All posts tagged Naheed Nenshi

Has Alberta pioneered an unlegislated ban on collective bargaining?

by David Climenhaga on April 24, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Collective Bargaining, Labour Relations with 1 Comment

“Post-secondary collective bargaining,” Alberta style. Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk and a post-secondary employer negotiator rig the deck, foreground, while a faculty association negotiators ponder what’s just happened. Actual Alberta bargaining teams may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Mr. Lukaszuk, former advanced ed minister Steve Khan.

As is well known, Advanced Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk has sent a letter to the boards of all of Alberta post-secondary institutions instructing them on what their bargaining position and final wage offer must be in negotiations with their faculty associations and staff unions.

The position can be summed up in the phrase, now frequently heard on college and university campuses throughout the province, “Zero, zero, zero.”

Oh, wait – and I mean that literally – after three years of nothing you can ask nicely for a 2-per-cent raise. If you’re lucky, and unlike Athabasca University your institution’s administration hasn’t spent its reserves into oblivion, you might get something.

This leads us to a new axiom in the Annals of Labour Relations in Alberta.

Alert readers will recall that it is an opinion expressed frequently on this blog that strikes are not permitted in Alberta unless the union is so weak that the workers cannot possibly win. This practice is already well established.

This is not mere hyperbole. It is literally true, since Alberta’s labour relations legislation, anticipating the Republican “reforms” in Wisconsin by decades, outlaws strikes by essentially all public employees – civil servants, health care workers and post-secondary education employees.

Where such blanket bans aren’t in place and a strike threatens to be effective from the perspective of working people – in the private sector as well as the public – the government directly or through the tame and toothless Alberta Labour Relations Board is willing to step in immediately to postpone or outlaw any strike the union has a chance of winning.

Strikes are only allowed to proceed when there is a strong chance the effort will fail.

Now, though, it would appear that in the matter of public sector negotiations, Mr. Lukaszuk is going for the “Full Wisconsin” and banning collective bargaining by public sector unions altogether – only without the American-style bother of actually passing legislation.

Why waste the time passing laws? This is, after all, Alberta!

So the new axiom is simply this: collective bargaining is illegal in Alberta, unless it can be shown in advance to be ineffective.

What else can we make of Mr. Lukaszuk’s statement – which is no request at all, but an instruction – in his letter that “limits on compensation and improvements in productivity are necessary everywhere in the public sector, including post-secondary education.”

“In this regard,” he suggests, it would be in the public interest for any and all future collective bargaining to result in agreements with the following parameters:

“Annual percentage wage changes over four years of not more than 0/0/0/2; and…

“Negotiated deals which include methods to achieve productivity gains by remedying any inefficiency in current agreements.”

The former point is code for a government ban on wage increases; the latter for wholesale gutting of collective agreements in the name of “productivity.” Certainly, under this formula, negotiating contract improvements that benefit working people is impossible.

This is not, of course, collective bargaining and Mr. Lukaszuk, who is a reasonably bright man, surely knows this.

But the government can confidently proceed with this program in the knowledge it would take more than four years for any challenge to reach the Supreme Court, by which time the government’s inevitable loss would be legally and politically moot.

So, let it be said here, this is an example of bargaining in bad faith on an epic scale.

Indeed, what if universities, colleges, technical institutions and their employees should come up with ways to be more productive? Well, why bother, since Mr. Lukaszuk’s diktat means there is no incentive for their productivity improvements to act as an incentive, collectively or individually.

Mr. Lukaszuk is also Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s deputy premier. Readers will recall that he was only recently slipped into the Advanced Education portfolio after the government brewed up its Bitumen Bubble misdirection. The previous minister, St. Albert MLA Steve Khan, was unceremoniously skidded, presumably for being too nice and honourable a guy. So Mr. Lukaszuk is most certainly aware that government budgets are passed on a one-year cycle – an inconvenient and unchangeable aspect of the Canadian Constitution.

So why is the Redford (un-)Progressive Conservative Government dictating collective bargaining over a four-year cycle? The answer, of course, may be summed up in a single word: politics. The four years will get them through the next election, the government obviously hopes, closing in on a half century of Tory rule.

This is what passes for “labour peace” in Alberta.

It’s said here that Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi – a Mount Royal University professor in a previous life – got it right when he said this government’s attacks on post-secondary education are a disgrace and wrote a letter to the MRU Board urging them to stand up to this government on the question of program and budget cuts.

Indeed, every post-secondary board in this province should do that – though it’s doubtful any of them will have the courage.

Speaking of courage, if this government had any real courage, they’d brush the boards aside and “negotiate” these contracts themselves – it’s what they’re doing anyway. Of course, if they did that, they’d have to take responsibility for whatever happened next.

Count on it, though, when that time comes, this government will be back knocking on the doors of public sector unions, social program supporters and progressive voters, respectfully asking for their sympathy and assistance and trying to scare the bejeepers out of them with tales of what a Wildrose government might do.

Oh, please!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Is Chuck Strahl’s dual role on the Manning Centre and security committee appropriate?

by David Climenhaga on April 22, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Conservative Party of Canada, Manning Centre, Security & Intelligence, SIRC with 7 Comments

Chuck Strahl listens to a participant in the Manning Centre conference in Ottawa in March. Below: Manning Centre founder and figurehead, Preston Manning.

Should Chuck Strahl be able to serve simultaneously on the board of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, a partisan political organization tied to the ruling Conservative Party of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other provincial conservative parties, and on the apolitical Security Intelligence Review Committee?

The SIRC is supposed to be, in the words of its website, “an independent, external review body which reports to the Parliament of Canada on the operations of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.”

“Parliament has given CSIS extraordinary powers to intrude on the privacy of individuals,” the website explains. “SIRC ensures that these powers are used legally and appropriately, in order to protect Canadians’ rights and freedoms.”

Mr. Strahl is a former Reform Party, Canadian Alliance and Conservative Member of Parliament from the British Columbia Interior who served as Deputy Speaker and held several cabinet portfolios during his political career. He retired from politics after the 2011 election and was appointed to a five-year term on the SIRC in June 2012. His biography on the committee’s site is open about his dual role, stating clearly that in 2011 he was appointed as a director of the Calgary-based Manning Centre.

