All posts tagged Linda Duncan

Undemocratic impulses? Who ya gonna call? Not Jimmy Carter!

by David Climenhaga on October 30, 2012 in Canadian Politics, Ukrainian Politics with 4 Comments

When it comes to ensuring the integrity of foreign elections, take it from Alberta Diary, Jimmy Carter is outstanding in the field. Below: Alberta MP Linda Duncan and Ukrainian President Viktor F. Yanukovich.

By the sound of it, the international observers of Sunday’s Ukrainian parliamentary elections did manage to catch the government of President Viktor F. Yanukovich getting up to some undemocratic naughtiness.

Their report, which the international media yesterday described as scathing, accused Mr. Yanukovich’s Party of Regions of unfairly benefiting from excessive money from supporters, abuse of government resources to make it look good and heavily biased media coverage in its favour.

So it comes as no surprise that on the same day the party was claiming to have won the election and hung onto its parliamentary majority.

Last week during the lead-up to the Ukrainian vote, I have to tell you I was worried our Canadian observers of that vote wouldn’t manage to notice a thing – not because they weren’t fine people, but because they didn’t have the right expertise.

At least, I was concerned that if they were all like Linda Duncan – the only one of the 500 or so Canadian observers that I happen to know – we might not be sending the right sort people to ensure the former Soviet Republic’s national elections were open and fair.

After all, the Member of Parliament for Edmonton Strathcona, the sole New Democrat MP elected in Alberta in the past two federal elections, is a thoroughly honorable and upright person who won and kept her seat in the face of this province’s usual Tory onslaught solely by dint of hard constituency work and her famously energetic style of campaigning.

Before becoming a successful politician, Ms. Duncan had a reputation as a smart lawyer – which certainly puts her in a good position to understand how dire the implications are when she worries about Ukraine, where, as she put it in a news release before departing for the city of Kyiv on Oct. 25, even before the election campaign there had been “backsliding of democracy and challenges with erosion of law.”

Indeed, as Director of the Canada-Ukraine Parliamentary Friendship Group, Ms. Duncan recently contributed to a report on the growing democratic deficit in Ukraine, a copy of which may be read here.

My worry was simply this: the kind of people who steal elections are by definition sneaks – sort of like computer hackers. Indeed, nowadays a lot of them are computer hackers. They are never people like Linda Duncan, who is honest, upright and prepared to work hard to win. So, I wondered, had we sent exactly the wrong kind of people to solve the problem in Ukraine?

Indeed, wouldn’t an honest politician and an upright lawyer be the easiest kind of person to fool when you send out your sneaks and electoral cat burglars, your robo-callers and push-pollsters, your ballot-box stuffers and vote suppressers? They might not even notice and end up endorsing an election result that in fact was pretty hinky!

I’ve thought for years this is why the Americans are forever asking Jimmy Carter, the former peanut farmer and Democratic president defeated after one term by Ronald Reagan, to make sure foreign elections are clean at the same time as they’re assigning CIA operatives to corrupt the same vote Mr. Carter is checking up on.

The CIA steals the election and laughs up its collective sleeve back at HQ in Langley, Va., while Mr. Carter endorses the result and makes us believe it because he believes it so sincerely himself.

Well, that’s just me wearing my tinfoil hat, probably. And anyway, Mr. Carter doesn’t seem to have made it to Ukraine for Sunday’s election. But still, on the theory that it takes a thief to catch a thief, I say we have many people in Canada who are highly qualified to track down electoral chicanery – leastways if we could only identify who they all are.

I mean, just for starters, the whole Conservative Party of Canada campaign team is not exactly unfamiliar with the concepts of excessive money from supporters, misuse of public resources to make the government look good and heavily biased media coverage in its favour!

And what about the anonymous person who leaked that 22,000-name Alberta Progressive Conservative Party membership list to Environics back in October 2011, so that Environics could do an interesting poll of Tory party members’ leadership voting intentions?

Or what about the robo-callers? Remember them? They were the nice young people who phoned you up if you happened to be a Liberal voter in certain closely fought Ontario ridings the night before the May 2011 federal election, the one in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper finally got his coveted majority, and advised you that your polling station had been moved to a vacant lot between a pawn shop and a tattoo parlour in a part of town where there weren’t many streetlights.

Last we heard, both Elections Canada and the police were looking into those cases, but don’t expect any results any time soon, and anyway, the courts are now filling up with Conservative appointments, thank you very much, just in case there are ever any actual charges or legal challenges.

But if we could just find one of the people who came up with that scheme – a seemingly impossible task, alas – you’d think they’d be ideal at ferreting out the same sort of thing if Ukrainian telephone call-display units start showing the Moscow area code on calls from extremely rude people claiming to be from the Ukrainian equivalent of the Liberals or the NDP. (Isn’t Ukraine the place where they had an Orange Revolution?)

And what if someone prorogues the Ukrainian Parliament to prevent an expression of the democratic will of the people? Wouldn’t it be better to have Prime Minister Harper or retiring Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty there to spot the signs of incipient undemocratic impulses? Or at least one of their advisors?

Or what if Mr. Yanukovich or one of his henchpersons decides to pass an omnibus budget bill with about 300 provisions that have nothing to do with the budget, or signs a 31-year surrender of national sovereignty with the Russians in the form of secret treaty than no Ukrainian gets to debate before it’s sealed and delivered. Call it, say, the Russia-Ukraine Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement.

Once again, wouldn’t someone from Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s office be better qualified for the observer’s job than, say, Ms. Duncan?

You probably get where I’m heading with this by now. After all, there’s more than a little evidence there’s been some backsliding of democracy right here in Canada, not to mention some challenges with erosion of law.

But, given what was noticed over there in Ukraine, maybe some of the 500 Canadians Prime Minister Stephen Harper sent off with a pat on the back did have the right kind of know-how.

What I want to know is, the next time we have an election here in Canada, who are we gonna call? And please don’t say Jimmy Carter!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

If Alberta’s Tories loved Peter Lougheed so much, why do they have so little to say about him?

by David Climenhaga on September 24, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics with 6 Comments

Linda Duncan at the Alberta NDP’s 50th annual convention over the weekend. Below: Ralph Goodale, Peter Lougheed.

We have 28 federal electoral districts in Alberta of which 27 elected members of the Conservative Party of Canada.

Of those 27 Conservative MPs, one has since been kicked out of caucus for refusing to blow into a Breathalyzer and now sits as an independent Conservative. One has quit and not yet been replaced. The 28th is a New Democrat.

