All posts tagged Rick Orman

What’s the matter with Gary Mar? The guy just can’t stay out of hot water!

by David Climenhaga on March 10, 2012 in Uncategorized with 8 Comments
Gary Mar: Now in state of suspension, he’s probably not smiling all that much. Below: the unforthcoming Rick Orman, private citizen.


What’s the matter with Gary?

Gary Mar’s a smart guy, brilliant even. Last year, he came that close to becoming the premier of Alberta.

Despite the disappointment the former Alberta envoy plenipotentiary to the Imperial Capital in Washington must have felt last Oct. 2 when he lost the Progressive Conservative leadership race to Alison Redford, everyone has to admit the $265,000-a-year-plus-expenses sinecure he soon landed as Hong Kong-based lobbyist-in-chief to Asia’s oil buyers made a very nice consolation prize.

Indeed, it was once speculated in this space that Mr. Mar was a likely candidate to replace the sour old neo-Con Stephen Harper as Conservative prime minister of Canada.

Alas, nothing like that is ever likely to happen because Mr. Mar – charming and determined though he may be – just can’t keep from repeatedly shooting himself in the foot, metaphorically speaking.

Who can forget the $400,000 or so in public funds that Mr. Mar saw paid to his friend and political confidante Kelley Charlebois for verbal advice delivered between 2001 and 2004, no record of which apparently was ever kept? Certainly not his political opponents in last year’s leadership race, who ensured that the issue resurfaced with regularity.

Then there was Mr. Mar’s promise four years ago not to take his $478,000 “transition allowance” when he quit being an MLA to go off and be Alberta’s tarsands pitchman in Washington, after that his revised promise to take it after all but not while he was in Washington, and then his re-revised decision to take it all anyway.

Tout le monde official Alberta agreed then that Mr. Mar broke no rules with that one – but the optics were far from ideal for a fellow then considered to be the front-runner in the race to replace the hapless Ed Stelmach as premier. It was, one suspects, yet another reason for a lot of wavering PC leadership voters to cast ballots for Ms. Redford, whose campaign successfully tarred Mr. Mar as an avatar of old-time Tory insider entitlement.

But thanks to Ms. Redford, Mr. Mar had soon tripped off to Hong Kong, and most Albertans assumed they’d heard the last of the fellow.

Now he’s back, sort of, and he’s in hot water again – this time for the way he, or someone trying to help him, went about raising funds to cover the last of the astonishing $2.7 million he spent on his doomed leadership campaign.

Seems Mr. Mar send out invitations to a fund-raiser that sort of suggested folks who helped him pay off his $262,000 campaign deficit by coming to the dinner at Edmonton’s Petroleum Club could purchase a little face time with Alberta’s top man in Asia.

By the time someone had picked up on the implications and the invitations had been revised, it was too late. Ms. Redford ordered Mr. Mar to take an unpaid leave of absence from his job while an ethics investigation is conducted – and not by Mr. Charlebois, either, who not that long ago was pressed into service investigating alleged voting irregularities that briefly derailed the campaign of Ms. Redford’s favoured candidate for the Calgary West nomination.

Nope, the investigation will be done by Alberta’s ethics commissioner, an officer of the Legislature who can take his sweet time if he wants to – which could be a problem for top-spender Mar since, presumably, the meter will continue to run on the suspended envoy’s no-doubt-pricey Hong Kong lifestyle.

Nevertheless, the premier’s spokesthingy told the Edmonton Journal yesterday, “the point is to have the ethics commissioner look at all aspects of the fundraiser. The premier felt it was important to get that in his hands right away. He can take a look at it, how it was conducted, any concerns with Mr. Mar’s role in it, and we’ll see what he comes back with.”

So, on the day when the PC Party released five of its six candidates’ leadership expenses – by comparison, Ms. Redford spent a paltry $1.3 million on her campaign – everyone was chattering about Mr. Mar’s troubles instead of digging through the reports and trying to figure out why anti-union agitators, slumlords, booze merchants and at least one senior health official gave so much money to so many of the candidates.

Together, the five candidates who bothered to report their donations raised and spent well over $6 million on their campaigns. The sixth candidate, the well-heeled Rick Orman, gave up $15,000 of his deposit to avoid reporting, explaining that he’s a private citizen now so the curious can just take a leap.

As for Mr. Mar – whose cautious auditor included a note that the firm was “unable to obtain sufficient audit evidence to satisfy ourselves” – he will no doubt be cleared by the ethics commissioner, but not before Ms. Redford’s campaign allegation that he epitomizes what’s wrong with the party’s old boys takes even deeper root in the public consciousness.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Sure, Gary Mar’s $264,576 Asian sinecure is sweet, but does it come with severance?

by David Climenhaga on October 17, 2011 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Gary Mar stands in Hong Kong and gazes back toward Alberta. Albertan politicians-in-exile may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Mr. Mar as others see him; Rick Orman aboard business jet with plate of fruit.

Word that Gary Mar is about to be sent into a comfortable voluntary exile in Asia by Premier Alison Redford prompted an instant and harsh reaction among many members of the Alberta public.