As readers of this blog know, according to an email the group sent to its supporters, Mr. Strahl has now been appointed chair of the board of the Manning Centre, the organization founded and led by former Reform Party leader Preston Manning that works openly to keep the Harper Government in power and is now trying to extend the reach of neoliberal politicians into Canadian municipal governments.

Well, it’s still a relatively a free country, so the Manning Centre can call itself whatever it likes and work for the political outcomes it supports, but the question of whether the chair of this partisan organization’s board should serve in a sensitive and apolitical Parliamentary security review position is another matter entirely.

A claim by B.C. Premier Christy Clark last Wednesday that Mr. Strahl has been campaigning for her Liberal Party in the current election in that province has proved highly controversial and prompted swift backtracking by Ms. Clark.

The B.C. Conservative Party issued a press release Thursday stating Mr. Strahl was barred from campaigning in the election because of his membership on SIRC and demanding Ms. Clark apologize for saying he was doing so.

The Globe and Mail reported Ms. Clark quickly “clarified her statements,” explaining, “he has been active for the last two years and when he took on his non-partisan role just very recently, he stepped back from that.”

No doubt spokespeople for the Manning Centre will try to claim that organization is non-partisan too, but, really, how can they?

“The Manning Centre is dedicated to building Canada’s conservative movement,” the group’s website states. At the federal level, there is only one Conservative party. As the statements, speeches and participants at last March’s Manning Centre “Big Ideas” conference in Ottawa made perfectly clear, time and again, the “conservative movement” means Mr. Harper’s Conservative Party and, here in Alberta, the Wildrose Party of Danielle Smith. “Us” and “the Conservatives” meant the same thing for most participants in the conference.

For example, Mr. Manning staked out a partisan position in Alberta politics in one of his principal speeches, stating, “in Alberta an aging Progressive Conservative administration has lost its way ethically and fiscally and needs to be overhauled or replaced.”

Mr. Strahl, naturally given his position, attended the conference.

As for the Manning Centre’s foray into municipal politics, its so-called “Municipal Governance Project” is also a directly partisan activity whether or not the group is actually backing a slate or trying to unseat Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi. It is most certainly backing individual candidates, one or more of whom, presumably, may challenge Mr. Nenshi directly.

If it is inappropriate for Mr. Strahl to serve SIRC and work for the B.C. Liberals’ at the same time, surely it is equally inappropriate for him to have a similar dual role with the Manning Centre and SIRC.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Are Alberta’s Tories taking the right message from Wildrose Party’s fund-raising success?

by David Climenhaga on April 5, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Civic Politics, Political Fund-Raising, Ralph Klein with 4 Comments

Counting pennies: Premier Alison Redford and MLAs Peter Sandhu and Steven Young count up donations to the Progressive Conservative Party in this photo stolen from Daveberta.ca. Actual donations, especially those brought in by Darryl Katz, may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Floating balloons and Calgary mayors, apparently nothing new about that idea either.

As Alberta prepares to bid a final farewell to Ralph Klein this afternoon, more evidence has emerged the province’s politically active right has given up on the party the market-fundamentalist avatar led for 14 years.

Mainstream media reported this week fund-raising by the farther-right Wildrose Party is outstripping that of the governing Progressive Conservatives, strongly suggesting efforts by such PC leaders as former premier Ed Stelmach and Premier Alison Redford to ease their party back toward the centre after the radicalism of the Klein Era are encountering stiff resistance.

This creates potential challenges for Redford’s party — but is not necessarily a disaster, as the horserace-addicted media seems to be working itself up to claiming.

Still, while the historically unmatched Progressive Conservative money machine is hardly faltering under Ms. Redford’s leadership, donations are pouring more quickly at the moment into a cash-collection mechanism for Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party that is based on the federal Conservative Party’s successful fund-raising techniques, unofficial annual financial statements from Elections Alberta indicate.

But while the Wildrose Party was better at raising large amounts of money from small donors in 2012, media coverage has (intentionally?) exaggerated this portion of the party’s donations to make it sound as if it is almost exclusively supported by grassroots contributors.

The reality, of course, is that just like the PCs, the Wildrosers are also very good at raising large donations from corporations, especially companies in the oil and gas sector.

Alberta election financing laws set a large maximum donation of $15,000 and make it easy for out-of-province corporations to launder their donations through local operations – naturally tilting the fund-raising field in favour of the right-wing parties like the Redford Tories and Smith Wildrosers.

Still, the fact the Wildrose Party could raise about 40 per cent of its revenue in 2012 from small contributors – versus less than 10 per cent in the same year for the Redford Conservatives – should be cause for concern for the Tories. It reinforces recent polling trends that indicate support is strong among conservative voters for the new party’s radical platform, which resembles Mr. Klein’s harsh market purism during his four terms as premier.

In the three-month period before the last election – which must be accounted separately under Alberta election laws – the Wildrose Party raised $2.8 million compared to the PCs’ $2.3 million. Those numbers compared with $517,000 raised by the NDP in the same three-month period and $150,000 contributed to the provincial Liberals.

But the spread really begins to grow dramatically when you look at contributions outside the three-month pre-election window. In all of 2012, the Wildrose Party raised $5.9 million compared to $3.9 million raised by the Redford PCs.

The NDP raised total contributions of a respectable $1.4 million and the Liberals had total 2012 donations of about $479,000.

Much was made by media commentators that this situation leaves the PCs with a post-2012 deficit of $785,000, while the Wildrose Party has a surplus, but it is said here that in itself is probably not all that significant given the ability of both parties to raise huge amounts of cash and the likelihood well-heeled donors will hedge their bets and support both until a clear winner emerges in the run-up to the next election.

It would be a serious mistake to jump to the conclusion this spells the doom of the Progressive Conservatives.

With the party’s emphasis on corporate fund-raising, many friends in corporate boardrooms and the province’s lax financing rules, PC revenues will likely peak later than those of the Wildrose Party. As a result, it is said here they will catch up to and surpass the Opposition party’s successes as the next election nears in 2016.

