All posts tagged Ralph Klein

Cashing in on Disaster Tourism: Rob Ford’s a boon to bloggers, if no one else

by David Climenhaga on June 5, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Toronto with 4 Comments

Your blogger drops pearls of political wisdom on the Toronto City Hall media. Below: Same fellow, outside the office of Mayor Rob Ford. Below that: Conservative Calgary talk radio host Dave Rutherford, said to be musing about running against Naheed Nenshi for mayor of Calgary.

TORONTO

If you ask me, it’s a sign of just how badly things have slipped for Rob Ford, not to mention the sorry state of journalism in this country, that an unscheduled lunch hour visit by a couple of Alberta bloggers to the Toronto mayor’s office yesterday almost caused a media stampede.

Now, let me be perfectly clear, when I say we visited the mayor’s office during a break in the convention we were attending, I don’t mean we were actually visiting the mayor. Whatever Mr. Ford was doing, it didn’t involve me, which is probably just as well for both of us.

No, this was just Disaster Tourism, plain and simple, the disaster-struck jurisdiction in question being Ford Nation. The big disaster, of course, is Mr. Ford himself, the one-man catastrophe afflicting Canada’s biggest city at this moment.

And I don’t suppose I made things any better when one of the crowd of bored city hall reporters milling around Hizzoner’s office waiting for news to break out asked who I was and what I was doing there, and I responded by barking back, “We’re crack dealers from Edmonton.” (Nobody laughed.)

That crack was untrue, it was also uncalled for, the now world-famous crack-smoking allegations against Mayor Ford are unproven, and, what’s more, they originate with the Toronto Star, so let me say right off the top that I unreservedly apologize.

Well, you’ve heard it said here that reporters act like herd animals and the next thing you know, we were the subject of several interviews with the Toronto City Hall press corps that, what the hey, had nothing better to do at that hour, seeing as there was no sign of Mr. Ford

Although, I’ve got to say, these were no “swarming, grunting masses of jackals,” as Conrad Black once said of the media in the same town – that must have been the business press when they still asked tough questions back in the day before his Lordship’s American martyrdom and subsequent Canadian elevation to sainthood.

No, things settled down quite nicely, thanks very much, and everyone was polite and respectful as soon as the initial media frenzy had subsided. And I must say, I didn’t feel for a moment as if I was being swarmed by maggots, as Mayor Ford’s brother Doug characterized these very same people in another imaginative animal metaphor not so long ago.

My colleague compared Mayor Ford unfavourably to some of the farsighted and exceedingly well-behaved mayors we have back in Alberta, like Naheed Nenshi in Calgary, and I gave Mayor Ford’s recent performance – There’s no video, and I’m not in it! – two thumbs down compared with the late Ralph Klein’s contrition after his bad moment in the men’s shelter.

The point being that Mr. Klein’s 2001 admission he had a problem and his pledge to do something positive about it won everyone’s heart, even cold, hard ones like mine, which at the time nurtured the suspicion he might not really mean it and wasn’t actually going to quit drinking.

Plus, I got in the great disaster tourism crack above … oh, I admit it, credit should really go to a reporter named Don Peat, chief of the Toronto Sun’s City Hall Bureau, who asked, “Would you call this disaster tourism?”

“Yes, I would call this disaster tourism,” I responded, adding: “Let me rephrase that … We’re here for the disaster tourism!”

This is perfectly respectable journalistic technique called “feeding your subject a line” – I used it myself when I was chief of the Calgary Herald’s one-man city hall bureau. But just so we all understand, now it’s my line, and I won’t give it back!

Unfortunately, later in the day, Mr. Ford decided to take a stroll through some City of Toronto-owned housing – unsurprisingly, he didn’t much like it – and Mr. Peat and his colleagues had something better to write about than the ruminations of a couple of out-of-province bloggers.

You just have to be philosophical about losing a chance to publicize your blog for free like this – stuff happens, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as the time I was edited out of a newsroom scene in Rockabye, a truly dreadful movie filmed at the Globe and Mail’s offices at 444 Front Street West in 1986, and became just another pretty face on the cutting room floor.

So I’m not bitter. But getting back to maggots, they have their place in nature, cleaning up things that drop dead in the forest – you know, like Mr. Ford’s political career.

OK, I recognize it’s a risky proposition to make predictions about politics in cities where you don’t live – Dave Rutherford in a sweep? – but it’s said here that Mr. Ford’s political career is done like dinner because of the continuing crack allegations and his risible response to them.

This is not, as my former colleague Naomi Lakritz suggested in a preposterous Calgary Herald column yesterday, because a bunch of “self-appointed elitists” with lefty tendencies and no respect for the presumption of innocence just won’t admit they lost the election, but because Mr. Ford now poses an existential threat to any politician who appeared in a photo at one of his barbecues. (Stephen Harper, c’mon down!)

Among her imagined left-leaning elitists, take note, Ms. Lakritz included the media, adding a weird new animal metaphor, accusing them of continuing “to pursue him like a pack of hounds baying at full throttle.” Motorized hounds?

Ford Nation and Ms. Lakritz may still love Rob Ford, for the moment anyway, but the prissy Upper Canada College graduates who approved his campaign, helped bankroll it and privately look down their noses as his déclassé barbecues do not. These folks – the real elitists in this story – want a conservative Toronto mayor who won’t embarrass them every time he eases his ample bulk out the door.

Mr. Ford may have seemed like a good idea to them at that moment he looked like a potential winner with the right ideological credentials, even if he wasn’t quite their kind of person. But now that there’s some danger his hard-to-mistake visage might show up alongside the prime minister in a federal opposition attack ad, you can assume he’s not nearly as appealing.