So how many Alberta Members of Parliament, do you think, paid tribute to former Alberta Premier Peter Lougheed in the House of Commons when Parliament resumed sitting four days after Mr. Lougheed’s death in Calgary at 84?

The answer would be “only one.”

And who was that sole Alberta Member of Parliament who did make a tribute to Mr. Lougheed in the House of Commons? Why, that would be Linda Duncan, Alberta’s sole New Democrat MP, the representative for Edmonton-Strathcona.

Indeed, only two MPs had anything nice to say about Mr. Lougheed in Parliament when it resumed sitting after his passing, and the other was a Liberal from Saskatchewan – former cabinet minister and deputy leader Ralph Goodale.

I raise this only because of the instinctively critical reaction of a few people in Alberta Tory circles to recent suggestions by some New Democrats that today’s Alberta NDP has more in common with the program of Mr. Lougheed when he was premier from 1971 to 1985 than does the party whose long spell in power began under his leadership.

Actually, even on this point the Tory response has been pretty muted – except for a few Twitterers who obviously haven’t been paying adequate attention to the Tory Trollfeed. After all, the governments of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Premier Alison Redford, who claim to wear the mantle of the former premier, would have trouble claiming in a serious debate that their market fundamentalism looks much like any policy Mr. Lougheed would have adopted, or that current NDP policies wouldn’t have mostly made sense to Alberta Conservatives circa 1971.

It’s said here the Conservative braintrust must recognize that it could get a little embarrassing for today’s Conservatives to try to make a serious case they ought to be called the party of Peter Lougheed – and not the party of Ralph Klein!

Mr. Lougheed, Ms. Duncan told the House of Commons during the 15 minutes before Question Period during which MPs may comment on whatever they wish, was “a formidable advocate for establishing provincial control of natural resources and for establishing a stronger place for Alberta in the federation.”

“Yet he contributed so much more on other fronts,” she went on. “He created the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, investing resource royalties towards health care and medical research. He established the first Alberta Ministry of Culture and set aside protected areas, notably Kananaskis Country. He enacted the Alberta Bill of Rights and contributed to the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights. Recently, he raised concerns with the fast pace of development of the oilsands and called for greater attention to the environment. In his own words, Peter Lougheed was a Canadian first, an Albertan second and a political partisan third. He left a lasting legacy benefiting not only Albertans but all Canadians. We would do well to build on his legacy and his recent sage advice. …”

Since Monday was the first day after Mr. Lougheed’s death that our MPs got together, it seems unlikely Ms. Duncan’s remarks were meant as a cynical or overtly political gesture. As Opposition environment critic, however, she could hardly be blamed for mentioning Mr. Lougheed’s recent words of caution about the pace of oil sands development. That reference, along with the one about the Charter of Rights, must have made Mr. Harper and his spear-carriers grind their teeth – although possibly not nearly as much as when Mr. Lougheed said it.

No doubt Ms. Duncan expected to hear similar remarks from the some of her 25 Conservative fellow Parliamentarians. If so, she was disappointed.

Instead, from them, there was little but silence on the topic. From all the Conservative MPS in the House, according to Postmedia News, one said she was changing her name, one lauded an Olympic athlete, one said the government wants to restore the planet’s ozone layer and three told the same pathetic lie about the NDP’s tax policies.

Of course, you may say, Conservative politicians had their chance to make their remarks at Mr. Lougheed’s public memorial service in Calgary or in the media.

This is true enough. Mind you, Prime Minister Harper spent almost as much time on that occasion attacking the legacy of Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, even if he didn’t name the man, as he did praising Mr. Lougheed.

Those few in the ranks who mentioned him at all, like the redoubtable Parliamentary blogger Brent Rathgeber, passed pretty lightly over Mr. Lougheed’s real accomplishments – for the obvious reason, I am sure, that they don’t show the current crop of Conservative legislators at either level of government in a very good light.

Still, Mr. Rathgeber’s blog – posted eight days after Ms. Duncan’s tribute in the House – made one good point: “As a lasting legacy, modern politicians should study his style and replicate his methods. It would improve our democracy.”

Agreed. Although it wouldn’t hurt to adopt some of his policies too!

Twenty-five Conservative MPs from this province, and not one of them had anything to say in Parliament about Peter Lougheed! Their silence speaks for itself!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Mystery story: is there an opposition candidate who can win the Calgary Centre by-election?

by David Climenhaga on August 1, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Centre By-election, Canadian Politics with 8 Comments

Your blogger with David Swann: Remember, when the author of this blog appears in a picture with a politician, it does not necessarily imply an endorsement. (That’s enough photos with politicians for one week, thanks – ed.) Below: Likely Conservative winner Joan Crockatt, Edmonton Strathcona NDP MP Linda Duncan and successful political strategist Stephen Carter.

At least as far as the opposition parties’ chances go in the Calgary Centre by-election, successful political strategist Stephen Carter called it bang on in a recent Calgary Herald story: “Everything depends on the candidate.”

So the question of the day is, is there an opposition candidate so strong he or she could actually defeat an apparent shoo-in Conservative in the Calgary Centre by-election, whenever Prime Minister Stephen Harper gets around to calling it? The answer is, as you shall see … maybe!

The conventional wisdom here in Alberta, of course, is that elections don’t really matter, because Conservatives always win them. This is said to be especially so in federal elections in Calgary. So the real fight’s for the nomination.

But as the old song says, it ain’t necessarily so. Edmonton Strathcona MP Linda Duncan, the New Democratic Party’s environment critic, has proved this, twice, if not in Calgary.

Unless there’s an earth-shattering surprise before Thursday, when Conservative nominations close, the Tories are going to go into this by-election without a star candidate that really glitters – which, given the assumption they’re going to win anyway, might be just the way Prime Minister Stephen Harper wants it.

As was argued in this space Monday, Joan Crockatt is the most credible Conservative candidate still standing, but neither she nor her principal challenger, Jon Lord, enjoys a particularly high profile or much of a track record as a campaigner. Either one, or any of the three or four others thought to be still interested in the race to replace former MP Lee Richardson, would be vulnerable to a good opposition candidate.

What’s more, Calgary Centre may not be your Tory father’s Calgary riding. Former prime minister and Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark held Calgary Centre in 2000 against the Conservative Reform Alliance Party tsunami that swept across much of the Prairies that year – leaving plenty of deadwood and other debris that’s still lying around hereabouts.