But with right-wing voters and their money obviously drifting toward the Wildrose, continued PC success obviously also depends on the ability of the premier and her inner circle to maintain the centrist coalition they built in the desperate weeks before the April 23, 2012, election.

They won’t do that by competing with the Wildrose Party for right-wing voters who have already abandoned them, taking their money with them, as the party seems to be trying to do at the moment by letting Ms. Smith set the province’s economic and policy agenda.

No matter what their political lizard brains are telling them right now with Mr. Klein’s public memorial scheduled to take place at noon before misty-eyed throngs in Calgary’s Jack Singer Concert Hall, for the Redford Tories the choice is getting back to the centre or arranging their own political funeral.

Mr. Klein, who served four terms as premier from 1992 to 2006 and who was mayor of Calgary from 1980 to 1989, died in Calgary on Good Friday at 70.

+ + +

Deep-pocketed neocons prove useful target for Calgary mayor 

Speaking of fund-raising and Calgary mayors, when neoconservative Godfather Preston Manning floated his Big Idea balloon about knocking off small-l liberals at Calgary City Hall, he gave Mayor Naheed Nenshi something to shoot at.

If Conservatives with deep pockets don’t like him, Mr. Nenshi reportedly told a closed-door fund-raiser Tuesday, they should run against him, not undermine councillors who are doing a good job.

When it comes to fund-raising potential, it is said here, it’s always useful to have a potential boogieman like Mr. Manning on the other side to concentrate your supporters’ minds – and if you don’t believe me, just watch this short video and see which well-known campaign mastermind pops out the door at the end, a very big grin on his face. If you don’t know his name, the answer is in the index.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Manning Conference III: The right’s strategies for dominating cities and wrecking medicare

by David Climenhaga on March 21, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Health Care, Manning Centre, Municipal Politics, Preston Manning with 5 Comments

Demolition in the name of ‘freedom’: Canadians obviously can’t be persuaded to allow public health care to be dismantled, so advocates of “breaking up” public health care who got together at the Manning Centre conference are clearly hoping the courts can help them demolish our system and impose U.S.-style health care. Below: U.K. independentiste Nigel Farage, anti-medicare crusader Dr. Brian Day.

Preston Manning and his self-titled hothouse for conservative scheming March 7-9 in Ottawa didn’t really help the credibility of Canadian conservatism by scheduling speakers from the fringiest fringes of their movement.

But then, why worry? After all, the mainstream media that attended the conference in large packs treated everything that went on – seminars on how to sell a kidney and all – with the utmost seriousness and respect.

The prophecy of fiscal doom by gold bug and former Texas congressman Ron Paul, the crazy uncle of the American Tea Party, and the anti-Europe tirade by U.K. independantiste Nigel Farage, leader of the fruitcake U.K. Independence Party (“You-kip”) in the European Parliament caused barely a raised eyebrow among the media or a ripple in public.

But while it may be comforting to know that Canada’s conservatives are just as crazy as we thought, the bad news is they’re the ones setting the country’s policy.

Municipal Government

That said, from their neoconservative perspective, they reckon they’re not setting enough of the country’s policy.

As a result, one major theme of this conference was how to extend their influence in Canada’s municipal halls, which to hear the conservatives in conclave tell it have become hotbeds of such ills (in order of illness) as progressive conservatism, progressivism, social democracy, socialism and outright Communism. (Yes, the C-word was heard in this context!)

Accordingly, as is well known, Mr. Manning’s Manning Centre has set up what has been called here a “dating service” to get would-be municipal politicians together with funders and campaign tacticians who share their views with the goal of dominating Canada’s municipal governments.

The first and main target, Mr. Manning has stated, is Calgary City Hall – where the progressive presence of Mayor Naheed Nenshi in the former Cowtown and current oil capital is obviously a burr under Mr. Manning’s saddle.

Naturally, conference presenters exaggerated both the numbers of progressives in elected municipal offices and the supposed dearth of conservatives in such places. But they are right to identify municipalities as places that have been a more promising field for progressives than senior governments, which are dominated by political parties and campaigns are dominated by money.

So, clearly, what the Manning centre hopes to do is bring the party system to municipal government as well – although they will go to great lengths to deny this, or even whisper the word “slate,” because municipal voters are known to be death on slates.

Just such a non-slate conservative slate was revealed in the Central Alberta city of Red Deer recently, and another non-slate slate of Manning Party trainees was announced in Calgary last week.

Daveberta.ca blogger Dave Cournoyer, who also attended the Manning conference, observed that Mr. Manning’s slate plans were “cleverly branded as the ‘organic cities project,’” with “increasing private sector planning of city development and decreasing the role of accountable public planning processes is at the heart of the Manning argument.”

On the list of targets to be privatized by Mr. Manning’s new conservative-dominated city councils: community recreation centres.

But the broader goal of this effort, as has been said here, is to put in place a range of policies that will hamstring the effectiveness of future progressive civic politicians and free the hands of corporations, particularly developers, do what they wish regardless of the views of citizens.

Health Care

If polling – including conservative polling – shows Canadians do not trust conservatives on the environment, it reveals they feel the same way about health care.

Worse, from the conservative perspective, health care is creeping back to the top of the Canadian public’s list of concerns as the interventionist policies of the Barack Obama Administration in the United States gradually benefit the entire continental economy and economic management in Canada therefore inevitably slips a little into the background.

Frustrated conservatives have been forced to recognize that public support for public health insurance and the Canada Health Act is very strong, so with good reason their political parties are very cautious about addressing this issue as they would like.

Yet public health care and the cost-effective and fair single-payer system remain major obsessions among their wealthy supporters and funders.

What to do?

At a session called “Breaking Up the Health Care Monopoly” it was soon apparent the right has all but given up on persuading the public of the dubious merits of their arguments for U.S.-style health care, which is inevitably nowadays rebranded as “European style.”

The moderator summed up the goal of the conservative movement as “how to decriminalize private health care in Canada,” and a rant by a clearly agitated Dr. Brian Day, inevitably introduced as the former president of the Canadian Medical Association, compared Canadian medicare to slavery and the Berlin Wall.