My guess is Toronto’s Tory elite would now quite happily put up with an NDP mayor who knows how to behave herself with dignity and wait a term or two to get the chief magistrate they really want.

And as for due process, as has been said here before, and as unfair as this may be, there is no presumption of innocence in politics, never was and never will be.

Mr. Ford is finished, even if we haven’t quite reached the end of the story.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Blame Ralph Klein for Redford Government’s messy regional planning crisis

by David Climenhaga on April 17, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Municipal Government, Regional Planning with 3 Comments

Representatives of Edmonton region municipalities discuss regional planning issues at a recent meeting. Actual municipal reps may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths; Ralph Klein with Steve West.

The foundations of the regional planning crisis that prompted a frustrated Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Doug Griffiths to threaten Edmonton-area municipalities with forced amalgamation were laid by the destructive policies announced by premier Ralph Klein’s sidekick Steve West back in 1993.

On Oct. 7 of that year, Dr. West, the Vermilion veterinarian and MLA who acted in a variety of portfolios as Mr. Klein’s minister of dismantling public services, marched to the front of a meeting of the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association and proclaimed that the government would be pulling the plug on the province’s internationally respected system of regional planning.

The great minds of the Klein government didn’t like it because they’d decided it was an extra layer of bureaucracy, and there’s nothing neoconservatives like more than smashing public services – especially, in Alberta, regulatory services that get in the way of the wishes of big businesses and small rural municipalities.

It is fair to say that if Mr. Klein and Dr. West had kept their neoconservative paws off Alberta’s 1977 Planning Act – which was a model for the world of how to reduce and solve conflicts like those that now bedevil the Capital Region – the government of Premier Alison Redford wouldn’t have to resort to potentially politically radioactive threats to get the Edmonton region’s municipal officials to behave themselves.

It is mildly ironic that the Progressive Conservative Party cluelessly trying to unravel the mess is the same one that created it 20 years ago. Then again, the Redford Government is also in full crisis mode dealing with such other direct impacts of Alberta’s “Kleintastrophe” as the ongoing mess in health care, so perhaps there’s a pattern here.

The Planning Act, which was still in force when Dr. West gave the shocked mayors and councillors their marching orders in 1993, required regional planning commissions around the province’s larger centres to draft binding regional plans.

The process – which was hated by rural municipalities that wanted a free hand to do what they felt like to attract business and despised by neoconservative ideologues like Dr. West who put the rights of business above all else – forced municipalities in a region to give up some power so they could work in concert, if not in harmony.

The result of this planning system in Alberta was high-quality regional planning from which, in many ways, we continue to benefit today.

By 1995, the Planning Act was history, replaced by Dr. West’s Municipal Government Act, from which all mention of legislatively mandated regional planning had been purged.

One result of this act of vandalism by the Klein Government is the chaotic and acrimonious situation we now face in the Edmonton region – in other words, what happens when the there’s no supervision fording the children to play nice in the sandbox.

Former premier Ed Stelmach made some tentative changes to try to encourage co-operation, but without a mandatory process for planning they were doomed to failure.

According to the Edmonton Journal, Mr. Griffiths gave Edmonton area municipalities six months to stop scrapping or face forced amalgamations and redrawn boundaries. “Infighting like this, I don’t know. It’s quite absurd, really,” Mr. Griffiths told a local newspaper.

That’s the thing, though. It’s not absurd. It’s the logical outcome of not having a mandatory planning process and fair regional distribution of tax revenues.

“Come September, if we haven’t turned the tide on this and it’s just getting worse, it can’t be allowed to continue,” Mr. Griffiths said, imagining that he was putting his foot down.

Alas for him, the kind of arbitrary redrawing of boundaries he seems to imagine would solve the region’s problems would likely drive voters in several well-off Edmonton suburbs and rural fringe areas with independent municipal governments into the arms of the Wildrose Party. This is especially true in low-tax Sherwood Park, which as part of Strathcona County is the Capital Region’s second-largest city and also legally the world’s largest hamlet.

A gentler solution to the regional planning disaster that might actually make sense would be to reintroduce the mandatory regional planning process contained in the 1977 act.

But that would require admitting that the now sainted Mr. Klein got it wrong, and moreover that the market fundamentalist verities of his and this era are not the economic gospel.

One thing that is increasingly clear about the Redford Government is that it has a knack for making enemies. So don’t expect whatever solution Mr. Griffiths comes up with to make it any friends!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Wicked Witch war of words: ‘Has Thatcher bashing crossed a line?’ Well, er… no!

by David Climenhaga on April 13, 2013 in Canadian Politics, Ezra Levant, Freedom of Expression, Margaret Thatcher, Neoconservatism, Ralph Klein with 13 Comments

The Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz. Below, Ezra Levant in an orange wig with a can of Orange Crush mocks Jack Layton’s funeral. RIP or give it a rest?

Oh my – quelle horreur! – naughty Britons still appalled by the depredations visited upon their country by Margaret Thatcher’s government have shocked and appalled the world by pushing “Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead!” to the top of the charts.

In case you missed it, the former British prime minister, who was in office from 1979 to 1990, died on Monday at 87. But it took until yesterday for the song from the Wizard of Oz – an apt metaphor itself for the operational side of neocon governments everywhere – to mischievously reach No. 1 on the British Broadcasting Corp.’s weekly music chart.

The right-wing media in Britain and, quite naturally, here at home in the colonies were full of opprobrium for the posthumous protest that cheekily pushed Ding Dong! to the top.