Mr. Clark, often reviled here in his native province as a Red Tory, was buoyed by the large number of what used to be known as Young Urban Professionals living their Double Income No Kids lifestyles in the riding’s high-rises, not to mention plenty of footloose folks from away who may have been used to voting NDP, Liberal or what have you when they were Down Home.

So as Interim federal Liberal Leader Bob Rae told reporters while flipping pancakes at a recent Calgary Stampede breakfast, these are just the kind of folks who are “open to a centrist, sensible and progressive” political party – the one he had in mind, presumably, being his own.

And there are good reasons for the Liberals to try hard in this by-election. If they could somehow eke out a victory, they could claim with justice to be on their way back to their historical role as Canada’s Natural Governing Party. By the same yardstick, if the New Democrats can win, they’ll arguably have made a big step forward in building the credibility they need to form the government in the next federal general election.

As of right now, however, the Liberals don’t seem to have particularly spectacular candidates. Two have been given the green light by the party to contest the nomination: teacher Rahim Sajan and full-time conservationist Harvey Locke. Both are fine people, I am sure, but neither has a high profile or is known as a veteran campaigner.

Liberal nominations remain open, and at least one other candidate may be considering a run. Two have been advised they didn’t make the cut.

The Greens, meanwhile, are expected to try again with communications consultant William Hamilton, likely with similar results as the last time.

Which brings us to the matter of the New Democratic Party, arguably the party with the most to gain in this game, and whatever it is that the Official Opposition is up to in Calgary Centre. As Kady O’Malley put it in an informative and amusing CBC political blog recently, the NDP “are playing remarkably coy; presumably, the party will field a candidate, but as yet, no names of likely suspects have surfaced.”

This suggests that after kicking around names like former Calgary aldermen Joe Ceci and Bob Hawkesworth, the NDP has finally found a live one – someone who would have plenty of credibility in the riding, and who could unite New Democrats, Liberals and Greens in a campaign that, in an off-year by-election, just might edge out a lacklustre Conservative candidate.

Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair sure spent a lot of time hanging around the Calgary Stampede earlier this month, and presumably like Mr. Rae he was doing more than just flipping flapjacks. Moreover, on July 11 NDP House Leader Nathan Cullen hosted an “interactive workshop” in a Calgary church on how to use the Calgary Centre by-election to “give Stephen Harper a stinging message in his own backyard that his divisive politics aren’t going to cut it anymore.”

The still-secret ingredient: a high-profile candidate who would appeal to Liberals, Greens and New Democrats alike.

There is such a person, of course. His name is David Swann, the former Alberta Liberal leader who always seemed to me to be more of a New Democrat than one of the Liberals he was trying to lead. Of course, he’s still an Alberta Liberal MLA.

Dr. Swann is brave – willing to go on humanitarian missions to Iraq, for example. He’s got impeccable environmental credentials – before getting into politics he was fired by the Alberta government from his job as Medical Officer of Health for Palliser Health and Headwaters Health Regions for daring to call for government action on air pollution. He’s a physician who really gets it about the value of public health care in Canada, serving as the Alberta Liberals’ health and environment critic in the Legislature.

He’s also proved he can get elected – repeatedly – in essentially the same patch of turf as Calgary Centre, since his Calgary-Mountain View provincial riding right across the Bow River.

What’s more, he’s got to be deeply frustrated as a member of former Conservative Raj Sherman’s small Alberta Liberal caucus – where, recently, an issue sure to be dear to Dr. Swann’s heart, the quality of food in seniors’ residences, was left to a union and the far-right Wildrose Party to successfully fight with hardly a peep from the Liberals.

Finally, Dr. Swann conducts himself with respect and quiet dignity, even when he’s taking annoying shots from bloggers like this one. He’s so tall and craggy he’s always reminded me of Abraham Lincoln, and he will you too!

I can’t tell you if Dr. Swann will sign on as the NDP candidate – but I can tell a heck of a lot of progressive Albertans of all stripes have been saying they wish he would. If he has been talking to them, the New Democrats should grab him and hang on for dear life. He’s a Knee-Dipper at heart, anyway, and he’s the kind of Albertan all Canadians could be proud to have in the House of Commons. He’d be proof the NDP was the kind of broad-based progressive movement Mr. Mulcair seems determined to build.

Indeed, Dr. Swann would be an invaluable addition to Prime Minister Mulcair’s first cabinet.

Above all, it is said here, he could beat any of the candidates Mr. Harper’s Conservatives are likely to put forward whenever that by-election takes place.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Parks Canada carnage sideswipes Jasper with nary a peep from local Tory MP

by David Climenhaga on May 4, 2012 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
Will the last person to leave Jasper please turn out the lights? A view of Beauvert Lake, near the Jasper townsite, as the sun sets. Below: Anchors Aweigh! There’ll be nothing at all like this for the good people of Jasper from their Conservative MP, Rob Merrifield. Rob who?

Where’s Rob Merrifield, the Conservative MP for Yellowhead, the huge western Alberta riding that includes the town of Jasper?

I ask only because the massive job cuts at Parks Canada by the radical neo-Cons in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s misnamed Conservative government are really kicking the snot out of Jasper and have long-term implications for the wellbeing of the park.

So you’d think that the local Member of Parliament would have something to say about this. But, as far as I can see, Mr. Merrifield is nowhere to be seen or heard.

This is actually pretty typical of Alberta’s vast army of Conservative MPs. They’re all for “keeping taxes low,” getting rid of the gun registry, fighting crime (usually in ways that actually assist crime, but never mind) and signing a free-trade agreement with Europe.

But when the going gets tough and the brainiacs in the Prime Minister’s Office come up with a scheme like this one that really hurts their own constituents, these tough Tory MPs get gone … shopping maybe. Anyhoo, they’re usually absent without leave from any local discussion of the topic.

So it’s hardly surprising that there’s nothing on Mr. Merrifield’s website about the effects of the Parks Canada cutbacks on Jasper National Park or the Jasper townsite – although all of the topics noted above were featured prominently there yesterday in a stream of news-free news bites.

Nor was Mr. Merrifield quoted in the local media’s accounts of the Parks Canada carnage – although that’s not necessarily his fault given the supine approach most professional journalists around here take to reporting Harperite depredations. (This week the Edmonton Journal was bragging about how it won a Pulitzer Prize for courageously standing up to the provincial government’s attempt to stifle freedom of the press … in 1938.)

