proof the Liberal Party of Canada had lost faith in its own future and is grasping at straws to survive, the adoption of this rule is it.

Just as it seems to have for provincial Liberals in Alberta, this will end badly for the Liberal Party of Canada.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Future bleak for Alberta liberals; among progressive parties, only NDP has momentum

by David Climenhaga on November 25, 2011 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
The Alberta Liberals: running out of gas and running out of road? Below: Liberal Leader Raj Sherman, NDP Leader Brian Mason, NDP candidates Shannon Phillips and Deron Bilous.

If you want a useful yardstick of the relative health of Alberta’s opposition parties, you need look no further than the number of candidates they have nominated for the next provincial election.

Using this measure, it is very unlikely the increasingly marginalized Alberta Liberal Party under Leader Raj Sherman will be capable of fielding a full slate of candidates on election day.

There will be 87 seats in the provincial Legislature after the next election. Here is a prediction: The Liberals will be unable to field a slate of even two-thirds that number, and may only be able to find candidates for about half the seats in the Legislature.

This is not idle mean-spiritedness. It is a forecast based on the difficulty all Alberta opposition parties have finding and fielding candidates, and the number of candidates the parties have nominated to date – with a general election possibly as close as three months away and certainly coming no later than six months from now.

Here are the nomination numbers for the three major opposition parties, which any sensible Alberta Liberal supporter must find deeply troubling:

New Democratic Party: 60
Wildrose Alliance: 58
Alberta Liberals: 19

Anyone who knows politics knows that while it may be possible to find warm bodies to fill out a slate of candidates, even for governing parties it is difficult to find good candidates with whom electors will really be thrilled. One needs only consider some of the lags in Premier Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservative caucus to know the truth of this!

Nevertheless, obviously both the NDP and the Wildrose Party have been doing their work with commitment and seriousness and will have full slates ready to go whenever the writ is dropped. Only the Conservatives will know when that is, of course, because Premier Redford’s “fixed election dates” law doesn’t fix an election date. It does, however, set the three-month period in which the vote will fall, which is why we can be confident the Liberal nomination numbers are going to be a big problem for the party.

Lacking key political staff and watching their support sag, the Liberals would be in a more difficult position anyway than the NDP or the Wildrose Party, even if they had more candidates.

Nomination numbers are moving targets, naturally. Last night, New Democrats in Edmonton-Centre nominated Candidate No. 60, Nadine Bailey, a veteran campaigner who ran federally for the party in May in the nearby Edmonton-Mill Woods-Beaumont riding. (She was also, I kid you not, nominated in the Canada’s Sexiest Candidate contest started by a Toronto blogger who obviously had too much time on his hands.)

The NDP and Wildrose numbers tend to go back and forth as both parties proceed competently toward nomination of full slates. In fact, both will likely have 70 or more nominated within the next couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, the governing Conservatives, at 51 nominations, are a little behind, but given their position as Alberta’s Natural Governing Party with a large elected caucus, they will have less trouble finding qualified candidates for the few ridings in which they don’t already hold seats. The Alberta Party, which has never made it onto the province’s political radar screen and is unlikely to do so now, has nominated only eight.

But while everyone else’s numbers are building, the Liberals’ tally stumbled backward Monday with the defection of Lethbridge-East MLA Bridget Pastoor to Premier Redford’s Tories. This brought nominated Alberta Liberal candidates down from the 20 noted in Dave Cournoyer’s useful Daveberta blog, consistently the best source on Alberta nomination tallies and names.

The loss of Ms. Pastoor comes on top of announcements by the backbone of the Liberal caucus – experienced MLAs like former leadership candidate Edmonton-Gold Bar MLA Hugh MacDonald, former leader and Edmonton-Riverside MLA Kevin Taft and Calgary-Varsity’s Harry Chase – that they won’t be seeking re-election. Another former potential Liberal leader, Dave Taylor, quit the caucus months ago and now sits as the Alberta Party’s sole MLA. He too won’t be running again in Calgary-Currie.