But really, given the misery the neoliberal project championed by Mrs. Thatcher and the likes of Ronald Reagan and Canada’s own Brian Mulroney has created throughout the world – consigning half the population of the planet to the status “surplus humanity” for the convenience of the 1 per cent – I’m surprised it took this long, and that the commentary has been this humourous and mild. (I mean, other than what Respect MP George Galloway had to say.)

We have a tradition – or maybe it’s a taboo – here in the West that one ought not to speak ill of the dead. But this needs to be treated with the proverbial grain of salt when it comes to politicians, even freshly dead ones, when the hagiography begins before they’re even planted in the ground.

Of course, the people penning hagiographies are bound to try to use this cultural squeamishness about speaking frankly with the goal of suppressing all criticism of the policies of the people they are deifying – as is most certainly happening now with Mrs. Thatcher and as happened last month here in Alberta upon the death of Ralph Klein.

This is especially true in the case of people like Mrs. Thatcher and Mr. Klein whose noxious neoliberal policies continue to be enthusiastically proselytized by politicians of the right despite their unremitting record of economic and social failure.

This, in turn, is important because, as Glenn Greenwald pointed out in the Guardian, “those gushing depictions can be quite consequential, as it was for the week-long tidal wave of unbroken reverence that was heaped on Ronald Reagan upon his death, an episode that to this day shapes how Americans view him and the political ideas he symbolized.”

So they need to be countered, and quickly – and it does no harm if this is done with a touch of humour.

Here at home, naturally, universally right-wing media coverage of this brouhaha has mostly taken on the tone of “more in sadness than in anger,” with a heaping side dish of “we just don’t do that sort of thing in Canada.”

Yet, in fact, we do. It’s just that we rarely do it when the likes of Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Reagan or Mr. Klein pass on to whatever reward awaits them.

On the other hand, never forget, if the recently dead political figure is someone on the left, one can say pretty much whatever one feels like and not invoke the supposed taboo.

And I’m not just speaking of press coverage of the death of Hugo Chavez here – although he’s a perfectly good example of this phenomenon in the Canadian media.

Who can forget Sun News Network TV commentator Ezra Levant marking the death of NDP leader Jack Layton in 2011 by donning an orange wig and sipping Orange Crush while exchanging mocking repartee with that great public intellectual Michael Coren?

The typical tastelessness of Mr. Levant’s display notwithstanding, what he had to say about Mr. Layton is directly applicable to those on the right who today purport to be horrified by even the mildest criticism of Mrs. Thatcher’s dark history.

“At what point,” asked Mr. Levant, “does somebody say, you’re putting that body on a bloody campaign tour? At what point does someone say, how many spin doctors … are allowed to set up a funeral before we say, ‘You’re getting creepy, guy?’”

“At what point do we say … this is a macabre attempt to, I dunno, bring back some political spirit from the dead,” he went on, noting that, “if I am not sufficiently deferential … if I am not being obedient and super polite, oh, they just open the sewer pipe.”

On this, for once, I think Mr. Levant basically got the principle right.

There can be very little doubt those who support the continued neoliberal project are using the death of Mrs. Thatcher to bring back a political spirit from the dead, and using our traditions of respect for the dead to open the sewer pipes if we dare to mention the obvious.

So in response to the Edmonton Journal’s timorous headline writer, who asked, “Has Thatcher-bashing crossed a line?” the answer is, “I’m afraid not.”

Cue the music!

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.

Remembering Ralph: Discussing union bargaining styles over the proverbial drink with the premier

by David Climenhaga on March 29, 2013 in Ralph Klein with 14 Comments

Ralph Klein, then premier of Alberta, with Dan MacLennan, then president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, at the premier’s Klondike pancake breakfast on the south lawn of the Legislature in Edmonton.

The scene: Just before Christmas 2001 at the Legislative Press Gallery’s Holiday “Gala,” a conversation takes place amidst of a swirl of intoxicated journalists, politicians, public relations flacks, lobbyists and other political hangers on.

The cast: Ralph Klein, premier of Alberta, clearly feeling no pain; your blogger, only on his second beer, then the PR guy for the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the provincial civil service workers’ union; and Peter Elzinga, Mr. Klein’s chief of staff.

Offstage but nearby, Larry Booi, president of the Alberta Teachers Association, then in an increasingly snarly round of negotiations with Mr. Klein’s government. Dan “Buff” MacLennan, the affable jail guard who was president of the civil servants’ union.

RALPH (Effusively, waving his arm): Hey Dave, how are ya?

DAVE: I’m fine, Mr. Klein. You?

RALPH: Doin’ fine, fine… Wush ya doin’ now?

DAVE: I’m working for AUPE…

RALPH: Yer workin’ for Buff? I like Buff!

DAVE: Yeah, I like Buff too. He’s around here somewhere…

RALPH: I like Buff! I like the way Buff negotiates…

DAVE: Speaking of negotiating, Larry Booi’s around here too. Maybe you should have a chat with Larry…

RALPH: Larry Booi? I don’t like the way Larry Booi negotiates! I like the way Buff negotiates!

PETER ELZINGA: Uh, Ralph, I think we’d better get going…

Actually, this scene happened, pretty much the way I’ve described it here. A few days later, in a similarly well-lubricated state, Mr. Klein – who died at 70 in Calgary today – famously showed up at an Edmonton men’s shelter and, as the CBC put it in his obituary, “got into a heated argument with a homeless man.”

It was soon the talk of the town that the premier had thrown a pocketful of change at the man before his driver hustled him back to the limo. Like a lot of us, Mr. Klein could be tetchy when his desire to be liked was thwarted. Or maybe he just mistook the guy for Larry Booi!