The Journal did provide some helpful details yesterday on the Parks Canada cuts – trails let go to seed and weed, fewer patrols to protect both tourists and wildlife, and the sell-off of precious national properties with profit potential to “the private sector” for a song. (Well, the Journal didn’t say anything about it being for a song, but trust me on that part.)

One in eight of the town’s 340 Parks Canada employees will get it in this first round of slashing, the paper reported. Oh well, maybe they can get jobs fighting fires at the Jasper Park Lodge the next time it spontaneously bursts into flames.

This stuff is bad news if you’re a grizzly, a caribou or some other kind of endangered species – your chances of being successfully hunted surreptitiously just went up considerably. It’s bad news if you’re a tourist lost on a trail – you’ll likely have to wait even longer to get rescued, or maybe even just die. It’s bad news if you’re running a business in Jasper – because in the end this is going to result in fewer tourists spending less time there. It’s bad news if you live and work in Jasper – especially if you work for Parks Canada.

It’s good news, I suppose, if you don’t feel like paying the park fees at the gates – there hasn’t been much enforcement in this area for years and now there will be even less. It’ll operate on the honour system, I guess. Those of us who want to make sure there’s enough change collected for Ottawa to purchase a couple of extra F-35s can contribute voluntarily as we pass through the gates, and the rest of us can just tell the attendant we’re “going through to Valemount.” If there is an attendant, that is.

You’d think this would be something Mr. Merrifield – the elected and well-paid federal representative for the town, after all – would want to speak out about, if only to say, “How most unfortunate for you! Have I told you about the benefits of our new free-trade deal with Herzoslovakia?”

But no soap, apparently.

Oh well, we can only feel so sorry for ourselves when this happens in Alberta, the Canadian province that is worst served by its federal Members of Parliament – with only about one notable exception, and that would be the NDP member for Edmonton-Strathcona. (Linda Duncan does prove one bit of Tory dogma has a little truth to it: when it comes to politics, anyway, competition is good.)

Basically, we barely hear from most of these Conservatives, except when they’re jumping into the provincial fray and telling us we ought to vote for the market-fundamentalist Wildrose Party. Sometimes I wonder if their lackadaisically open neglect is a part of a cleverly thought-out plot on their part to persuade us that our taxes are a waste of money.

But since we keep electing them with metronomic regularity, we can hardly complain about it, can we?

Mr. Merrifield’s tame Wikipedia page boasts about the important role he played as Minister of State for Transport, a position he no longer occupies, in “revitalizing Marine Atlantic with two new ferries.”

Well! Anchors aweigh! Having grown up on an island, I can vouch for the fact that’s a good thing. But perhaps the good people of Jasper and the nearby towns just outside the park gates should ask themselves this: “What he has done for us lately?”

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

First impressions: NDP leadership candidate Peggy Nash in Edmonton

by David Climenhaga on December 17, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
NDP leadership candidate Peggy Nash at last night’s “kitchen-table talk” in Edmonton. Below: Marlin Schmidt.

There are only three or so of the nine candidates for the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party, and therefore for Leader of the Opposition, who are truly qualified to do the job and do it right now.

One of them is Peggy Nash, who spoke at a “kitchen-table talk” in Edmonton last night. Another is Brian Topp, who was at a similar event here Monday.

While Edmonton New Democrats won’t get a chance to see all the candidates in action debating one another – a situation that can be as distracting as it is enlightening – seeing these two strong candidates in the same meeting room a few days apart provided a worthwhile opportunity to compare their ability to engage a wider audience of Canadians.

Ms. Nash’s resume is superb – she earned the economic chops as finance critic under Jack Layton’s leadership to offer better polices than the Conservatives and make Canadians believe in them, she is fluent in both official languages and she has enormous experience building progressive alliances with Canada’s social movements, including labour where she has been a senior official with the Canadian Auto Workers Union.

Moreover, as she clearly demonstrated yesterday, Ms. Nash is a capable speaker who, as Duncan Cameron of Rabble.ca wrote in his endorsement of her candidacy and in other pieces, speaks with sympathy, humour and coolness under pressure.

Since we are talking about a top player in an elite political league here, though, all this is to be expected. Her performance yesterday demonstrated that she could do the job if New Democrats vote to choose her as leader on March 24.

But Ms. Nash is not merely running for the leadership of a perennial Parliamentary third party but to be Leader of the Opposition and the government-in-waiting of Canada at a crucial moment in our country’s history. As a candidate in that high-stakes league, she needed to show she could really engage and electrify her sympathetic audience of New Democrats, and that didn’t happen.

Now, this was one meeting, in a town that no doubt was at the end of a long and tiring road. But where Mr. Topp energized his audience Monday and turned up the temperature in the room, Ms. Nash was temperate and uninspiring. Her only passionate moment was in response to a question about the planned Conservative vandalism to the national rifle and shotgun registry.

The ability to really grab the attention of an audience and hang onto it is vitally important. As Ms. Nash put it last night in response to a question, “the first goal is to win the next federal election.” But to win the next federal election, the NDP leader is going to have to motivate and move more Canadians than just the familiar and sympathetic old New Democratic faces who dependably show up at meetings like this one and make them feel like church services.

Ms. Nash didn’t say anything with which this New Democrat disagreed, or anyone else in the room by the sound of it, and she made a couple of points I strongly support. As previously noted in this space, I’d be surprised if any of the candidates do anything differently. But unlike Mr. Topp, she didn’t do it in a way that I feel is likely to engage many voters outside NDP circles.

This showed in the responses of the audience. The meeting was chaired by Edmonton-Gold Bar provincial candidate Marlin Schmidt with the same good cheer and discipline he demonstrated Monday. But more questioners rambled on, instead of sticking to their points. It was hard to shake the feeling many of them weren’t really all that anxious to hear what Ms. Nash had to say because when they already knew her answer. It’s the passion that makes you want to listen and, last night at least, the passion was missing.

The audience ran out of steam 15 minutes early. No one could think of another question and Mr. Schmidt gently brought the formal meeting to an end. On Monday, hands were still waving when the time ran out, and the people waving them seemed genuinely upset they didn’t get their chance to query Mr. Topp.

The stakes could hardly be higher than they will be in the next federal election, in 2015 or whenever it takes place. New Democrats need a leader who can reach out and grab Canadian voters by the lapels and give them a good shake.