The Provincial Gag Reflex Index ™ moved sharply upward immediately upon publication Friday of the government’s news release announcing the appointment – which with apparently unintended hilarity didn’t bother to mention that until just days ago, Mr. Mar was Premier Redford’s chief rival for the job she had just won.

The salary, a nice neat $264,576 – how did they come up with that number? – seemed to irritate folks like sand on a sunburn. There was at least one moment Friday – albeit at a gathering not particularly sympathetic to the government – when the crowd broke into spontaneously heartfelt jeers at a mention of Mr. Mar’s soft landing.

Moreover, Albertans will probably be even more annoyed when the penny drops that, unlike you or me, the disappointed Progressive Conservative leadership front-runner won’t have to pay his own rent in hyper-expensive Hong Kong, and will probably have a decent enough living allowance to cover all the pork, barbecued or otherwise, that he wants. There’s sure to be a nice car provided, with a driver to boot.

Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason told the Calgary Herald Mr. Mar should “get a real job.” Liberal MLA Hugh MacDonald – who himself knows a thing or two about the sting of not being chosen in a party leadership contest – complained that Mr. Mar didn’t do particularly well the last time he had essentially the same position, as Alberta’s “envoy” in Washington, D.C., from September 2007 until last March when he threw his hat in the Tory leadership ring.

But obviously the political strategists in the premier’s office – who so far have called the public’s likely opinions pretty accurately – were of the opinion the outrage would be short-lived, and the benefits more substantial.

Reading between the lines, Mr. Mar’s manufactured comment in the official Public Affairs Bureau news release was interesting: “Premier Redford and I had discussions on what my future would entail which included potentially running for office and serving in Cabinet.”

I’ll bet! Wouldn’t you have loved to be a fly on the wall at that meeting? One can just imagine the conversation: “Just forget it, Gary! Here, how about this…”

Usually, of course, the best advice to a politician in a situation like this is to keep your friends close and your enemies closer.

And Ms. Redford has done just that with those of her former fellow PC leadership candidates who had seats in the Legislature. Doug Horner, Ted Morton and even Doug Griffiths have all been rewarded with important cabinet portfolios – notwithstanding the fact Dr. Morton and Mr. Griffiths continued to back the wrong horse, Mr. Mar that is, after they washed out of the leadership race.

But keeping them in cabinet allows Ms. Redford to keep an eye on them – and their ambitions or any bright ideas they might get about advancing them.

Ms. Redford may be alleged to have a have a manner with her underlings as blunt as that of Margaret Thatcher, but, by golly, she is not about to suffer Lady Thatcher’s fate at the hands of her Legislative caucus if she can help it!

As for Rick Orman, the premier’s advisors obviously concluded they could safely ignore him – after all, he seems just to be a rich old guy who ran for the position to ride his hobbyhorse. If he really makes a nuisance of himself, though, they could always put him in charge of a commission looking into the rules governing the service of fresh fruit aboard business jets in Alberta’s skies or something equally compelling.

Mr. Mar, however, presented a special case. He came so close, and obviously appealed to so many Conservative Party members – indeed, more than Ms. Redford if you go by ballot first choices alone – that he was bound to be an embarrassing “what if” if he hung around and things didn’t go swimmingly for the premier.

What’s more, he could have been a millstone in cabinet – and he really would have had to have been put in cabinet if he’d run and won.

Even if he’d just lingered in Alberta and not run for anything, he would still have presented a potential “what if” scenario – as former Tory front-runner Jim Dinning did after the accident-prone premiership of Ed Stelmach started to take turn for the worse after turn for the worse.

So from the premier’s perspective, what if a few taxpayers are unhappy at Mr. Mar’s new sinecure? The risks of that, someone obviously concluded, are less severe than the risk of keeping the guy around.

From Mr. Mar’s point of view, the calculus must have been similar. Going to Asia saves him from the horrible fate of having to keep his promise and run for an office he obviously doesn’t want – whether or not Ms. Redford saw fit to put him in cabinet.

And in a funny way, his appointment even gives Ms. Redford’s government an opportunity to fire a subtle shot across the bow of the Obama Administration in the United States, and to make Mr. Mar’s lack of success south of the Medicine Line work for him while she’s at it. “You didn’t like the message that Gary Mar was giving you about our oil from the tar sands? Well, if you don’t want it, maybe China does…”

All this said, there is a reason the premier’s office released this terse little message on a Friday afternoon – the traditional dumping-ground moment for news that is bound to be a pain in the Parliamentary rump.

This is because, once they’ve had a chance to think about it, Albertans are going to be asking questions about more than Mr. Mar’s living expenses and the credit limit on his Government of Alberta Visa card. They’ll be wondering, for example, what kind of a severance payout comes with this job should he ever decide, say, to return to run for public office again.

They may also wonder if he got a similar payout when he left his position in Washington, and if so, what it was.

Alert readers will recall that Mr. Mar’s severance was a matter for controversy once before – when he left the Legislature for Washington and said he wouldn’t take his MLA severance while he toiled in the vineyards of the public service, then changed his mind and took it after all. During the leadership race, famously, he wondered what the big deal was, since everybody does it.