To me this short conversation cast a lot of light on the principal reasons for Mr. Klein’s political success and his principal flaws, which paradoxically contributed to his success.

He was congenial, often very warm. He wanted to be liked, maybe desperately. If he wasn’t responded to the right way, well, things could turn stormy. In other words, he had a contradictory nature – as most of us do.

He had friends in unexpected places – like Buff, with whom he had a genuine friendship, to almost everyone’s astonishment except the two of them, and maybe Ralph’s brother Lynn, who was a union activist in B.C. That friendship did no harm, it is said here, to AUPE’s ability to recover from the thrashing Mr. Klein gave the union’s members in the years before Mr. MacLennan appeared on the scene.

Mr. Klein also liked his former colleagues in the media, and met them almost daily in the halls of the Legislature. When he did, he was prepared to answer whatever questions were thrown at him. What a contrast that is to tightly controlled and secretive Conservative politicians nowadays like Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Alberta Premier Alison Redford, for whom message discipline is the sine qua non!

Mr. Klein also drank too much, as is well known. This, it is said here, impaired his judgment in bigger ways than just his conduct in the foyer of the men’s shelter. But that made him an entertaining fellow to hang around with, which is to say that there was something to the popular perception he’d be a good guy with whom to have a drink.

Two days after the brouhaha in the men’s shelter, when the story became general public knowledge, Mr. Klein gave an emotional news conference at which he promised to foreswear the bottle and behave himself. Whether or not he really did so was long a matter of speculation. I’ll say this for him, to my knowledge, no one ever saw him intoxicated in public again.

Not surprisingly, a majority of Albertans admired him for his honesty – and some of them loved him for it.

They loved him a little too much, it could be argued, because they overlooked some pretty dubious policies as a result – but his willingness to man up and admit fault was a big part of Mr. Klein’s appeal, and a significant part of his success. What a contrast, it must be said again, to Conservative politicians like Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, when faced with the same kind of revelations.

Indeed, it’s easy to assail Mr. Klein’s polices, which were in many ways a catastrophe for Alberta notwithstanding the steady stream of propaganda to the opposite effect, but let’s leave that argument for another day, shall we?

Mr. Klein was an entertaining and engaging character, well liked because he was genuinely likeable. Like all charming people, his charm reflected the fact he actually liked the people he was talking to – at least when he was talking to them. People who were not his political or ideological fellow travellers were therefore sometimes welcome in his orbit, and occasionally they were even listened to.

He was largely the author of his own political successes – the many claims of the political advisors who rode his coattails to power and influence notwithstanding. You’ll note that most of them haven’t had that many political successes to brag about since, and not for lack of trying.

Mr. Klein was always more popular with the Marthas and Henrys of Alberta than with political insiders of many stripes. Even after the lean and hungry types within his own Progressive Conservative Party who had their eyes on his job started pushing him toward the door in 2006, engineering a 55-per-cent vote in a leadership review, his support among ordinary voters remained much stronger.

And what a strategy that little coup turned to be for the PCs, who stumbled when they chose Ed Stelmach and, it surely could be argued, stumbled more seriously when they unexpectedly picked Ms. Redford.

Mr. Klein remembered his friends, even when he didn’t agree with them. Years later, when I nominated Mr. MacLennan for the Alberta Order of Excellence – an idea that must have left the selection committee feeling chest pains and dizziness – Mr. Klein called me right back and immediately wrote an enthusiastic letter of support.

Prime Minister Harper said of Mr. Klein today that, “while Ralph’s beliefs about the role of government and fiscal responsibility were once considered radical, it is perhaps his greatest legacy that these ideas are now widely embraced across the political spectrum.” Unfortunately this is true.

Mr. Klein’s political and economic legacy did not end with his life on Good Friday. It will still be with us on Easter Monday and for a long time after, even if Ralph, King of the Albertans, no longer is.

It is a paradox, like the man himself, that the Klein Era that ended in September 2006 hasn’t ended yet.

Still, I for one won’t have any problem hoisting an alcoholic beverage tonight to the memory of Ralph Klein, the man.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Two polls show how, and maybe why, Alberta’s Tory coalition is crumbling

by David Climenhaga on March 5, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Polling with 7 Comments

Weakened but still standing: The mighty Tory edifice. Don’t panic. This is a metaphor! Below: Alberta Premier Alison Redford.

It’s interesting to juxtapose the results of two new polls on related but different topics that were released yesterday – a Think HQ poll of Alberta voter intentions and an Environics poll of Albertans attitudes about taxes and public services.

The results of the former were published in the afternoon by CTV; the results of latter were released in the morning by the Alberta Federation of Labour, for which the survey was done.

If you believe them, the Think HQ numbers show support for Premier Alison Redford and her party alike falling through the floor.

Environics’ results show extremely strong support among Albertans for a return to a progressive income tax, higher corporate and wealth taxes, and higher petroleum royalties.

Looking at the polls in more detail, the Think HQ survey indicates support for the far-right Wildrose Party has shot up to 38 per cent, leaving the Tories of Premier Alison Redford in the dust with the support of committed voters at only 26 per cent.

That would be a drop of 18 per cent since the PCs won a 61-seat majority on April 23.

The poll indicated the NDP had the support of 16 per cent of respondents, and the Alberta Liberals that of 13 per cent. (NDP support was concentrated in Edmonton, where it sat at 26 per cent, in a statistical tie with the Wildrose at 27.) The seatless Alberta Party posted 3-per-cent support.