Lacking any big ideas palatable to voters, the conservative movement has all but conceded the “marketplace of ideas” on this issue to the Left, and have moved to the courts in hopes of reproducing the Supreme Court’s Quebec-only Chaoulli Decision in other parts of Canada, which would allow the encroachment of private insurance and multi-tier health care.

Cases are expected to go to trial soon in Alberta and British Columbia – the latter involving Dr. Day’s Cambie Surgery Centre, which has been extra-billing patients in defiance of the law – in hopes that what cannot be destroyed in the political sphere can be wrecked in the courts.

If they are successful, of course, this will open Canada’s doors to for-profit health care and a full-scale invasion by American health care providers under the terms of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Thus endeth the lesson – leastways the one about the Manning Centre’s March 7-9 “Big Ideas for Conservatives” conference in Ottawa. Back soon to commentating on Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s plans for a summer camping trip and the six-member Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s schemes, I guess. This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta still needs a “city party” – a role the New Democratic Party could fill

by David Climenhaga on March 14, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta New Democrats, Alberta Politics with 8 Comments

Typical Alberta Progressive Conservative Party members. Or, wait, are those Wildrose members? Alberta’s rural elite may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel. Where’s the NDP when we need them?

Here it is 2013, the Earth is about to become an urban planet, and the Progressive Conservative Government of Alberta and the Opposition Wildrose Party are locked in a titanic battle to win the hearts and minds of conservative rural voters.

What’s wrong with this picture?

City folks? As far as both parties are concerned, we’re just effete, latte-swilling, soft-handed condo dwellers who get along by mooching off the hard work of our horny-handed rural betters.

Worse, we’re dangerously inclined to go out and vote for politicians like Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, who – quelle horreur! – has squishy liberal values. The same could be said of Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel, although I’ll bet he thinks of himself as a small-c conservative.

A week ago, Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths – who would be as comfortably at home in one of our two rural right-wing parties as the other – spoke for both parties when he accused the millions of Alberta city dwellers of spending all their time thinking up ways to purloin the wealth of the rural Albertans who toiled so hard to store all that currently undervalued oil and gas beneath their North 40.

“You could be asked by rural Albertans why 17 per cent of the population that lives in rural Alberta that has all the oil and gas revenue, does all the work, all the farms, all the agriculture and everything associated with it goes to support urban Albertans, who sit in high-rise condos and don’t necessarily contribute to the grassroots of this economy,” Mr. Griffiths told the Legislature.

Later, he said that wasn’t what he thought, it was just the opinion of a couple of friends of his. But you get his general drift. Even having a big-city premier never seems to make much difference.

Alberta today is dominated by low-population rural ridings whose residents are going to vote for their beloved tax-and-spend conservatives, in one guise or another, as long as sufficient loot from city taxpayers and hydrocarbons keeps flowing their direction.And it’s pretty clear that out there amid the barley fields and pump-jacks of rural Alberta, Mr. Griffiths’ remarkable slander of Alberta’s beleaguered city folks isn’t going to cost him many votes.

Meanwhile, here in the cities, we are undergoing yet another brutal course of the austerity treatment regularly prescribed by these two hayseed parties while we try to navigate our way through the potholed streets of the former Richest Places on Earth.

And what are our two supposedly progressive political parties, the NDP and the Alberta Liberals, doing about this? Oh, they’ll take a gentle poke or two at Mr. Griffiths for his mean-spirited ignorance, but neither of them seem to be able to get out of the rut of imagining they can somehow, someday win a majority in this rural-dominated, rural-favouring province.

Fat chance! 

I’ve said for years that this is a lost opportunity for the Alberta NDP in particular, which could recast itself as the party of Alberta’s cities and thereby play a genuinely influential role in shaping policy in this province in a way that can benefit all its citizens.

It’s a continuing tragedy that our four Alberta New Democrats – every one in an Edmonton area city seat – sacrifice the ability to build the party and have meaningful influence in order to play homage to the pipedream that some day, when the planets are all magically in alignment, enough old CCF voters are going to crawl out of the rural woodpile to finally swing things the way that God and Tommy Douglas intended.

So let’s say it one more time, with vigour, that the Alberta NDP should recast itself as the City Party of Alberta and speak up plainly and forcefully Alberta’s urban voters and demand that we and our tax contributions be treated with a little respect.

What kind of issues would work for the NDP in this context? Here are five, dragged back from the crypt one more hopeless time:

Public Transit and public works. Everyone knows how Alberta tax dollars flow to rural areas for irrigation projects, first-class highways, health facilities, Cadillac schools and a host of other costly benefits. Meanwhile, we need decent, efficient, safe, fast public transit in our cities, and roads we can drive on in a family car. But while transit helps the environment and saves a bundle down the line, it costs a fortune up front. The NDP should fight for it, not just half-heartedly pay it lip service. And while we’re at it, how about a little help filling those potholes?

Social Services. When Tories cut social services, as they’re doing once again, who pays? Urban taxpayers, that’s who! We pay more for policing, health care, basic services required just to keep our fellow humans from freezing to death. We pay in crime, run-down neighbourhoods, foregone business opportunities and illness, physical and mental. Plus ever-higher municipal taxes, of course. Rural-based, rural-focused parties don’t really give a hoot.

Child Care. Can we afford childcare at a time like this? We can’t afford not to have it at a time like this! This is an urban issue if ever there was one. It’s also a prosperity issue – as a method of stimulating the economy, childcare dollars are worth about five times infrastructure spending. All the other parties will say, “stimulating the economy? What’s that?”  But they’re the parties that stand for rock-bottom hydrocarbon royalties, carbon storage boondoggles, endless contributions to the upkeep of rural electoral districts, and a flat tax that favours the rich.

Public Health Care. Decent hospitals and enough health professionals are an urban issue. Mental health facilities that work, where they’re needed. Public health and emergency treatment facilities belong in every part of our urban communities. So do publicly run seniors’ residences. So what are our rural parties doing again? One of them is kicking the crap out of health care and the other is demanding that it kick harder. All in the name of winning rural votes.