That’s the problem, of course. Everybody doesn’t – if only because most of us don’t get such sweet deals when we leave a job, for whatever reason.

For once, the probability is that this won’t just be a topic of chatter in the blogosphere. Opposition politicians of all stripes are certain to develop a healthy interest in the details of Mr. Mar’s excellent new job as the next election approaches.

Later this week: Some thoughts on what the future may hold for Gary Mar.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Will Gary Mar reinvent the Alberta Tories? Fat chance!

by David Climenhaga on September 27, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Gary Mar at the wheel of the new, improved, “reinvented” Alberta Conservative Party. Alberta politicians and the parties they lead may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Mr. Mar, Ralph Klein and a Tory electoral strategist speaking with an Alberta voter about reinvention.

One of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives’ key talking points is that every few years since the sainted Peter Lougheed retired in 1985, the party “reinvents” itself through the selection of a new leader certain to be beloved by the public.

This tale has been repeated enough times that it seems to have been accepted by everyone in Alberta, and certainly in the Alberta media, as gospel.

It is, of course, mostly baloney.

Leastways, if the Alberta PCs really want to reinvent themselves in order to get a new lease on life with Alberta voters, they have two good choices left in the leadership contest now running through its final days: Alison Redford and Doug Horner.

Ms. Redford is brainy and tough. Tough enough that when she deals with underperforming staff, it’s said, to almost make it worth living the short life of a fly to perch on the wall of the cabinet room after she became premier. The international human rights lawyer and former justice minister has certainly been bold about talking back to the premier when he’s made foolish statements about teachers. She was also prepared to defend policies like the restorative justice program when the government was about to make dumb cuts. Her commitment to public health care seems genuine. And her “high risk” campaign has been paying dividends.

Mr. Horner is smart and visionary. He has the best narrative among the three candidates of how to position an oil rich Alberta for a successful future in an era of both high technology and petrochemical shortages. He’s a sincere believer in the value and power of education. The former deputy premier may not be an academic overachiever like Ms. Redford, but politics runs in his blood and he seems like a more sure-footed version of the thoroughly decent Premier Ed Stelmach. This should be a compliment, but in the topsy-turvy world of Alberta politics will probably doom him.

Either one would be an excellent choice. Either would truly represent a genuine reinvention of the Conservative Party.

Then there’s Gary Mar. Mr. Mar is smart and …

Well, who knows what else Gary is? He’s said precious little during this leadership campaign that indicates what he really thinks, or what really motivates him. There was that vague salute toward the so-called Third Way attack on public health care. And there is ritual obeisance to the power of the Old Boys Club that ran the government of premier Ralph Klein, under whom he served as minister of health, education and several other portfolios.

The Third Way, of course, was Mr. Klein’s failed attempt to bring U.S. style private health care to Alberta – foiled by the overwhelmingly hostile reaction of the public. One of Mr. Mar’s chief backers in the current contest, Ron Liepert, tried much the same thing when he was Mr. Stelmach’s health minister and nearly got run out of town before the premier moved him to a portfolio where he could do less harm. (Mr. Liepert also almost started an open war with Alberta’s teachers in a previous incarnation as education minister, but never mind that just now.)

It seems likely that Mr. Mar will try something similar again – renamed, of course, but hardly reinvented. He’ll probably call it Healthcare 3.5 or something suitably leading edge and digital.

Even Mr. Mar’s general election platform released yesterday – billed an intensive plan for his first 120 days – is long on promises and short on explanations. It promises fiscal discipline and restored education funding, plus “steps” to make health care and education stronger. The plan suggests, at least, that Mr. Mar won’t call a fall election – offering new hope to the opposition parties.

Mr. Mar is also backed by a long list of more than 30 Conservative MLAs, including the ultra-conservatives skidded from the leadership race on Sept. 17. Whatever else he is, after all, he is the anointed candidate of the Tory Old Boys, and that means MLAs with cabinet aspirations now figure they’d better scramble on board. Who can know what motivated ex-candidate Rick Orman, who is old, rich already and not an MLA.

Mr. Mar is also – as has been repeatedly noted as if this were a point in his favour – the preferred candidate of the catastrophic Mr. Klein. This has likely been the case for more than a decade, but only now after a comfortable spell as Alberta’s well-paid “envoy” in Washington have the planets come into alignment for Mr. Klein and Mr. Mar to see this dream become reality.

Given all this, in addition to Healthcare 3.5 and Mr. Liepert’s dream of high-cost private seniors’ care, which we already know about, we have to wonder what else Mr. Mar might find if he roots around long enough in his mentor’s bag of tricks, which alert readers will recall contained such treats as:

  • Delisting additional health services
  • Exploding public hospitals, or selling them for a song to friends of the government
  • Driving health care professionals to other provinces and countries, leaving lingering shortages of epic proportions
  • “Deregulating” monopoly utility companies
  • Cutting education funding and imposing kindergarten fees
  • Introducing regional planning chaos
  • Encouraging streets full of dusty robbery-magnet private liquor stores mostly run by Tory insiders
  • Opening the door to biker-run privatized registries
  • Rolling back the pay of public employees
  • Introducing a Republican flat tax that lets the middle-class pay the freight
  • And slapping user fees on everything to make Alberta, despite the propaganda, a high-tax jurisdiction

Did I miss anything else from the Klein years? Oh, probably.