According to Think HQ’s analysis of the numbers, the PC election coalition that saved Ms. Redford’s bacon in April is eroding from both ends of the political spectrum.

It tells something about the state of political reporting in this province that neither CTV nor the Globe and Mail bothered to report the NDP or Alberta Liberal provincial numbers in their first runs at this story.

The poll was even harsher on Premier Redford’s personal popularity, indicating 58 per cent of respondents disapprove of her performance and 33 per cent approve.

By contrast, the spreads of other leaders’ ratings were much closer: Danielle Smith, Wildrose, 43 per cent disapprove, 46 per cent approve; Raj Sherman,  Alberta Liberals, 40 per cent disapprove, 37 per cent approve; Brian Mason, NDP, 35 per cent disapprove, 40 per cent approve.

Think HQ’s conclusions were based on a survey of 1,214 self-selected members of an “online research panel” between Feb. 12 and Feb. 16. The company says the poll has a margin or error of plus or minus 2.8 per cent.

Turning to the Environics numbers, 72 per cent of respondents said they favour returning to a progressive income tax and abandoning Alberta’s so-called flat tax, a relic of the Ralph Klein era that is not flat at all, but blatantly favours the wealthy.

Environics said 78 of the poll’s respondents favoured higher taxes on corporate taxes and taxes on high-income earners. The pollster also said 71 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that Albertans are not getting their fair share of royalty revenue.

Respondents identified several spending priorities, including creating a provincial strategy for long-term care for seniors (70 per cent in favour) and protecting publicly funded health care against for-profit health care (57 per cent).

Environics used a telephone survey of 1,014 adult Albertans from Feb. 14-24 and says the margin of error is plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Now, anyone who has read this blog for long will know that I am not a fan of Think HQ’s methodology and that I have more time for the polling methods used by Environics.

Since the on-line panels like Think HQ’s tend to be drawn from the politically hyper-engaged, I don’t entirely trust this one’s conclusions. That is to say, I think it highlights an undeniable trend, but I seriously doubt Wildrose support has reached 38 per cent, or that Redford Tory support has plummeted to 26 per cent – just yet, anyway.

If I were to guess, I’d put the support for both parties in a dead heat, probably in the low 30s. Who knows, support for the NDP might be even higher – you have to be an eternal optimist to be an Alberta Knee-Dipper like me.

But whatever you think of Think HQ’s methods, the direction it has identified is clear – and real.

The high level of support for public services, public programs and the taxes needed to pay for them identified by Environics are also real – as anyone who talks to living and breathing Albertans knows.

It is said here these attitudes explain a lot about why Ms. Redford’s winning coalition from last April is crumbling, at least on the left-hand side.

Both polls strongly suggest that Albertans aren’t buying what Alison Redford is trying to sell. Both polls strongly suggest that plenty of Albertans are not happy about the fact she’s not keeping her promises.

Given the political position most often taken by Alberta Diary, some readers will find this conclusion tendentious. Fair enough, I guess. Indeed, some non-Albertans may also find these two polls’ conclusions contradictory.

Moreover, there’s still plenty of time for the Redford Tories to pull their fat out of the fire again. Even the way her government handles this week’s upcoming budget on Thursday could make a big difference.

Still, it’s said here that taken together the polls show the Wildrose Party’s departed strategic guru, Tom Flanagan, got it right. To wit: If voters on the left abandon the Progressive Conservatives and return to their traditional political homes, the Wildrose Party has a chance to grasp the brass ring.

It’s almost a shame that Dr. Flanagan, who celebrates his 69th birthday today, is not longer with his party to have his prescience acclaimed.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

One single Alberta government bargaining agency is likely to end badly for Redford PCs

by David Climenhaga on February 24, 2013 in Alberta Politics, Labour Relations with 4 Comments

Premier Alison Redford, in lab coat, centre, and her Progressive Conservative cabinet get ready to bring Consolidated Bargaining to life. Actual Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Albert Einstein, the well-known genius, and Charles Darwin, who gave us the idea for the Political Darwin Awards.

Chances are good the Alberta government’s announcement it will consolidate all bargaining with all unionized provincial public employees into the hands of a single lead negotiator will end badly for Premier Alison Redford’s Progressive Conservative Party.

This is a government that has never understood the meaning of the phrase “unintended consequences” and that has a fatal attraction to the idea of grand unified schemes that are supposed to solve all its problems forever – and never do.

This is the government, after all, that under premier Ralph Klein had the bright idea of gaining control over hospital boards by consolidating them into huge regional health authorities that would run the public health care system in a way the government could avoid taking any political responsibility for unpopular decisions.

When that didn’t work out quite the way it hoped, Mr. Klein’s brain trust dismissed the health regions’ elected boards and consolidated them into even larger and more expensive entities. At the same time, the PCs consolidated the unions in the province’s hospitals into huge region-wide bargaining units, which had the effect of giving them more power.

When that didn’t work out the way the next premier, Ed Stelmach, liked – mainly because some of the senior executives of the new and larger health regions swung their weight around too effectively – the government created a massive province-wide entity called Alberta Health Services and hired a smart-mouthed Australian economist to run it.

Well, we all know how that worked out. That’s right, not as expected.

First of all, of course, the Australian economist turned out to have a politically fatal predilection for saying what he thought while his mouth was full of oatmeal cookies.

But AHS also cost more. Its management was bloated and bad at solving problems. The government tended to get blamed more often and more quickly for its failings. Plus, it increased the strength of the unions it consolidated into single units.

Examples: Three years ago, Mr. Stelmach was crystal clear, about 20,000 Registered Nurses employed by AHS must take zero pay increases in bargaining. The nurses settled for zero per cent, two per cent and four per cent over three years. One year ago this month, hospital support workers alone proved with a half-day wildcat strike at 20 hospitals that they could bring the system to its knees.