Public Education. Investment in public education obviously benefits the province. It pays dividends in terms of quality of life in our communities – even the ones in the sticks. It eases the impact of unemployment, especially for young people. It helps urban working families. What a concept – create vast long-term advantages for society by helping young people now! Caps on tuition, adequate funding for institutions, and schools where we need them add up to a terrific urban issue. If we can pay billions for carbon capture and drilling “incentives,” surely we can afford to fund our schools and universities. What have we got? Bigger cuts in education than anywhere else!

The NDP could speak to these issues, and it could speak to them in a way that said specifically it supported urban areas and their citizens. The NDP could paint itself as what it is anyway, whether it likes it or not: the only political party in Alberta that looks out for, or cares about, issues and values that matter to city people, rich and poor alike.

The party wouldn’t actually need to have to badmouth rural areas. But seeing as the folks out there aren’t going to vote NDP anyway, they would hardly need to put a heck of a lot of effort into developing a platform for them either!

Alberta’s city taxpayers get screwed. Street crime, sky-high municipal taxes, potholes, poor health facilities, doctor shortages, unplowed winter streets and pathetic public transit are all glaring examples. No Alberta party likely to form a government soon – least of all the two rural parties that run this place – will sacrifice rural votes to serve the people who really provide the energy, enterprise and creativity that make this province worth living in.

The NDP can speak for those of us who live in Alberta’s cities, and improve its electoral chances too. Or it can wait for someone else to do it. Because – trust me on this – one of these days, someone will figure this out!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Preston Manning’s well-funded ideological hobbyhorse takes aim at civic progressives

by David Climenhaga on January 28, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Canadian Politics, City of Calgary with 6 Comments

Calgary City Hall: The next target for former Reform Party leader Preston Manning’s not-very-merry band of far-right ideologues? Below: Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and neoconservative ideological guru Manning back in the day.

Is the so-called Manning Centre for Building Democracy preparing to target Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and other progressive city councillors for a corporate-backed reprise of the far right’s domination of federal and provincial politics in recent decades across Canada?

So it would seem.

Indeed, it would be fair to say the benevolent sounding Trojan Horse founded by Preston Manning, the former Reform Party leader and unflinching market ideologue, has its sights set on finding ways for the ideological right to take over municipal councils all across Canada. Calgary is just to be the first conquest in its ideological blitzkrieg.

The Manning Centre bills itself as an effort to “build Canada’s conservative movement,” which is fair enough as long as we understand that there’s very little that’s conservative in the true sense of the word with the destructive neoliberal strain of market fundamentalism advocated by Mr. Manning and his well-funded hobbyhorse.

In addition to the boilerplate commitment to “free markets, freedom of choice, and limited government” characteristic of these kinds of organizations, if you take the time to examine and decode the Manning Centre’s general goals you will find plenty that’s interesting. What, for example, does “living within our means … ecologically” mean? What does the Manning Centre really have in mind when it speaks of encouraging “strong families” or “respecting Canada’s cultural, religious, and democratic traditions”?

It’s not hard to guess, as long as we remember to wear our neocon decoder rings!

According to the National Post, the Manning Centre recently set up “training hub for the next cadre of small-c conservatives who seek to become campaign managers, co-ordinators, communications staff, policy makers and candidates” at a heritage building in downtown Calgary. The facility comes complete with a wall portrait of Louis Riel – more appropriate than you might first think if you consider neoconservative icon and firewall fantasist Stephen Harper’s past Alberta independentiste leanings.

It’s also interesting to take a look at the cast of characters planning to turn up at the next Manning Centre event: Sun News Network commentator Ezra Levant, health care privatization advocate Dr. Brian Day, Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers President David Collyer, Immigration Minister and anti-choice activist Jason Kenney, former Liberal and neoliberal Australian prime minister John Howard and Treasury Board President and epic-spending constituency MP Tony Clement, just to name a few.

In addition, representatives of far-right AstroTurf groups and think tanks abound, including the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada, the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, the Montreal Economic Institute, the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.

But if you want to find out how the Manning Centre plans to translate all this bloviation into specific action, you’ll need to dig a little deeper – perhaps into some apparently unlinked corners of the ideological hothouse’s website.

Which brings us back to the centre’s plans for Calgary, and eventually other Canadian municipalities.

Consider the Manning Centre’s “Municipal Governance Project,” which, we are told, is dedicated to “improving local government through free markets” and “applying free-market principles to local government.”

What will this project actually do? Why, it will “develop market-oriented policies that can be applied at the municipal level – starting in Calgary, then throughout Canada.” (Emphasis added.)

It will also “provide research and education resources to market-oriented participants in municipal political processes.” Bet on it that those education resources will include the names and phone numbers of generous donors to municipal candidates far enough to the right to be approved by the Manning Centre.

Indeed, the Manning Centre is “inviting like-minded people from the entire cross-section of Calgary society to contribute to the discussion and the pursuit of the above objectives.”

So Mr. Nenshi and other progressive local politicians in Calgary should beware: the Manning Centre and its insiders have turned their baleful eyes on you, and they’ll be hoping to bring the same failed policies to your municipal government that have done so much damage at senior levels of government across Canada.

A key moment in this march of conquest, of course, was the hostile reverse takeover of the honourable old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada by Mr. Manning’s radical Reform Party in 2003.

The good news is that nowhere will these neocons be easier to identify and challenge than at the municipal level.

Forewarned is forearmed!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Latest Calgary poll results – perhaps aided by party’s sophisticated moves – show Green Wave developing

by David Climenhaga on November 19, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Centre By-election, Canadian Politics with 7 Comments

Calgary Centre Greens get ready to surf the Green Wave, expected momentarily. Actual Green Party supporters may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Chris Turner, Joan Crockatt and Naheed Nenshi.

The latest poll of residents of the Calgary Centre riding shows a Green Wave developing among opponents of the Conservative Party in the Nov. 26 federal by-election.

Organizers for Green Party candidate Chris Turner are taking a highly sophisticated approach to polling in the Calgary Centre by-election, tipping their supporters when they get wind of opinion polls in the riding and instructing them to be sure to pick up their phones and answer the questions.