Based on their Edmonton performances, we know that Mr. Topp has that ability. Whether Ms. Nash does is not so clear. Other voices, of course, are yet to be heard from.

+ + +

It is an absolute disgrace that these well-attended meetings in the City Arts Centre at 84th Avenue and 109th Street in the midst of NDP MP Linda Duncan’s federal Edmonton-Strathcona riding are being ignored by local mainstream media. It’s embarrassing, really, making Edmonton look like a two-bit hick town unaware there’s a big world outside its civic boundaries.

Ms. Nash, Mr. Topp and the other candidates who will be visiting Edmonton are not campaigning for the leadership of some Alberta fringe party, but to be the Leader of the Opposition of the Parliament of Canada. As unlikely as this may seem to someone who has been imbibing nothing but Alberta political bathwater, Canadian leaders of the Opposition do become prime minister of the whole country now and then. What’s more, sometimes provinces with only one New Democrat MP suddenly take a notion to elect dozens of them.

I doubt the local media are missing these important stories because they’re actually plotting to ignore Canada’s social democratic opposition for sinister political reasons. But they have to be prepared for some of their dwindling numbers of readers and viewers to reach that conclusion anyway and make the effort to find their news elsewhere.

In the last provincial and federal general elections, Edmontonians elected two NDP MLAs and one NDP MP. They voted in significant numbers for the NDP in other ridings. Local media should make at least a half-hearted effort to serve this important part of our community.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Wildrose Party’s Redford Files: Not nearly as funny as the first time…

by David Climenhaga on November 23, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
The Redford Files website: evidence the Wildrose Alliance is on the ropes. Below, an image grabbed from the site.

If “the Redford Files” really are “authorized by the Wildrose Party,” as the blog-style attack website that appeared on the Internet a few days ago indicates, it is the best evidence yet the whole ramshackle far-right project is crumbling in the face of Premier Alison Redford’s Tory juggernaut.

The former Wildrose Alliance was never really the right-wing Prairie fire media made it out to be and its most devoted adherents sincerely believed after reading their own press clippings. But this little exercise in mean-spiritedness is nothing more than a puff of greasy smoke, a whiff of desperation.

The Wildrose Whatever’s game plan started to fall apart the day last January that Conservative premier Ed Stelmach announced he’d had enough and would pull the plug on politics. Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith and her closest advisors were gobsmacked, and the party’s rise in the polls, which was a real phenomenon though one that always came with a certain degree of exaggeration, never recovered or resumed. Nothing has changed since Ms. Redford succeeded Mr. Stelmach last month.

But this pathetic effort at RedfordFiles.ca – like the deceptive push poll the party financed last month – indicates Wildrose insiders now really fear their effort to move Alberta even farther to the right is on the ropes.

Cornered, they must have concluded their situation is so desperate they have no choice but to plumb the depths of the bag of dirty tricks given to right-wing operatives everywhere by such odious Republican strategists as Donald Segretti, Karl Rove and Grover Norquist.

Almost all political parties talk a good line about civility and generosity when things are going their way. It’s when they’re in a corner and feeling desperate that their true character is revealed. So neither the appearance in October of a thoroughly disreputable push poll, followed by the Redford Files website this month, are good indicators of the kind of character that underpins the Wildrose effort.

Indeed, RedfordFiles.ca is a blog-style pastiche of cheap shots stitched up like torn-up documents recovered from a garbage can and scotch-taped together for a scoop in a right-wing newspaper. What’s next, one wonders, a paranoid accusation that the thoroughly right-wing Ms. Redford is a secret Bolshevik? Oh, wait. That’s all but already on the site, whose anonymous author suggests the Conservative premier is “too RED for Alberta.” After that, Swift Boats for sure – or, in the case of the Wildrose Party, perhaps, Swift Bats.

In addition to its rather quaint attempt to red-bait the premier – here’s betting most Wildrose supporters nowadays identify the colour red with their beloved American Republicans – RedfordFiles.ca includes an obviously PhotoShopped image of Ms. Redford sitting with her controversial Chief of Staff Stephen Carter, tries to tie her to the Liberals (quelle horreur!) and (even worse, apparently) the NDP.

“Liberals feel at home in Redford caucus,” is today’s commentary on the return of Lethbridge-East MLA Bridget Pastoor to the party she started out with. “Federal NDP endorses Redford,” is yesterday’s posting, showing an image of a Tweet by Edmonton-Strathcona MP Linda Duncan suggesting Ms. Redford is adopting NDP polices.

Another post yesterday, in the style of a Western Wanted poster, accuses the premier of “total absence on the Keystone XL Pipeline … when her province needed her most.” Now, there are those of us who think the pipeline is not a particularly good idea, but one can hardly deny the premier’s frenetic efforts to sell it to the U.S. Administration of President Barack Obama, even if she was talking to the wrong politicians south of the Medicine Line.

In other words, RedfordFiles.ca is not only mean, it’s lame!

Just as they tried to brazen it out when caught using a push poll, if this should become controversial, count on the Wildrose Party to try to pass it off as just an exercise in good fun – sort of like the progressive blogs these normally tireless property rights advocates steal their best lines from. (Face it people, the “Redford Files” was funnier the first time, if I may say so myself.)

Actually, many of us in the centre and on the left had been hoping for a strong-enough Wildrose showing in the Edmonton area to split the right-wing vote and make a little room for an Orange Wave, or an orange ripple anyway.

If the Wildrose Party can’t do better than this, we may have to resign ourselves to another 40 years of Tory government!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Happy Halloween: The Mystery of the Missing Museum and what Edmonton needs to tell the Tories

by David Climenhaga on October 31, 2011 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Looking for the money: The typical Albertan, and the Albertosaurus, above, may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Federal Tories never offered more than $30 million to Edmonton museum project, says MP Laurie Hawn … whoops, the latest Conservative claims may not be exactly as illustrated either. Below that: Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel, angered and dismayed.

About the only thing that’s really clear about the tortured saga of the $350-millionish Royal Alberta Museum is that hardly anybody understands how the supposed key to Edmonton’s desperately needed downtown renewal could be promised, then jerked away in a matter of weeks.

That said, two conclusions are inescapable:

  1. The major players from all three secretive Conservative governments that have had a hand in this fiasco (the Ed Stelmach provincial government, the Alison Redford provincial government and the Stephen Harper federal government) are likely lying to us about it.
  2. Edmonton and its taxpayers are consistently taken for granted and treated with contempt by Conservatives of all stripes.