The Alberta government may imagine consolidated bargaining can control such outcomes. In fact, it will hand more power to its employees.

Arguably, the PC government has done a little better in education and the government service. In the former field, it managed a single deal with the province’s 40,000 teachers that lasted five years and only devolved into the chaos of multi-board negotiations recently. A case can be made if they’d only tried a little harder, they could have done it all again.

Indeed, just to show that the government isn’t paying any attention, Education Minister Jeff Johnson is trying to get all the teachers and school boards back at a single bargaining table before the creation of the new consolidated bargaining shop.

Meanwhile, in roughly the same time frame, the government also maintained labour peace pretty successfully with the union for Alberta’s 21,000 direct government workers through several rounds of negotiations – suggesting that the negotiation system run by the Public Service Commission wasn’t broke, and therefore wasn’t in need of fixin’.

The PCs haven’t done nearly as well with the province’s 10,000 or so physicians, who only sort-of-bargain collectively, but who seem to have a knack for getting up this government’s nose and making it do stupid things.

So now the Consolidation Gang is going to fix the bargaining problems with health care workers of all varieties by creating a massive centralized bargaining authority – and bringing the teachers and the government workers, not to mention the employees of government boards and agencies, into the mix as well.

And they think this is going to help?

Well, we’ll see, I guess. In theory, one could argue, the idea as described by Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk has some merit. But right from the get-go it’s hard to imagine it won’t have the effect of making it very difficult for the government to point the finger at someone else if its negotiations with any group of public workers go off the rails for any reason.

So I would say Unintended Consequence No. 1 for the government is likely to be serious and swift political consequences for the bumps and potholes that are fairly typical on the road to any collective agreement.

Unintended Consequence No. 2, it is said here, will be that rather than co-ordinating public sector bargaining, the new agency will probably discombobulate it.

Fighting over control of the bargaining agenda between the government’s super-bargaining agency and the front-line human resources staff in health care, education and the government service will grow worse, and more bitter.

It’s hard to imagine that public service unions won’t be able to make that disunity on the other side work well for their members.

In health care, the government made AHS an arm’s-length, independent agency and hired people to run it. Those people will not take kindly to being told what to do, line by line, minute by minute, nickel by nickel. More unintended consequences are likely to follow.

You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to understand insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, but apparently it sure helps not to be a PC premier or cabinet minister. And you don’t have to be Charles Darwin to figure out what could happen next.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

‘Freddy Lee’ Morton, the journalistic sequel: We’ve already seen this horror movie, thanks!

by David Climenhaga on February 21, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Media with 3 Comments

Freddy Lee Morton, in happier times, with your blogger. Below: Firewaller Tom Flanagan; the entire separatist 2001 Firewall team (grabbed from the National Post).

Freddy Lee “Ted” Morton, the worst premier Alberta never had, was back in the pages of the Calgary Herald the other day, bloviating at length about the need for brutal attack on public service salaries because this province’s frequently fluctuating principal revenue source has gone and fluctuated again.

Alert readers will recall Dr. Morton describing himself as “every liberal’s nightmare, a right-winger with a PhD.” He was also the owner of the mysterious “Frederick Lee” semi-official government email account.

Later, Dr. Morton’s defiance as finance minister effectively brought down premier Ed Stelmach – setting himself up to succeed “Honest Ed” as the leader of the Progressive Conservatives and the premier of Alberta, or so he thought.

Dr. Morton first came to public attention back in the early Zeroes as the neoconservative University of Calgary professor and American-born Alberta independentiste who signed the Firewall Manifesto along with such other well-known Western separatists as Stephen “The Big Kahuna” Harper, Tom “I’m Feeling Manly” Flanagan and Ken “No Notes” Boessenkool.

Well, it’s nice to know that nowadays when Dr. Morton, PhD, is in semi-retirement, he can still pick up a little extra cash cobbling together completely predictable opinion pieces for the Calgary Herald, the newspaper lately known to its non-union employees as The Nightmare on 16th Street SE.

“Do we need another Klein-era five-per-cent wage rollback for the entire public sector?” asked Dr. Morton, rhetorically. “Probably. It would get the job done in a hurry, and it is less hurtful to families than massive layoffs.”

This would be especially true if the families in question were those of well-off, largely superannuated, public service double dippers (the Legislature and the University of Calgary) such as Dr. Morton, who is mostly out of danger of his own economic remedies. Mind you, Dr. Morton is still, according to the Herald, an “executive fellow” at the U of C’s School of Public Policy, where he is listed as teaching a single course, so there’s a small but worthwhile cut that could be made to save a few petro-shekels.

Well, Dr. Morton’s five-per-cent pay cut idea would get the job done in a hurry all right.

It’s a fight Alberta’s public service unions would almost certainly lose, but at least they’d have a chance of taking the double-talking government of Premier Alison Redford down with them, which would get Dr. Flanagan’s Wildrose government off to as easier start in 2016.

As for the health care professionals – specifically mentioned on the list of targets for wage cutting in Dr. Morton’s op/ed piece – they could move by the thousands to British Columbia and the United States, just as they did back when premier Ralph Klein last tried that stunt in the mid-1990s, leaving the Alberta health care system in a shambles from which it is yet to recover.

As a good friend of mine recently remarked, this is a person whose own government wouldn’t pass his anti-gay “religious freedom” Bill 208 in 2006, and whose Firewall Manifesto was chucked into the garbage can by Premier Klein in 2001.