Nothing wrong with this, of course – but it should serve as a warning to undecided voters and other observers, especially journalists, that the “narrative” candidates’ campaigns try to spin around small-sample polls like those being conducted in Calgary Centre can be easily manipulated by smart efforts to game the polling process.

In the case of the Calgary centre by-election, the narrative being developed by Mr. Turner’s supporters is that their candidate is the only one with momentum after he appeared unexpectedly in third place among respondents to a Nov. 12 poll of riding voters conducted by Forum Research Inc.

And it may well now be true, as Mr. Turner told the Globe and Mail yesterday after another Forum research poll appeared to confirm the results of the Nov. 12 survey, “we’ve got the momentum now. I know for sure we can win it. This is the most vulnerable Conservative campaign in Calgary in decades.”

The Nov. 12 poll showed Mr. Turner in a strong position to vault into the lead among the riding’s many voters who are opposed to front-running Conservative candidate Joan Crockatt. This would be an important consideration for strategic voters opposed to Ms. Crockatt and looking for the best candidate to whom to give their anti-Conservative vote.

The Nov. 12 Forum poll put Ms. Crockatt in the lead, barely, with 32 per cent of committed supporters. Liberal Harvey Locke was in second place with 30 per cent of those surveyed and Mr. Turner – at that time surprisingly – was in the key No. 3 spot with 23 per cent. NDP candidate Dan Meades had 12 per cent, according to that Forum survey.

The Forum Research poll released last night appeared to reinforce the narrative. In the survey conducted Saturday, Ms. Crockatt was back up a little at 35 per cent, but well below the 48 per cent she recorded in the first poll on Oct. 26. Mr. Locke was holding at 30 per cent. Mr. Turner had moved up again to 25 per cent. Mr. Meades’ support slipped to 8 per cent.

If this narrative sounds familiar to Alberta political observers, it ought to. It was exactly the strategy used to catapult Naheed Nenshi into the lead in the October 2010 Calgary municipal election and Alison Redford to victory in the 2011 Progressive Conservative leadership race. Both really got on the radar when a poll unexpectedly placed them in the No. 3 spot in their respective contests. Mr. Nenshi is now mayor of Calgary and Ms. Redford, of course, is the premier of Alberta.

It is likely no coincidence that many of the same people backing Mr. Turner were also involved in the Nenshi campaign, and possibly in the Redford campaign as well. Indeed, Mr. Nenshi stepped into the fray last week, slamming Ms. Crockatt for not showing up at some all-candidates’ forums.

So journalists and citizens interpreting the various Forum Research poll results ought to take note of the fact that the survey samples are very small – the Nov. 12 poll had only 376 respondents and the Nov. 17 poll had 403, which means that approximately four responses could move the level of support for any given candidate by a full percentage point.

Interactive voice response surveys like these Forum polls (which is pollster talk for robocall push-button polls) tend to have lower response rates than other polling methodologies, further increasing the impact of individual respondents.

After the Nov. 12 results, media quickly picked up on the fact Ms. Crockatt’s support appeared to be dramatically lower than it was on Oct. 26, when she recorded the backing of 48-per-cent of respondents. Journalists also quickly ran with the idea Mr. Turner was the candidate whose support was showing the most upward movement.

So it is significant – though impossible to criticize – that a Green Party organizer emailed committed supporters a note headed “There is another poll tonight – be sure to pick up,” not long before the latest survey.

“Word from Chris Turner’s Head Quarters is that another poll is being conducted at this very moment,” said the email from Green Party Volunteer Co-ordinator Natalie Odd to committed Turner supporters. “Please be sure to pick up any calls your receive this evening!”

The emails were followed up with phone calls to supporters, although the pollster actually appears to have called a day later than the party expected.

In addition to such emails and calls, Mr. Turner’s supporters posted similar messages on Facebook and some people distributed the call-display number the polling company was using.

As previously noted, there’s nothing wrong with this, any more than it would be wrong for a politician to encourage supporters to show up at all-candidates meetings and cheer loudly. Other campaigns may also be doing the same thing.

But as citizens we need to be aware that this method of polling can produce results that do not precisely reflect the true distribution of public support at the time the survey was taken. Furthermore, we would be naïve not to realize that poll results influence voter preferences during campaigns, especially among undecided voters pondering a strategic vote against a particular candidate.

Advance polls in the Calgary Centre by-election are scheduled to open today.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Stephen Carter addresses B.C. Liberals; apparently nothing more

by David Climenhaga on October 27, 2012 in Alberta Politics, B.C. Politics with 5 Comments

Your blogger, looking rather stout and unkempt, his faded shirt stained with crow gravy, with political strategist Stephen Carter, who popped up in British Columbia yesterday at a meting of B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s foundering conservative Liberals. Nothing more. Below: Ms. Clark

Alberta-based political strategist Stephen Carter continues to insist that British Columbia Premier Christie Clark has not hired him to turn around her foundering campaign against the province’s New Democrats. Alberta Diary has no choice but to take him at his word and eat some crow.

As we speculated back on Sept. 28, with Ms. Clark, “a conservative Liberal, desperately low in the polls, facing an election in less than eight months, having just been forced to fire her chief of staff for unspecified naughtiness, who would want to bet against Carter showing up in Victoria with a smile on his face and a nice apartment overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca?” Absolutely not, says Mr. Carter now.

The CBC’s report of Mr. Carter’s remarks to a B.C. Liberal pep rally in the ski resort of Whistler, described by some participants as a campaign presentation, can be read here. He told reporters that British Columbians really want to like Ms. Clark. “I think right now they want to like her, they just don’t know what it is she’s in government for. I think she just needs to get back to who she is foundationally and people will remember why they liked her.”

Sources in LaLa Land, meanwhile, insist Mr. Carter has met with Premier Clark’s campaign management team at least twice, although the topic of those conversations can only be speculated upon, as of course they will.

As is well known, Mr. Carter is an avid Twitterer who served ably as Premier Alison Redford’s leadership and electoral campaign manager, and a little less ably as her chief of staff. He also played a similar role in the campaign of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, although there are former Nenshi supporters who dispute the claim Mr. Carter’s role was quite as pivotal as it is now said to have been.