Well, maybe this is all wrong. Mr. Mar could represent something new. But based on what little information we have, or are likely to get, that seems unlikely.

So, are the Alberta Progressive Conservatives about to reinvent themselves?

Fat chance!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Top Ten reasons to worry about Premier Gary Mar

by David Climenhaga on September 22, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
Gary Mar exactly as he appeared at a recent Conservative leadership forum, as some guy looks on. Your blogger is on the road, has limited Internet access and needs to keep it short…. so, perhaps we can explore this theme in greater detail soon. Photo by Dave Cournoyer.


CALGARY

10) He’s supported by Doug Griffiths

9) He’s supported by Rick Orman

8) He’s supported by Ted Morton

7) He’s Danielle Smith’s greatest hope

6) Boy is he ever supported by Kelley Charlebois

5) He’s a big advocate of the Keystone XL Pipeline

4) He did a lousy job of advocating the Keystone XL pipeline

3) He’s supported by Ron Liepert

2) He wants to introduce private two-tier health care

and…

(drumroll….)

1) He’s Ralph Klein’s favourite candidate!

This short post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Why those drat blamed cowboy poets make me so darned ornery

by David Climenhaga on September 21, 2011 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
Your blogger, centre, at the June 1994 gathering of cowboy poets in Pincher Creek, wondering why they reckoned him for a city slicker. Online Alberta political commentators may not have appeared exactly as illustrated. Below: A couple of actual Alberta Conservative politicians, looking really foolish. Astonishingly, there appears to be no photo of Gary Mar in a cowboy hat! Your blogger’s boots.


FORT MCLEOD, Alberta

Listen, Pilgrim, back in 1994 when I was still toiling as an underpaid sluggo in the reporting ranks of the Calgary Herald, I was asked to write a story based on a press release sent out by the cowboy poets’ society in Pincher Creek. All that was expected was the usual dull three paragraphs.

Bragging here, but bright spark that I was back in those days, I had the coruscating idea of writing it up as a cowboy poet might.

The dear old Herald didn’t quite know what to do with the outcome of this effort, but to their credit they didn’t spike it. They merely slammed it into a hole on the city page under a pedestrian headline: “Pincher Creek to host annual round-up.”

My colleagues, however, gave me a standing ovation when I came down for coffee the next morning, something that had never happened before and has never happened since. The managing editor of the day, on his way through the revolving door like all the rest of them, grumped: “Loved the poem. Don’t ever do it again!” Without a word of a lie, he ended up in Dayton Ohio, possibly as punishment for allowing it to go to press!

The facts were accurate, however, and the Herald never had to print an apology, correction or retraction. Here’s the story:

Pincher Creek to host annual round-up

They’ll be ridin’
From Vancouver,
Manitoba,
Dawson Creek.

Even one
From Lubbock, Texas,
Has set out
For Pincher Creek.

It’s those drat-blamed
Cowboy poets,
81 of ’em
In all

Comin’ for
Their yearly readin’,
Roundup, tea party
And ball.

Seven years now,
They’re recitin’
In the fairgrounds
Down in Pinch’

4,000 folks
Came last year,
For t’ hear ’em,
It’s a cinch.

June 17
To June 19
Admission costs
Five bucks

So says
Anne Stevick,
Who’s in charge.
So go gas up the truck!

The dinner
And the barbecue
Are 20 bucks,
all told.

But Stevick says,
on Saturday,
the tickets
Are all sold.

So if you
Like yer rhymin’
With yer ropin’
And yer beans:

You come on down
To Pincher Creek,
They want you
On the scene.

After that grand success, the Herald rewarded me with a trip to Pincher Creek, whence I filed an uninspired and now entirely forgotten story – not in verse, as per my instructions – though, at my age, forgetting stuff like this or anything else isn’t entirely unexpected. I mean, I’m practically the same vintage as Rick Orman and Ted Morton, for crayon’ out loud, only without the nice, outside-my-snack-bracket Sam Abouhassan suits and cordovan loafers! (I do, however, have a nice pair of boots.)

I was reminded of this just the other day when what should show up in my e-mailbox but a press release from the Western Folklife Centre in Elko, Nevada, (of course, they don’t spell centre that way, but nuts to them!) plugging their 28th national cowboy poet gathering, Jan. 30 to Feb. 4, 2012. (Why me, now? I have no idea. Maybe because my former neighbour is Ian Tyson’s cousin, and he’ll be there – Ian, that is, not my former neighbour.)

However, since event this will no doubt be covered heavily in the mainstream media on the theory that what worked like a darn on June 9, 1994, must still be a great idea, I feel obligated to warn you about a couple of things about these guys, who made me real ornery in Pinch, and make me real ornery to this day on the rare occasions I think about them.