Back on April 7, the provincial government of trotted out the trumpeters and the fireworks to announce that the grand edifice would be erected adjacent to the north wall of Edmonton City Hall, in a part of downtown that can be justly described as both dreary and dangerous.

The new museum was to be finished by 2015, we were told then. “Just as the great urban centres around the world are known for their great museums, known for their cultural facilities, so too, will this great city, and this great province will have a truly world-class museum,” enthused then-premier Stelmach.

“I really deeply believe that this particular structure will give a new birth to an area of our city that’s had challenges,” trilled along Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel, fastidiously understating the problems of the neighbourhood.

Over the summer, designers and contractors were hired, deals were signed, magnificent drawings were published by the local newspapers and the project appeared to be moving ahead swimmingly.

Most Edmonton-area residents were pleased by this announcement, even if they didn’t particularly care about museums or cultural stuff.

Most everyone here recognizes that part of downtown needs fixing – and patching up areas like that is an essential job that only a government can be expected to do in a pinch like this. People know in their hearts that if we wait for private sector to fix this grimy patch of concrete, we’ll be waiting till the 22nd Century. Indeed, building a museum in this block will do more to make Edmonton’s streets safe than another billion spent on the Harper Government’s “tough-on-crime” agenda.

Anyway, any city that aspires to be part of the elusive “world class” needs a museum or two.

In retrospect, one wonders if someone in the provincial government didn’t read the calendar wrong when they booked the room for the news conference at nearby Grant MacEwan University. Maybe it was supposed to be on April 1, not April 7?

OK, that was then and this is now. So, what happened was … something.

On Oct. 26, Edmontonians were genuinely shocked to learn from the province that the federal government had pulled $92 million in promised money and, in the process, pulled the plug on the project.

Mayor Mandel expressed his anger and dismay, which, is something that obviously caused Prime Minister Harper and his Calgary Conservative brain trust in Ottawa to lose no sleep. Indeed, all this had the feeling of déjà vu all over again. (Wasn’t it just this time last year that Mr. Mandel was expressing his anger and dismay at the federal government’s decision to pull the plug on the city’s bid for Expo 2017?)

At this point, the narrative becomes very confusing. Using Edmonton Centre MP Laurie Hawn, in whose riding the museum would have been located, as their point man, Ottawa denied ever having promised to fork over the dough.

As Edmonton Journal columnist and blogger Paula Simons explained it in her excellent unraveling of this Tory cluster-pluck, “like his colleagues Rona Ambrose and James Rajotte, Hawn has been busy insisting that the federal government never promised to give the RAM project any more than the minimum $30 million previously pledged by the former Liberal regime.”

Alas, she pointed out, this would appear to be a flat out fib, as Mr. Hawn was bragging about his government’s contribution, $85 million of it at any rate, back during his campaign for re-election in the federal election last May. That, however, may simply be another case of that was then and this is now. At the very least, the federal Conservative claims the provincial conservatives never asked for the money strain credulity.

Not that any of the other Conservative governments come off covered in glory or winning laurels for their commitment to openness and transparency.

As Edmonton blogger Dave Cournoyer has ably pointed out, the Stelmach government obviously rushed the announcement of the project as a legacy when they didn’t have all their ducks in a row, then misled Albertans about the deal. And the Calgary-focused Redford government may well have been less enthused by the expensive plan and quite happy to let someone else take the rap for killing it, and was economical with the truth about what they really want to happen.

What’s more, as Ms. Simons explained the background to this situation: “the federal Conservatives have clearly allied and aligned themselves with the Wildrose opposition, much to the fury of the provincial Tories. Our museum has been caught up, a civilian victim in that civil war.”

Needless to say, this whole fiasco is not only a slap in the face of everyone who pays taxes in the Edmonton region, it’s an international embarrassment – the opposite of the vision of world classiness we always seem to be striving for in these parts.

Indeed, about the only good thing that can be said about this situation is that it’s entertaining watching this tripartite peeing match between these three Tory skunks. Too bad it has to be happening in our front yard, because it’s going to stink the place up for years.

Weirdly unspoken, however, in all the mainstream media coverage of the Mystery of the Missing Museum is the obvious conclusion that these Tories of all stripes – and you should include the Calgary-centric Wildrose Tories in this because they’re part of it too – are obviously going to keep on treating Edmonton with contempt as long as we reflexively keep re-electing them.

Just look at what happened in the Edmonton-Strathcona riding before the last federal election: Having an NDP Member of Parliament, Linda Duncan, was the best thing that ever happened to the place!

It’s as simple as this, people. They’re going to keep slapping us around until we stand up to them and make them stop!

And if we won’t, well, we have no one to blame but ourselves!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Two words put the Ruth Ellen Brosseau brouhaha in perspective: ‘Rob Anders’

by David Climenhaga on May 17, 2011 in Uncategorized with 8 Comments
Above: Ruth Ellen Brosseau in her riding. Below: Rob Anders and Peter Goldring. Need we say more?

Since the media has shown such reluctance to let it go, let’s put this whole Ruth Ellen Brosseau brouhaha in perspective.

Ms. Brosseau is the young woman elected as the New Democratic Party Member of Parliament for the riding of Berthier-Maskinonge as Opposition Leader Jack Layton’s Orange Wave swept through Quebec on May 2.

The media got its teeth into this story because it just can’t resist the symbolic opportunity to attack the NDP that is found in the fact Ms. Brosseau obviously didn’t expect to win when she accepted the nomination. As if that were some kind of a first in Canadian political history!

Nevertheless, as we are reminded with tiresome regularity, Ms. Brosseau spent part of the campaign in Las Vegas, doesn’t live in the riding, doesn’t speak the majority language fluently, and some of her political opponents are making claims about the validity of her nomination papers. So, fair enough, we can reasonably conclude from this that she was probably not the ideal candidate for a riding in which the party in fact had a chance of winning.

Given this, we might as well let the media have its fun. After all, notwithstanding their implication that the Quebec surge of the NDP was some kind of historical aberration soon to be corrected, the Orange Wave didn’t just happen – it was the product of more than eight years of hard work by Mr. Layton and his lieutenants in that province.

It is reasonable, therefore, to conclude that the same Mr. Layton may have the political skills to have a reasonable chance of turning his 59-member Quebec caucus into an effective political machine over the next four years. No doubt that is what is really worrying his opponents in other parties and in the government’s English Canadian media auxiliary.