This collapse in MLA support is arguably even more serious to the Alberta Liberal Party’s prospects than its decline in popular support as recorded by public opinion polls from better than a quarter of the Alberta electorate in the 2008 general election to somewhere between 11 and 15 per cent today.

As for the NDP and Wildrose Party, while they have similar numbers of candidates nominated and arguably possess similar levels of political skill, they cannot simply be considered interchangeable destinations for protest votes.

You can judge a party by its platform statements or by the people who support it. By either measure, the well-funded Wildrose Party is far to the right of the governing Conservatives. And never forget that despite Wildrose rhetoric to the contrary, Premier Redford and her Conservatives are pretty far to the right.

The Wildrose Party, led by former Fraser Institute functionary Danielle Smith, is dedicated to the proposition all government services ought to be privatized – and that goes particularly for the work done by the “publicly funded” public health system they promise to maintain with nuanced precision.

By contrast, the NDP led by Brian Mason is unabashedly a party of the progressive centre-left, committed to maintaining and improving publicly financed, publicly operated health care. (This is not something the Liberal leader, not so long ago the Conservative junior minister for health, can say!)

Mr. Mason earned his living doing a real job, driving a bus, before remaking himself as an effective Parliamentarian and legislative leader. With Edmonton-Strathcona MLA Rachel Notley, the small NDP caucus has consistently punched above their weight in Question Period.

With neither the Liberals nor the Alberta Party likely capable of nominating full slates of candidates, obviously the NDP is the only progressive opposition party where progressive voters can hope to get any impact with their votes.

Moreover, unlike some elections in the past, the NDP this time has been able to attract remarkably good candidates in all parts of the province. In addition to Ms. Bailey in Edmonton-Centre, there is five-term city councillor Lorna Watkins-Zimmer in Red Deer, Alberta Federation of Labour researcher Shannon Phillips in Lethbridge-West, and former councillor Wanda Laurin in Peace River.

In Edmonton, where the NDP enjoys a significant regional advantage, running ahead of all other opposition parties according to a recent Environics poll, there are candidates like Friends of Medicare Executive Director David Eggen in Edmonton-Calder, a former MLA, teacher Deron Bilous in Edmonton-Beverly and social worker Lori Sigurdson in Edmonton-Riverview.

So, sorry, but by every measure, the future looks very bleak for the Alberta Liberals.

The Wildrose Alliance is a radical right-wing party that would lead Albertans down a dangerous path to wholesale privatization of public services.

In this election cycle in Alberta, the New Democrats are the only progressive party with enough momentum to have a meaningful impact in the next election.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta Liberals hit by defection as implosion continues; new poll suggests NDP potential for growth

by David Climenhaga on November 22, 2011 in Uncategorized with 9 Comments
Bridget Pastoor, still a Liberal to the party’s missing webmaster. Below: Raj Sherman.

No one can say the Alberta Liberals don’t have movement. The trouble is, it’s all down hill.

That the slow-motion implosion of the Alberta Liberal Party is gathering speed was evident on two fronts yesterday, as one of the party’s veteran MLAs skedaddled for the government benches and a new poll by Environics Research Group confirmed the party is mired in third place among the province’s opposition parties.

The departure of Lethbridge-East MLA Bridget Pastoor, 71, was hardly the surprise the media made it out to be. She’s been openly flirting with the governing Progressive Conservatives since early 2009, and like a lot of Alberta politicians of various stripes she was a Conservative before she was anything else.

But the timing of Ms. Pastoor’s floor crossing was dramatic, a symbolic slap in the face of the Liberal leader by freshly appointed Premier Alison Redford, on the first day of Part II of the Legislature’s abbreviated fall sitting almost a year to the day after Dr. Sherman threw a spanner into the Conservative works by getting himself fired as Parliamentary Secretary for Health, kicked out of the Conservative caucus and setting the stage for then-premier Ed Stelmach’s unhappy departure from power.