First of all, there doesn’t seem to be a heck of a lot of new blood in this field. At any rate, I’m sure I saw some of the same names on the list for 2012 as back in ’94. But that would be no surprise because these guys are real snotty about who’s a cowboy poet and who ain’t. And I can tell you that as far as they were concerned back then, you weren’t a cowboy poet if you couldn’t memorize your poems – although I bet you nowadays they all read them off their iPhones in squeaky voices and keep them real short so they can Tweet them around to their “followers.”

They were also real economical about keeping their promises when they said they’d have an open session where anyone could read a cowboy poem. Leastways, they wouldn’t let me read mine.

I’d rushed back to my truck, see – which, really embarrassingly, in those days was a Chrysler mini-van fully of baby diapers and stuff like that – and penned a cowboy poem for city people that, if you don’t mind me saying so, was pretty darned good.

And they wouldn’t let me read it! They said it was “too late,” which really strains credulity if you watched the same Western movies I did (apparently along with most Alberta Conservatives, see accompanying photos) when you were growing up.

In their defence, sort of, I think the real reason was that the lady before me read a poem that … and brace yourselves, people, because this is pretty ugly … didn’t rhyme!

Well, I can’t say I approve of that, but it’s probably not as a bad as not keeping your word as a cowboy poet and, to be frank, I’ve never really forgiven them denying me my sly little digs. That’s when I gave up the art for Elizabethan sonnets about the NDP and, I must say, it’s their loss.

Anyway, from that day to this I’ve never had an excuse for that poem to see the light of day, but thanks to the press release from the Folklife Association – whatever the heck a folklife is – now’s my chance. So here it is, establishing my credentials, I surely hope, as a True Albertan as true as any candidate for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, even the ones that like me that were born on the West Coast.

After this, I expect, nothing more will ever again be said in this space about cowboy poetry. And I don’t want to hear any cracks from the usual online trolls about not giving up my day job!

Deconstructing the West

There’s men that wear their sisters’ shoes!
(Each one a college grad)
They’ll tell ya God Hisself is dead,
And eatin’ beef is bad!

They don’t approve of drinkin’ beer,
Cigar smoke makes ’em weep.
They want to register your gun,
And repossess your Jeep.

They’ll tell you that for womenfolk
All marriage is pure hell:
But put your kids in daycare
And they’ll think yer mighty swell.

Plain talk and self-reliance
Are to them a wicked curse.
But worst of all is this, my friends…
They don’t believe in verse!

Perfessers say that rhymes are dead!
The folks who write ’em, bent.
The only thing they can’t explain
Is where their students went.

Well, let me tell ya sumpin’, boys,
Sweet poetry ain’t dead.
Not here where deconstruction means
Takin’ down a shed.

So if you seek inspirin’ verse,
Well, all you need, my friend,
Is to sit down by the campfire
In the compn’y of good men.

The ‘Freddy Lee’ Loser Factor: Albertans plain didn’t like a sneak

by David Climenhaga on September 18, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
Finalists Gary Mar, Alison Redford and Doug Horner. The remaining Alberta Progressive Conservative candidates are, well, pretty much exactly as illustrated! Below: Dr. Freddy Lee Morton.

Never mind the winner. Yeah, Calgary lawyer Gary Mar got way more votes than anyone else – enough to clinch it decisively had Alberta’s Conservative leadership ballot count last night been in a normal first-past-the-post election.

But for the moment, there is no official winner, just three contestants still standing in the race to become Alberta’s Next Top Premier ™ and two more weeks in which they need to Keep Calm and Carry On.

The real story today is the loser. Say what you will about Albertans and their one-party ways, they’re true to their principles, and principled Albertans don’t like a sneak.

And let’s face it, by almost any reasonable yardstick of behaviour, that’s exactly what Ted Morton showed himself to be.

This is a guy who in January as minister of finance sandbagged his own premier for personal political advantage. Readers will recall how the American-born far-right ideologue in effect told Premier Ed Stelmach to let him bring down the Shock Doctrine budget he wanted or he’d quit and so would his supporters in caucus.

With the Wildrose Alliance appearing to breathe down the Tories’ necks at the time, such a maneuver would have left the premier with a political crisis he might not have been able to unravel. Disinclined to destroy the province’s economy and drive away his party’s moderate core to satisfy Dr. Morton’s notions of ideological purity, Mr. Stelmach astounded everyone except perhaps his wife Marie and pulled the plug on politics.

The self-described “every liberal’s nightmare, a right-winger with a PhD,” was also the candidate who most radically changed his story about what he believed in. In the 2006 leadership race that Mr. Stelmach won, Dr. Morton did pretty well by acting like the hard-right market fundamentalist he is.

Back then, he advocated a U.S.-style model for health care that would look like the way Albertans get veterinary care for their pets and livestock. This time, all of a sudden he was Medicare’s Greatest Friend. When the Calgary Herald started describing him as public health care’s great defender, many of us thought Alberta Conservatives would be fooled. Evidently not!