This is not to say that Mr. Layton will face no challenges managing sovereignist sentiment within his caucus. But then, others have the same problem with provincial sentiments. Consider the Alberta Conservative caucus, for example, which contains the noted Western sovereignist Stephen Harper, who in 2001 wrote, “it is imperative … to build firewalls around Alberta.”

Regardless, Mr. Layton is not the first Canadian political leader to have gone to Ottawa or a provincial capital with a caucus containing a significant number of inexperienced members. John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney, both Conservative prime ministers, faced the same problem.

Nor is Ms. Brosseau the first Canadian politician, of course, to have represented a riding where he or she did not live. Examples? How about John A. Macdonald, our first prime minister, who was elected to represent … wait for it … Victoria, B.C., in October 1878?

She doesn’t speak the local majority language fluently? Well, gee, that’d be half the MPs in Canada!

Nor is the NDP the first Canadian political party to have seen a weak candidate elected on the strength of his or her political affiliation. The proof of this assertion, surely, is in the Conservative Party’s Alberta caucus.

Indeed, out here on the Great Plains of Alberta we not only elect unqualified and inexperienced candidates, as long as they’re some variety of Conservative we keep on re-electing them, year after year, election after election!

The media and all other political parties would like those of us in English Canada who know very little about the political scene in Quebec to draw the conclusion from the election result in Berthier-Maskinonge that all the NDP’s successful candidates in Quebec are weak. This is of course preposterous.

In fact, the NDP Quebec caucus has deep roots in that province’s trade union movement. It is full of smart, experienced, committed, seasoned union activists who have learned their political trade the hard way, on the front lines.

Consider these new NDP MPs, so far barely mentioned in the English Canadian mainstream media, if at all:

  • Tyrone Benskin, MP for Jeanne-Le Ber – a popular actor and actors’ union representative.
  • Françoise Boivin, Gatineau – an experienced and progressive MP as a Liberal, now one of the bright lights of the NDP Quebec caucus.
  • Alexandre Boulerice, Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie – a senior CUPE communications strategist.
  • Guy Caron, Rimouski-Neigette-Témiscouata-Les Basques – CEP economist, former president of the Canadian Federation of Students.
  • Hélène Laverdière, Laurier-Sainte-Marie – former Canadian diplomat and PhD sociologist.
  • Roméo Saganash, Abitibi-Baie-James-Nunavik-Eeyou – a top-shelf Cree negotiator.
  • Nycole Turmel, Hull-Aylmer – the first woman president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

Seriously, people, how many Alberta politicians could hold a candle to any of these guys? On the other hand, consider these notables from the Conservatives’ Alberta caucus, which is otherwise mostly distinguished by the nonentities it includes:

  • Rob Anders, Calgary West – the former professional Republican heckler who called Nelson Mandela a terrorist?
  • Peter Goldring, Edmonton-East – the MP whose big issue is having Louis Riel declared to Canada’s No. 1 Official Villain when he’s not campaigning to have the Turks and Caicos Islands united with Canada? Mr. Goldring is an MP, a local columnist gently noted, for whom “the actual affairs of actual Edmonton have not always been foremost in his mind.”

There are others, but why go on? Offhand, I can only think of one Alberta MP other than the PM and Chief Censor Jason Kenney that really matches the firepower of any of the seven Quebec MPs mentioned above, and that’s Linda Duncan, environmental lawyer and seasoned campaigner, the MP for Edmonton-Strathcona. But Ms. Duncan, of course, is also a member of the NDP caucus in Ottawa.

So never mind the one-note song the media has been singing. With people like those listed above in the NDP’s Quebec caucus, it’s a safe bet that over the next four years it will prove to be very effective, thank you very much.

And who knows, even Ms. Brosseau may turn out to be a capable Member of Parliament. Stranger things have happened.

Regardless of this, the governing Conservatives, the moribund Liberal Party and their amplifiers in the media had better be careful if they want to push this line of criticism, considering some of the clowns we elect under their banners in English Canada.

What’s more, unlike our compatriots in Quebec, we don’t have the excuse here in Alberta that we were courageously voting for change or supporting newcomers to federal politics.

Both Mr. Anders and Mr. Goldring, for example, have been re-elected six times! What’s with that?

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

All roads in Alberta lead to Edmonton-Strathcona

by David Climenhaga on April 29, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
NDP Edmonton-Strathcona MP Linda Duncan, Wednesday evening, at NDP leader Jack Layton’s rally in Edmonton. Below: Anne Marie Decore calls out Conservative candidate Ryan Hastman for using her late husband’s name in an effort to advance the prime minister’s neo-con agenda, an action she termed “repugnant.”

This profile of the Edmonton-Strathcona riding held by MP Linda Duncan ran on rabble.ca earlier this week. Edmonton-Strathcona is one of 10 key ridings across Canada rabble.ca advises progressive Canadians to watch in Monday’s federal general election.

In Alberta this week, all roads lead to Edmonton-Strathcona.

Down those roads, metaphorically speaking, flow the three Ms of Canadian politics: Mail, Money and Manpower.

This is because the folks who live along the still-snowy streets of the riding — which may soon be leafy and green as what Lucy Maud Montgomery called “the beautiful, capricious, reluctant Canadian spring” finally comes to Alberta — are represented by a New Democrat!

Will they still be represented by MP Linda Duncan, a capable and low-key environmental lawyer, when green leaves and warm sunshine dapple the streets of Edmonton-Strathcona? Well, the prime minister of Canada and his minions here in habitually Conservative Alberta — where this inner-city Edmonton is the only spot on the provincial electoral map not coloured Tory blue — have decreed it must not be so after the May 2 federal election.

To that end, they have been pouring the Three Ms into the riding in support of Ryan Hastman, a 31-year-old evangelical Christian and sometime minor PMO minion, chosen as the Conservative standard bearer. He seems to have been picked in part on the theory his age and looks will appeal to university students.

Specifically, this has meant taxpayer subsidized Parliamentary mail sent by Conservative offices and vast sums of money not needed by Conservative candidates in Alberta ridings where winning the Tory nomination means winning the Parliamentary seat. Only on the manpower front, have Duncan’s enthusiastic New Democratic supporters been able to equal or exceed the Tory troops.