Back in November 2010, with the province in a tizzy about the state of health care and Dr. Sherman openly lambasting his own party, the part-time Emergency Room doc and Tory MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark seemed like the most popular politician in the province. And while the sun shone last summer and fall, the by-then Independent Dr. Sherman was able to make hay with his popularity – getting himself elected leader of the Alberta Liberals on Sept. 10.

But that was then and this is now. The stumblebum government of Mr. Stelmach has been replaced by a more sure-footed version of the same thing led by Ms. Redford, who was sworn in at the start of October, and Dr. Sherman and the Liberals find themselves in dire straights.

Hugh MacDonald, the seasoned veteran of many Liberal campaigns and effective MLA who challenged Dr. Sherman for the party leadership, has pulled the plug in disgust at the outcome of the weird leadership race, in which the party foolishly allowed anyone to vote, whether or not they were party members.

Liberal MLAs Kevin Taft, Edmonton Riverview, and Harry Chase, Calgary Varsity, had already announced they wouldn’t run again. Back in 2010, Calgary-Currie MLA Dave Taylor quit the party, sitting for a spell as an Independent, then as an MLA for the fledgling and barely noticed Alberta Party. He’ll retire from politics too when the next election is called.

Party staff is scuttling down the hawsers as the Liberal ship settles in the water.

As for Ms. Pastoor, she will run as a Tory in the next election, which, presumably, will fall between March 1 and May 31, according to the fixed-election law promised in this Legislative session by the Redford Tories.

If the latest Environics polling suggests anything, it may be that while Albertans generally liked Dr. Sherman as a rebel Tory, and didn’t mind him as a principled Independent, they’ve grown tired of him as the leader of the Opposition. The slide of the Liberals also suggests that Alberta’s substantial numbers of die-hard Liberals are finally losing interest in their moribund party with the Conservative Dr. Sherman at the helm.

The Environics numbers – which were collected for the Calgary Herald between Nov. 4 and 8, then sat upon by the newspaper until now for some reason – show Ms. Redford’s Tories with a commanding 51-per-cent lead, indicating Albertans are quite satisfied with their government at the end of a tempestuous year.

The province-wide breakdown looks like this:

Progressive Conservatives – 51 per cent
Wildrose Party – 19 per cent
New Democratic Party – 14 per cent
Alberta Liberals – 13 per cent

There’s not much joy here for the Wildrose Party under Danielle Smith, whose fortunes have also fallen with the departure of Mr. Stelmach and the rise of Ms. Redford.

If normal recent patterns persist, you can expect the Wildrose Party to release a poll of dubious provenance in a day or two that shows that party at a higher level and the Conservatives lower, with everyone else in about the same place.

Significantly, however, the Environics results showed Alberta’s New Democrats under the steady old hand of Brian Mason second only to the Conservatives in the Capital Region, enjoying 21-per-cent support in the area.

This suggests that the NDP is the only opposition party with the potential for growth in the present circumstances. Coming into the 2008 provincial election at a lower level of support, they lost two of their four pre-2008 Edmonton seats and held on to Mr. Mason’s in Edmonton-Highlands and Rachel Notley’s in Edmonton-Strathcona.

If their current numbers hold, especially if the Wildrose Party can make a strong showing and split the right-wing vote, it’s realistic for New Democrats to hope to recapture the two seats they lost in 2008 and return to four seats in the Legislature.

If the New Democrats want to move beyond that, however, they are going to have to move their support into the 25-per-cent range in the Edmonton area – a development that is within the realm of possibility with the continued decline of Dr. Sherman’s Liberals.

Since the NDP’s regional advantage around Edmonton plays more strongly at current support levels than the Wildrose Party’s regional advantage in Calgary, it could be a very close contest between the two parties to see which one emerges as the official Opposition.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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