But the knife in his political heart was just a little thing: that Freddy Lee government email address he used that was uncovered mid-campaign by CBC investigative journalist Charles Rusnell.

Dr. Morton and his supporters tried to blow it off as something everybody does, and with his legal name to boot. But Albertans saw it for what it was: an intentionally deceptive tactic. And those who voted in the Tory election gave its dismissive and contemptuous defence the hearing it deserved.

Dr. Morton did a lot of work getting ready for this run. He had his supporters lined up and his political ducks in a row. It’s said here that Rick Orman, another candidate who staked out essentially the same economic position, did far better last night than he would have had Dr. Morton not been caught doing business behind a couple of names most Albertans didn’t know were his.

Dr. Morton would have done far better last night if he’d forthrightly owned up to using an email address he shouldn’t have, and apologized for his behaviour. He also would have done better if he’d just admitted he is what he is – a committed free-market foe of public health care. On health care, that’s exactly what he did in 2006, and he made it to the finals.

At this point, Danielle Smith and her far-right Wildrose Party will try to elevate Dr. Morton to sainthood to make their case no “true conservative” can be elected to lead the Conservatives. They’ll also try to use the relatively low turnout yesterday – 35,000 fewer voters than in 2006 – to argue their support is still stronger than polling shows it to be.

Well, good luck to them. A split right wing is never a bad thing. But don’t bet on the right-wing vote being all that spit, or the Wildrose being anything but obliterated, whether Mr. Mar, second-ranked Alison Redford or third-place Doug Horner wins the final battle in two weeks. Both Ms. Redford and Mr. Horner are former ministers in Mr. Stelmach’s cabinet.

And don’t assume that Mr. Mar will emerge the winner just because he has over 4,400 more votes than his two remaining challengers combined – everyone has two more weeks to cook up deals, sell memberships, and book the buses needed to bring their supporters to the polling stations.

But it’s probably safe to conclude that Dr. Frederick Lee Morton, also known as Ted, is finished in Alberta politics. Just guessing, but here’s a prediction he’ll soon retire south of the 49th Parallel, work for a right-wing “think tank,” and live very well indeed, thanks to the public service pension he doesn’t think anyone else should have. Or maybe he’ll go back to the University of Calgary, which is pretty much the same thing.

Meanwhile, one imagines Premier Stelmach, an honourable guy who had a harder time as premier than he really deserved, is pretty pleased with the outcome of last night’s vote.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

You can vote today to promote and legitimize Tory domination of Alberta – or you can Just Say No!

by David Climenhaga on September 17, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
Leadership voting day in Alberta. Warning: Alberta political scenes may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Ted Morton and Alison Redford, doing deals?

“The danger,” some Calgary political scientist solemnly intoned in last night’s on-line edition of the Edmonton Journal, is that many “Two-Minute Tories” who bought party memberships to take part in today’s vote for the new leader will fail to cast ballots.

Some danger!

If you’re a Two-Minute Tory who slapped down $5 for an Alberta Progressive Conservative membership so that you could help pick Alberta’s premier – a vote portrayed by the media and the government as the province’s only meaningful expression of democracy – just remember that it’s still not too late to do the right thing and not vote.

Do like Big Business and write off the five bucks as a sunk cost on an activity that will never be profitable. Then get on with your life. If you don’t, not only are you legitimizing the policies and domination of the Conservative Party, you’re in for a world of disappointment.

The reason: these guys aren’t really being candid with Albertans like you who are thinking about voting for them.

The media, with its love of simple stories and dark lines within which to colour, has portrayed this race as a contest between three “conservatives” and three “liberals.” The ultra-right-wing Wildrose Party has tried to cast the vote in the same stark light, along with the preposterous claim no “true conservative” can ever win the Tory leadership.

The “conservatives,” according to this media take on the race, are Ted Morton, who wants to welcome the Wildrosers back to a happy Tory home; Rick Orman, who just wants to emulate the Wildrosers; and Doug Griffiths, who apparently only wants the excuse to wear that nice black suit again.

The “liberals,” meanwhile, are said to be Gary Mar, Alison Redford and Doug Horner.

But these lines have become blurred among the candidates themselves. All three of the so-called “liberals” have indicated they are prepared to look at creeping privatization of health care, attacks on the rights on unionized working people, further kowtowing to the oil industry and, in the case of Ms. Redford, deals with Dr. Morton! And what, pray, is liberal or left-wing about any of that?

For his part, meanwhile, Dr. Morton has been assiduously painting himself practically a “wet,” and with his putative ally Ms. Redford a great friend of public health care. Quoth the Edmonton Journal on this: “Alison Redford and Ted Morton both emphatically ruled out privately paid health care in Alberta. … ‘There will be no private pay for private health care,’ Morton said. ‘We would have to find more efficient ways to deliver publicly paid health care.’ One possibility includes contracting out publicly paid services to private clinics, he said.”

Are you reassured by this? Ted Morton as the enemy of two-tiered health care? You ought not to be.