Duncan’s election in 2008 came as a surprise to Alberta’s Conservative establishment — though it shouldn’t have, given the appalling quality of representation the riding received from Reform-Alliance-Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer, who over five easy elections justly earned the sobriquet of “Canada’s laziest MP.”

Still, the riding hadn’t elected an MP who wasn’t a member of some kind of Conservative-Reform-Alliance Party since 1958, when voters sent a Social Crediter to Ottawa.

Duncan made a credible run in 2006, in the process persuading many traditionally Liberal voters to move to the NDP column as long as Duncan was the candidate.

At any rate, voters in the riding — which surrounds the mildly progressive environs of the University of Alberta campus in the west and modestly suburban and traditionally Conservative neighbourhoods in the east — decided to give the hard-working New Democrat a try. Even so, old Alberta political habits die hard, and Duncan only squeaked in by 463 votes.

Indeed, on election night 2008, the CBC announced Jaffer’s victory and recorded his “victory speech.” By the time this writer got to Duncan’s headquarters to commiserate, however, New Democrats were celebrating victory.

This means is Duncan’s re-election is certain to be a hard fight. On her side is her credible performance since 2008 as an effective MP. Also helping have been a number of blunders by her Conservative opponent — Hastman was discovered to be getting help from a friend and former ministerial aide under investigation by the RCMP and was called out by the widow of the province’s most successful Liberal leader for comparing himself to her husband on a radio program.

For months, the government has trotted Hastman out around the riding to announce federal spending — as if he were the MP. It’s not clear if it has percolated to the riding’s Conservative voters that thanks to having an NDP MP they are doing better than most Alberta ridings, whose MPs, at best, take loyal voters for granted.

In the end, Duncan’s success may come down to how determined progressive and environmentally concerned voters are not to be distracted by a plethora of “alternative” candidates — including a Green, a Marxist-Leninist, two Independents, and a member of something called the Canadian Action Party.

The Liberals have nominated a candidate, but the message from their party to Liberal voters seems to be clear that it’s OK to vote strategically for the NDP.

For the reality — certainly in Edmonton-Strathcona with possible implications across the country — is that a vote for the Greens, the Liberals or any of the others is a vote for the Conservatives.

Click here for information on Edmonton-Strathcona.

Click here for information on Linda Duncan.

Quintessentially Canadian Layton casts orange glow on Edmonton

by David Climenhaga on April 28, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Jack Layton in Edmonton last night. Below: Linda Duncan, Lewis Cardinal, Ray Martin, Layton again.

Let’s go with the mainstream media’s cautious numbers: more than 1,000 optimistic New Democrats packed the historic Blatchford Hangar at Fort Edmonton Park tonight to welcome NDP Leader Jack Layton back to Alberta’s capital city where he started his campaign a scant 32 days ago.

It looked like twice as many to me, but, what the hey, crowds are notoriously hard to judge from the centre.

Is there an Orange Wave, even here in Conservative Alberta? It sure as heck looked like it, sounded like it last night. I had a moment when I thought a balcony laden with precious orange-wrapped NDP voters might come crashing to the floor, but it held, praise be, as the building literally shook with stomps and chants of N-D-P! N-D-P! N-D-P!

The guy beside me looked familiar: Oh yeah, he used to be a Red Tory who contested the Conservative nomination in the federal riding I live in. Maybe he was just spectating, but he looked as happy to be there as I was, and none of Mr. Layton’s RCMP guards offered to give him the bum’s rush.

But then, that sort of thing isn’t done at NDP rallies – which may just have something to do with why the NDP is doing so well right now.

Anyway, while there were a lot of familiar faces in the very big crowd, there were an awful lot of new faces too, many of them atop bodies clutching signs that said, “We can do this.” This was one NDP meeting that didn’t feel a bit like going to church.

Mr. Layton looked quintessentially Canadian in his grey Charlie Farquharson sweater while the crowd treated him like a rock star.

In his speech, Mr. Layton quite properly ignored to the more idiotic charges being bandied about by hysterical Alberta Conservatives these days – you know, like how the success of the NDP means the end of the world, or at least civilization as we know it, and certainly every last job in the oilpatch.

So far, no one from the Alberta chapter of the Conservative Party has demanded that Mr. Layton produce his birth certificate, but one can’t shake the feeling that this kind of thing is right around the corner.

Instead, as a candidate should at this point in the campaign, Mr. Layton just got on with pumping up the troops for the final push, especially in Edmonton-Strathcona, held by MP Linda Duncan, and in Edmonton-Centre and Edmonton-East where New Democrat candidates Lewis Cardinal and Ray Martin respectively have a fighting chance of riding the Orange Wave to Ottawa.

This prompted a reflexive snarl from the drafty Conservative tent over in Strathcona, where a spokesperson for the Tory candidate, whose name escapes me at the moment, denied there’s any evidence of an Orange Tide and repeated the standard Tory talking point about the need to keep on attacking the NDP for its energy policies.

Of course, it’s not really NDP energy policies the Conservatives and their hyperventilating stenographers in the tamer corners of the Alberta media are attacking, but a fictitious caricature of the New Democrats’ environmentally responsible approach to developing the oil sands.

The NDP approach makes for an interesting contrast to that taken by all three Alberta branches of the Maple Tea Party – Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s, Premier Ed Stelmach’s and Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith’s – which is essentially to kill the goose as quickly as possible to get at all those eggs. In this scheme, Canadians make some money loading up the boxcars to ship the gold to the United States.

What the NDP is proposing, by contrast, is to develop the oil sands in a way that ensures long-term prosperity and continued employment for Canadian working people – not just oil company executives in office towers in Texas.

So instead of hosing away taxpayers’ money on public relations sales pitches and unconvincing billboard denials around the world, the NDP proposes to develop the Athabasca oil sands resource in a sustainable way that provides clear evidence to buyers in Europe and the United States Canadians are not environmental lunatics.

This will create more jobs, not fewer, as the Conservatives … well, let’s just say, as they “claim.”

Moreover, instead of shipping bitumen – and Alberta jobs – down the pipeline to the United States, the NDP would encourage more bitumen to be processed in Alberta by Albertans. This would create well-paying stable jobs in Alberta and enhance our economy.

The Conservatives know all this. But Mr. Harper’s party is all about short-term favours for their corporate pals in the United States, and long-term pain for the rest of us.

That’s why, from Alberta’s perspective, it’s never been more important than next Monday to elect New Democrats like Linda Duncan, Lewis Cardinal and Ray Martin … and Jack Layton.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

← Older Entries