His recent electoral record is similarly (un)impressive:

  • The Progressive Conservatives rejected him as their leader in 2006
  • They rejected him again as leader in 2011
  • The voters of his Foothills-Rocky View riding rejected him as their MLA in 2012

So why would anyone, even the Calgary Herald, be interested in Dr. Morton’s opinion now?

We’ve already seen this horror movie, thanks very much. It wasn’t very good the first time.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

A Tale of Two Provinces: B.C. NDP and Wild Rosehip Tea Party show why opposition matters

by David Climenhaga on February 20, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, B.C. Politics with 2 Comments

Razzle-dazzle, sis-boom-bah, balanced budgets, rah-rah-rah! Danielle Smith and the Wild Rosehip Tea Party yell squad cheers for Alison Redford’s Tory team’s worst plays on the field. The actual Alberta opposition may not be quite as illustrated. Below: Ms. Redford and B.C. Premier Christie Clark. Why are these two premiers smiling?

British Columbia and Alberta, Canada’s two westernmost provinces, have lots in common.

Both have economies that rely heavily on volatile natural resources, well-educated, diverse and generally socially progressive populations, and Westminster-style parliamentary legislatures in beautiful old buildings.

Both are also governed by irresponsible neoconservative coalitions with misleading names that have been in power far too long, each of which has an obsession with balanced budgets and also faces a problem balancing the darned things.

The B.C. neoconservatives are called Liberals and are led by Premier Christy Clark. The Alberta neoconservatives are called Progressive Conservatives and are led by Premier Alison Redford. Apparently Ms. Clark and Ms. Redford can’t stand one another, owing to Ms. Clark’s refusal to commit political suicide to help Ms. Redford – but that will have to be a topic for another day.

There are big differences, too, of course, and I’m not just talking about the West Coast weather forecast.

Chief among them in the political arena is that there’s an opposition party in the B.C. Legislature. It’s called the New Democratic Party led by a fellow named Adrian Dix and we’re told it could very well win the next provincial general election that’s now just 12 weeks away, God willing and the crick don’t rise.

Hoist on its own petard, the B.C. Liberals must hold the election on May 14, thanks to the party’s own un-Canadian fixed-election-date legislation. The reliably neoconservative Vancouver Sun begged yesterday for the vote to be pushed back to a more convenient date, say, one when there’s a more popular neocon premier at the helm.

Here in Alberta, by contrast, we have for an “opposition” one of the offshoots of the American Tea Party – which I like to think of as the Wild Rosehip Tea Party – which acts as a cheerleading section for all the worst instincts of the governing party, the unprogressive Progressive Conservatives of Premier Alison Redford.

The Wild Rosehipsters, officially known as the Wildrose Party, are led by Danielle Smith, who used to be an intern for the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute. They believe in everything the PC Party led by Ms. Redford does, and more! Woo-hoo!

This difference is important because while the New Democratic Party in B.C. most certainly acts as a brake on the worst instincts of the neoconservative B.C. Liberals, and occasionally even pushes them in the right direction, which is the left direction, the Wild Rosehip Tea Party in Alberta always pushes the neoliberal Conservative Party in the wrong direction, which is to say politically speaking the right direction.

Still with me? I’m trying to make a serious point here.

We saw examples of this yesterday in both provinces.

In British Columbia, pushed by the NDP, Ms. Clark’s neoconservative Liberals tabled a budget that, while rich in flaws, did at least one sensible thing – to wit, it included a modest increase in business taxes to help the government meet its commitments.

The mainstream media in B.C. was crowing with delight at how the Liberals had outmaneuvered the NDP, who have been calling for a similar tax increase. (Ms. Clark also sort of outmaneuvered Ms. Redford, by actually managing to put together a budget she could claim, however fancifully, to be balanced.)

The B.C. Liberal budget, which also included a modest (and temporary) increase in income taxes among higher income earners, “captures some of the political territory that has long been occupied by the New Democratic Party opposition, by turning to corporations … to help put the budget back into black,” raved the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Personally, I think this sells B.C. voters short. Those who support a more sensible and sustainable taxation policy have to know that these increases will be out the window the instant the Liberals manage to squeak back into power, if they do, and will likely behave accordingly in the polling booth. Regardless of that, we’ll presumably know soon enough.

Meanwhile, back here in Alberta, we were having a holy-cowflops moment yesterday with the realization the latest analysis of the government’s resource-dependent revenue misestimates mean the looming budget deficit could be as high as $4 billion.

Since Ralph Klein was premier, the province has made an obsession of avoiding both tax increases and deficits, no matter the cost in crumbling infrastructure or flagging services. As a result, the Richest Place on Earth ™ exists in a perpetual state of economic crisis, and this entirely self-inflicted injury now has the potential to become a major embarrassment for Ms. Redford.

But with the Wild Rosehip Tea Party pulling the whistle cord and sitting in the driver’s seat of the province’s ideological locomotive, there’s absolutely no danger we’ll smooth out the wild fluctuations in resource prices with the application of sensibly progressive taxes.

Hell no! We’ll drive this train right off the bridge if we have to before we’ll raise the lowest business taxes in the country by even a single percentage point or give up our “flat tax” – ensuring that more cash can all head south across the U.S. border in the form of massive corporate profits. And when it comes to petroleum royalties, we won’t even collect the money we say we’re owed!

So yesterday we had the unedifying spectacle of Finance Minister Doug Horner getting up on his hind legs and telling us that public service managers were going to have a haircut, and anyone who is negotiating a collective agreement with the public sector – which is pretty well all the public employees in the province – had better get ready for a trim as well.