Never mind that contracting out public services to private clinics is no way to save money, a case that has been irrefutably made time and again. The truth is that it’s extremely hard to believe even for a minute that this committed, dedicated, life-long foe of public services has any use at all for public health care.

As the Bible asks and answers: “Can a leopard take away its spots? Neither can you start doing good, for you have always done evil.”

Here’s what Dr. Morton, who made an academic career as a market fundamentalist ideologue attacking public services, really thinks:

“If your dog needs a new hip, your dog can get a new hip in one week. But if you need a new hip, you have to wait one year. Does that make any sense to you? It doesn’t make any sense to me. … Get the government out of the way between someone who wants to buy a new hip and the doctor or clinic who wants to provide it. … Let’s get the government out of the way!”

This is what Dr. Morton believed in the 2006 leadership campaign and, I say to you, it’s what he believes today. If Ms. Redford is doing deals with this person, it’s reasonable to assume that all her rhetoric notwithstanding, it’s quite acceptable to her too.

The political polarities in this province have been skewed far to the right for a long time, and all six of the Conservative candidates are nicely in tune with the market fundamentalist ethos of the age. The fact that poll after poll shows Albertans strongly support true public health care – provided by public employees in public venues – affects the candidates’ rhetoric, but not their core beliefs.

Those core beliefs include the notion that we’d be better off if human health care ran like veterinary medicine. Think about that the next time you take your wallet out to pay to de-worm your dog!

Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives don’t have a “Progressive” bone in their bodies! They ought to be reported to the Better Business Bureau for false advertising when they call themselves “Progressive.”

So when you vote for one of them in their private party election – free of limits on spending and donations, without legitimate oversight and rife with questionable voting practices – you are endorsing the outcome.

Yeah, a lot of people do – 97,000 in 2006, if we believe the party’s propaganda. Well, positive change comes one step at a time. And a good first step for you is not to be one of them.

That way, you won’t be even the tiniest bit responsible for the catastrophe a market fundamentalist like Dr. Morton would try to sow if he became premier. And you won’t have to feel the bitter disappointment that’s inevitable when a politician you thought shared some of your beliefs turns out to be another destructive ideologue claiming There Is No Alternative to undermining the best features of our society.

You have a duty to vote – in a real election.

But today, you can Just Say No!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Tomorrow’s episode of Alberta’s Next Top Premier will see someone voted off the island!

by David Climenhaga on September 16, 2011 in Uncategorized with 4 Comments
A crowd of Albertans solemnly awaits word of the outcome of the first ballot in the Tory leadership race. Typical Albertans may not always appear as illustrated. Then again, maybe they will… Below: Ted Morton, Doug Horner and Alison Redford. Where’s Gary Mar’s hat?

After the voting ends at 7 p.m. tomorrow, Tory party brass should quickly count the first-round ballots in the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race – which may be why things feel around here like a surround-sound version of a TV reality show nowadays.

Only now, instead of America’s Next Top Model or whatever, it’s Alberta’s Next Top Premier, and everybody’s wondering which one of the contestants will have to pack up his (or her) stuff and leave the show forever Sunday morning – presumably after a round of tearful hugs and promises to really, really, really work on that modelling (political) career back in Wichita (Calgary).

Only one, you say! What’s this guy talking about? There’s three of them headed for oblivion!

Not really. Two of the candidates have already reached that destination – they just don’t know it yet. Face it, people, there’s no suspense about the fates of Rick Orman and Doug Griffiths. At best, they were never more than long shots and by the wee hours of Sunday at the latest, that assessment should have been confirmed.

There were always only four serious candidates – in alphabetical order by last name, Doug Horner, Gary Mar, Ted Morton and Alison Redford – and tomorrow one of them is going to be voted off the island. (The possibility of any one of them getting more than 50 per cent of the votes on the first ballot is almost as slim as Mr. Orman or Mr. Griffiths making it to the second.) Those are the rules as set by the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta.

And notwithstanding the continual left-right chatter of the pundits throughout the campaign, not much really separates any of these four – at least if you believe what they’ve been saying these past few weeks.

So, any bets? Not this blogger. Among those four, I call it too close to call.

And don’t even think about using the only available opinion poll of party members as a tipsheet – it turns out the whole thing’s a load of hooey that’s left egg on the faces of the pollster, the media and the Conservative Party nomenklatura.

Well, at least we get to see Postmedia’s true colours. Faced with a scandal of their own making for trying to engineer an advantage for their favourite candidate and a good horserace story at the same time, they have nothing to say “for journalistic reasons.” Good one! The next premier can keep that in mind the next time the pot starts calling the kettle black! It got so bad that even the normally sleazy Calgary Sun called them out on it!

Just hold on another day, they’re no doubt mumbling at the Calgary Herald’s morning news meeting as you read this, and after tomorrow they’ll forget all about where that bloody list came from! About that, unfortunately, they’re probably right.

After the first ballot, of course, there’s only one more week of suspense before Alberta’s Idol is picked and we move swiftly to an election before Alberta’s electorate cottons on to what’s happening.