In all three cases – that is, Ms. Redford’s leadership campaign against front-runner Gary Mar and others, her election campaign against front-runner Danielle Smith and her Wildrose Party and Mr. Nenshi’s campaign against front-runner Ric McIver and others – Mr. Carter has been credited by many observers with having devised the winning come-from-behind strategies.

Since well behind B.C. Opposition Leader Adrian Dix is precisely where Ms. Clark finds herself and her party at this juncture, Mr. Carter must have seemed like a good fit for the B.C. Liberals’ campaign for the election they’re locked into fighting on May 14, 2013 – and perhaps that explains the reported sightings with Ms. Clark’s campaign management team.

Even without Mr. Carter’s help, the B.C. Liberals are going to have to come up with something better than dealing with Ms. Clark’s faltering likeability index. If they pay attention to Mr. Carter’s past campaigns, one of those better things could be an unexpected poll that casts their leader in a different and much more complimentary light than everyone had thought was shining on her.

This often seemed to happen when Mr. Carter was around, although perhaps that was just because he’s just lucky, which is certainly what he would like you to think.

Days before the second Alberta Progressive Conservative Party leadership vote in early October 2011, Ms. Redford’s campaign effectively used an unexpected Calgary Herald-Environics poll that put her in second-place behind Mr. Mar. This in effect created a new reality that motivated her supporters and gave her sufficient momentum to push her narrowly over the top.

The mid-September poll was controversial because it was based on a list of 22,000 card-carrying PC Party members that probably ought not to have been given to the polling company. You know, because giving it to them likely violated Alberta’s privacy laws.

The next day, Conservative Party President Bill Smith issued a stinging rebuke on the party’s website of whoever allowed the “unauthorized and inappropriate use” of the party membership list.

However, no one but the people involved really knows who gave the list to the Calgary Herald to pass on to Environics, and the Progressive Conservative Party lost interest in pulling on that particular thread the instant Ms. Redford became the leader.

“It’s the miracle on the prairies. Nobody would have picked her,” PC party president Bill Smith later said diplomatically of Ms. Redford’s victory. He has since moved on.

Similarly, back in the fall 2010, Mr. Nenshi’s campaign gained sudden momentum and credibility from an unexpected September Calgary Herald poll that put the mayoral candidate in third place.

Indeed, third place is where Mr. Carter likes his candidates to vault from – which could be a problem in B.C. since the implosion not so long ago of the Wildrose-style B.C. Conservative Party.

So if an unexpected B.C. poll suddenly puts Ms. Clark in a more credible position at just the right moment before the election date, it would be fair to conclude at least that the B.C. Liberals have been paying attention to Mr. Carter’s strategies.

And whomever is at the helm of Ms. Clark’s campaign, British Columbians should brace themselves for residential telephones ringing off their hooks with a barrage of automated robocall push polls designed to drive them away from the NDP.

NOTE: This post has been rewritten significantly to reflect Stephen Carter’s insistence he is not working for Christy Clark’s campaign.

 

By-election watch: Calgary Centre Grits hope to benefit from Justin Trudeau’s reflected glow

by David Climenhaga on October 16, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Centre By-election, Canadian Politics, Justin Trudeau with 3 Comments

Justin Trudeau passes through the Calgary Centre riding, as seen by the media. Actual Liberal Party of Canada leadership candidates may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Conservative Party candidate Joan Crockatt, still the front-runner in the by-election that hasn’t been called yet; Liberal candidate Harvey Locke looking outdoorsy; the real Mr. Trudeau.

With the federal Liberals suddenly looking as if they have a little momentum courtesy of the media’s incipient relapse of Trudeaumania, perhaps there’s the vaguest possibility of a horserace in the eventual Calgary Centre by-election.

At any rate, the Liberals have a respectable Calgary Centre candidate in the person of conservationist and lawyer Harvey Locke, who may not have the highest profile around but at least can reflect some of the glow of media ardour for Justin Trudeau as he passed through Cowtown just before announcing his own grab for the brass ring.

Mr. Trudeau’s high-profile Liberal Party leadership bid, in turn, has boosted his once-flagging Liberals’ popularity into and beyond the territory occupied by the NDP, at least according to poll results published yesterday by the National Post.

The Greens also have a reasonably appealing Calgary Centre candidate in author Chris Turner, who writes about sustainability issues.

Alert readers will be aware that all of this matters because Prime Minister Stephen Harper must soon call a by-election in the downtown Calgary riding where his Conservative Party of Canada in late August chose as its standard bearer market-fundamentalist on-air talking head Joan Crockatt.

Alas, while the New Democrats are finally getting around to trying to nominate a local candidate after a few higher-profile names declined their party’s proffered parachutes, it’s hard to see how the likes of Brent Macklinson, Scott Payne or Matthew McMillan can use the contest to do much to raise the profile of Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair in the West.

Well, maybe the NDP have stirred the entrails and written Calgary Centre off, which wouldn’t be unreasonable given the habits of that city’s voters. Or maybe a bigger name is still waiting in the wings.

The riding was vacated back in May by former Conservative MP Lee Richardson, who had a reputation as a slightly pinkish Tory. Mr. Richardson went to work as Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s principal secretary, a position for which a meaningful job description seems to be lacking. A by-election must be called by Nov. 18 if the vote is to take place before Christmas.

Why this has been taking Mr. Harper so long is a mystery to everyone, since in the normal course of events the Conservative candidate in a Calgary riding, Ms. Crockatt, should be a shoo-in. The longer the PM waits, the greater the chances Ms. Crockatt will slip her foot into her mouth, creating opportunities for her opponents.

Which brings us back to the matter of the suddenly lustrous Mr. Trudeau – who is certain to adopt the standard and frequently effective Liberal practice of flashing left while preparing to turn right. Stating this axiom is all very well, but it would be a terrible mistake – as former Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney suggested not so long ago – to underestimate Mr. Trudeau.

The main knock against the Liberal leadership contender seems to be that he lacks legislative experience. But legislative experience is a commodity that may in fact be the kiss of death for anyone campaigning nowadays on a claim they can reinvent politics – which is very likely exactly why Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae decided to pull the plug on his own ambitions.