Remember, these public employees are in many cases the very same naïve voters who flocked to the PCs’ side last April to keep the WRTP out of power, thereby saving the government’s sorry keester in its darkest hour.

If nothing else, this should tell us all we need to know about the importance of having the right opposition here in Alberta.

If we had Adrian Dix and the B.C. NDP as the opposition, we could probably expect Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservatives to behave like grownups. Hell, that might even be true if we have Brian Mason and his Alberta NDP as opposition.

Instead we have the Wild Rosehipsters and so the government’s key strategy is to sell out the people who saved it and reward the people who came very close to destroying it, and who furthermore still want to.

What’s wrong with this picture?

+ + +

Fort Mac Public School Board nixes four-day week plan

This just in: Pressed by mostly horrified parents, Fort McMurray’s Public School Board voted late yesterday against adopting a four-day school week to save $1-million.

The scheme would have increased the average school day by 11 minutes and cut classes for students on about half of the school year’s Fridays to help reduce the board’s $4.4-million deficit.

Most educators criticized the proposal as harmful to learning, although as this blog’s mailbag showed, the idea had some fervent supporters.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Four-day school scheme shows Tories view Fort McMurray as not much more than a work camp

by David Climenhaga on February 14, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Politics, Education, Fort McMurray with 27 Comments

Public School District students await dismissal for the week on a Thursday afternoon in Fort McMurray. Actual students may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Edmonton-Calder NDP MLA David Eggen; former Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo MLA Guy Boutilier.

And where, the good people of Fort McMurray should be asking themselves today as Canadians scratch their heads at the idea of four-day school for children in the Alberta oil sands boom town, is Guy Boutilier now that they really need him?

Mr. Boutilier, as readers with long memories may recall, was the Conservative MLA for Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo who was kicked out of the Tory caucus in the summer of 2009 by then-premier Ed Stelmach for speaking up too vigorously on behalf of his constituents in the matter of a seniors’ home that was promised but never built.

Mr. Boutilier eventually joined the fledgling Wildrose Alliance, which was later to become the right-wing Opposition Wildrose Party.

Alas for him, in the 2012 provincial election, Fort Mac voters had the good sense – or so they thought at the time – to give the sometimes-erratic Harvard MBA graduate and former Ralph Klein cabinet minister the bum’s rush and replace him with a seemingly reliable Progressive Conservative.

Now another Alberta MLA, Edmonton-Calder New Democrat David Eggen, has with a single news release made the pathetic state of public education in Fort McMurray into a national news story. Indeed, it was top story on the Toronto Star’s website hours before the moribund local rag here in Edmonton managed to bestir itself and publish the news that the Fort McMurray Public School District is contemplating reducing its school week to four days to help pay off a projected deficit of $4.4 million.

Not noted in Mr. Eggen’s news release yesterday, but mentioned at his news conference, was the fact the Catholic school district in the northern town at the centre of Alberta’s current oil boom, the one that according to the governing PCs of Premier Alison Redford just went bust, is already operating on a four-day week!

So really, the Fort Mac public school board just trying to harmonize its school days with the academically disastrous but money saving schedule already adopted by its Catholic counterpart.

A significant part of the modest $800,000 to $1 million saved, by the way, would come out of the pockets of school teaching assistants and bus drivers, who would lose up to 20 per cent of their income and their pension because they won’t work enough days to qualify. In a high-pay locale like Fort Mac, many of them will simply walk away for better treatment at the local Tim Horton’s or wherever.

The cost of daycare and tutoring generated by this policy will be offloaded onto families.

In his revelation of the four-day school fiasco and the school district’s continuing financial troubles, Mr. Eggen played it as yet another example of continued PC underfunding of basic education in Alberta and the Redford Government’s recent history of broken promises.

Fair enough, and seeing as this all started well before Alberta’s boom went bust last month, exposure of this situation to the rest of Canada should be a huge embarrassment to the Redford PCs – if, that is, they are even capable of being embarrassed.

Mr. Eggen, who is the NDP’s Education Critic and a schoolteacher by profession, notes that, pedagogically speaking, the idea of having a long weekend every weekend is nearly catastrophic. Most students, he observed, would be permanently disengaged from school. Actually, the way he put it was: “It’s insane!”

It doesn’t stop in Fort McMurray, either. Many other underfunded Alberta school boards face a situation similar to the one in Fort Mac, so in Ms. Redford’s new age of austerity, it seems unlikely we have heard the last of four-day schooling for Alberta kids.

But the wellbeing of students – and especially students in Fort McMurray – seems to be the last thing in the mind of anyone connected with this government.

Fort McMurray was once seen as a great place to raise a family, and I am sure many citizens of that city work hard every day to keep it that way.

But the attitude of both the provincial and federal governments appears to be that it is simply a huge northern money pit, a mining camp best manned by temporary workers from far away – who can go back to where they came from and take their troubles with them when their best-before date has passed.

You doubt it? Only one new public school has been built in Fort McMurray in the past 26 years.

The highway to Edmonton is a death trap that the government is only slowly, slowly moving to upgrade.

As for the promised seniors’ home that Mr. Boutilier got kicked out of caucus for squawking about, well, it’s never been built either.

Judging from media coverage, there doesn’t seem to have been a peep about the four-day school week idea from the community’s PC MLA, Mike Allen. But then, maybe he’s working behind the scenes to rectify things.

Fort McMurray’s population of more than 60,000 is expected to double in the next 15 years or so.

But making the money pit those people will come to service a healthy place to grow up or grow old seems to be the last thing on this government’s agenda. They just treat it like a work camp.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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