From an Alberta perspective, anyone inclined to laugh off the 2012 beneficiary of the Trudeaumania phenomenon would do well to remember two other politicians with limited legislative experience – Alison Redford and Naheed Nenshi. The former is now the premier of Alberta and the latter the mayor of Calgary after each ran just the kind of “transformative” campaign Mr. Trudeau is bound to try.

Getting back to Calgary Centre, perhaps His Nibs the prime minister continues to temporize in hopes the Supreme Court will rule in his favour on the case of Etobicoke Centre and he’ll only have to call three by-elections.

In Etobicoke Centre, the Conservative MP is appealing a ruling of an Ontario court that his election day victory is null and void because of campaign shenanigans. The court, like the prime minister, is taking its time. Two additional vacant ridings, one in Ontario and the other in B.C., also await by-election calls.

Meanwhile, back in Cowtown, it is said the word has gone out to the city’s many Conservative MPs (and that would be all of them) that they are to behave themselves and campaign for Ms. Crockatt.

Calgary East MP Deepak Obrai obediently went door knocking with Ms. Crockatt last week, and other Calgary MPs can be expected to join her as their marching orders come through.

Mr. Harper, however, may want to make an exception of his neighbour, Calgary West MP Rob Anders, and demand instead that Mr. Anders stay home.

It’s not that Mr. Anders doesn’t support Ms. Crockatt – au contraire, he shares her enthusiasm for the sort of nutty neoconservative economic nostrums that are apparently still popular in Calgary. It’s just that, well, he is known to be Canada’s Most Embarrassing MP, and it’s entirely possible that he would not be a particular asset to Ms. Crockatt’s election bid.

Then again, no matter what you may have read about the supposed sophistication of the downtown riding, it is in Calgary, and we all know what Calgary always does at election time.

With or without Mr. Anders’ participation, it sounds as if Calgary Centre should brace for a Christmas by-election.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

‘Crowdsourcing our confidence’? Don’t bet on 1CalgaryCentre, whoever’s behind it, having much impact

by David Climenhaga on September 4, 2012 in Alberta Politics, Calgary Centre By-election, Canadian Politics with 4 Comments

A crowd: They have wine and balloons, and they’re all dressed in white. Does this make them progressives? Have they been crowdsourced? Alberta Diary is not certain and you shouldn’t be either. Below: Calgary pollster Brian Singh, Calgary Centre Conservative candidate Joan Crockatt.

“Crowdsourcing our confidence” will get a progressive candidate elected in Calgary Centre? Just asking…

A few days ago a website appeared called 1CalgaryCentre.ca that asks voters in the central Calgary federal riding where there will soon be a by-election to take part in an “innovative and evolutionary approach to democracy.”

The by-election, whenever Prime Minister Stephen Harper gets around to calling it, is widely expected to be a coronation of Conservative nominee Joan Crockatt, the former journalist and right-wing commentator who is anything but progressive. Ms. Crockatt beat five other candidates on Aug. 24 for the federal Conservative nomination to replace department MP Lee Richardson, who quit in May to become Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s principal secretary.

The goal of 1CalgaryCentre.ca, according to the man behind the website, is to select and then elect a progressive Member of Parliament for the riding, thereby changing the face of Calgary.

Well, so far, so good, but progressive voters – and especially those progressive voters who support the New Democratic Party – have good reasons to be suspicious of this effort, which is almost certain to end up with the endorsement of a non-New Democrat candidate as the “progressive choice” for Calgary Centre.

1CalgaryCentre.ca is saturated with the vague, feel-good rhetoric of several recent political efforts of varying success associated with the mooshy middle of Alberta politics – Re-Boot Alberta, the failed Alberta Party that grew out of the Re-Boot and Renew Alberta conferences, and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s successful 2010 campaign.

From this it would be reasonable to assume the same group of people involved in all those efforts may have something to do with this one. However, that’s quite hard to say for sure after talking with Brian Singh, the Calgary pollster whose company Zinc Research was associated with the Nenshi campaign and whose name is one of only two that actually appears on the website. (The other name belongs to the guy who developed the website, which makes sense because the site is pretty good.)

For his part, Mr. Singh isn’t saying who, other than himself, is involved in 1CalgaryCentre, other than to promise that, eventually, more will be revealed. (If you think this sounds a lot like the pre-election Alberta Party policy dance of the thousand veils, you’d be right.)

Mr. Singh sees himself, I have been told, as something of a political provocateur and social media guru, so it’s possible he’s doing this to be provocative and generate some media coverage.

“I know it sounds cryptic,” he told me, somewhat apologetically, “but as they come forward we’ll be putting them up on the website.” Whoever they are, he added, there are is core of about eight people currently involved in this effort at this point, but there has been input from many more, including supporters of all political parties.

Other than that, though, we are on our own for the time being – although there is plenty of speculation about who these people may be among the politically obsessed.

It’s safe to state categorically, for starters, that this effort has nothing to do with the Democratic Renewal Project, Athabasca University history professor Alvin Finkel’s longstanding campaign to get progressive Albertans to vote strategically against this province’s conservative juggernaut.

And it’s also reasonably safe to conclude that not much will come from it, since, Mr. Singh’s wide circle of friends notwithstanding, no one in any of the major political parties likely to run a candidate seems very interested in 1CalgaryCentre.ca.

From the New Democrat and Green perspectives in particular, I think it’s safe to conclude that whomever those parties nominate, their candidates will not be the choice of the participants in the 1CalgaryCentre process, whatever it may be and whoever they may be.

It is predicted here that 1CalgaryCentre will ultimately endorse someone with ties to Alberta Party/federal Liberal/Nenshi campaign circles – say, Calgary lawyer Chima Nkemdirim, Mayor Nenshi’s chief of staff and still a potential Liberal contender despite his best efforts to avoid that fate, or former Alberta Liberal/Independent/Alberta Party MLA Dave Taylor.

Beyond that, at least as things appear from here, it seems quite unlikely 1CalgaryCentre will have much impact at all on the outcome of the Calgary Centre by-election.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

← Older Entries