And after that, in turn, Alberta’s most exciting political season in a generation will be all but over as the winner cruises to an easy and not very engaging 12th straight Tory majority and is swiftly and safely ensconced back in the Legislative Building that overlooks the mighty North Saskatchewan River.

Indeed, at the point, about the only suspense will be which of the two largest Opposition parties – the Alberta Liberals under the erratic Raj Sherman or the Wildrose Party under Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith – will implode first!

The speed of these two parties’ collapse will depend a little, of course, on whether either of them manages to elect anybody to the Legislature. If they do, they could linger for a little while, before they are absorbed into other parties or simply drop to the ground like the autumn leaves outside.

My money is on the Wildrosers falling first. These right-wing Tories, naturally enough, will swiftly gravitate back to their natural home with the Alberta Conservatives, with or without the provincial Tories’ current “Progressive” moniker.

Alberta conservatives of any stripe will find the Opposition benches uncongenial, and – as the publicly paid right-wing bloviator and estranged prime ministerial pal Tom Flanagan pointed out on the radio just this morning – they’ve already served their purpose by getting rid of Premier Ed Stelmach, who dared to try to raise petroleum royalties.

As for the Liberals, any who remain with seats in the House, one imagines, will swiftly separate themselves from their leader, then tear themselves apart in meaningless internal squabbles. All the while, they will be invoking the name of Laurence Decore and vowing to be back, bigger and better than ever. Those who lose their seats will quietly retire.

Then there are Alberta’s other opposition parties, the Alberta Party and the New Democrats.

According to one recent poll, the former is polling three percentage points above the Communist Party – within the margin of error!

It seems safe to conclude that the Alberta Party will soon officially concede that it is this province’s answer to the Theosophical Society and get back to doing what it does really well – organizing after-church coffee parties.

As for the NDP, well, pardon me, but someone has to be in opposition, even in Alberta!

Notwithstanding the inevitably furious yowls of the enRajed Shermanites that I’m just a Knee-Dipper willing to curtsey to any perfidy to benefit my party – that’s the role the Alberta New Democrats may be doomed to play starting in the 41st year of the Tory dynasty.

Well, as Tommy Douglas is reputed to have said, the first thing we have to do is get rid of the Liberals. After that, as Tommy didn’t say – but would have, had he stuck around long enough to see them – the Wildrosers need to go too.

These are rare sentiments on which good Tories and New Democrats can agree as we sit down to contemplate whether that orange glow in the eastern sky will stick around after the morning mist clears.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Strange Case of Dr. Morton and Mr. Lee … not to mention that of Mr. Sparrow

by David Climenhaga on September 13, 2011 in Uncategorized with No comments
Dr. Morton and Mr. Lee. Note that Alberta political aspirants may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Ryan Sparrow with some guy on a plane; the real Freddy Lee.

Having been accused of getting up to something with a real government of Alberta email account and a not-quite-so-real name, Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Freddy Lee “Ted” Morton has offered a sort of “rolled-up plea” before the court of public opinion.

First of all, plead the American-born neo-Con ideologue and his key supporters, sure he did it, but everybody does.

Second, even though he did do it, and even though everybody else does it too, he didn’t really do it, because he used his real name.

So, as Dr. Morton’s spokesperson, a fellow named Ryan Sparrow recently told my community’s newspaper, the St. Albert Gazette, “the leadership candidate does not believe he did anything wrong … ‘Absolutely not. The minister’s office followed all the rules and guidelines.’”

Indeed, according to the Gazette, Mr. Sparrow said that “having one email for public consumption and another for internal communication is not uncommon, and Morton’s secret account was a government one with his name. ‘The premier has said he does the same practice and the deputy premier, who is also a leadership candidate.’” (Emphasis added.)

The idea behind this line of reasoning being, presumably, that if the first part doesn’t succeed, then … the prosecution can just drop dead!

Never mind that everybody doesn’t do it. In fact, I’ll make a gentleman’s wager right now that while Premier Ed Stelmach, just to pluck one political name out of the air, may have a private email account, it’s not in the name of Edward.Michael@ … wherever.

And never mind that using his real name doesn’t get Dr. Morton off the hook, because almost nobody knew it was his real name, and Dr. Morton knew that.

In other words, Mr. Stelmach, who used to be called “Honest Ed” for a reason, would get it that anyone looking at such an address would assume it belonged to someone named Mr. Michael, and that that would be deceptive. (And by the way, people, just in case there’s a real Edward Michael working for the government of Alberta, please don’t go sending the poor guy emails today to find out if he’s really the premier. That’s called collateral damage, and it’s not nice when it happens to you or someone you care about.)

Of course, it’s not at all clear whether this little email imbroglio will hurt Dr. Morton. The prevailing opinion among both his neo-Con supporters, who obviously have a dog in the hunt, and cynical lefties who have seen how things operate in Alberta for far too long, is that it won’t make any difference.

Me, I’m not so sure. I think a lot of small-c conservative Albertans are honourable people – even if they hold some ideas about economics that I think are wrongheaded – and it’ll trouble them that their favourite candidate is a sneak. It may not trouble them enough to go back to the Wildrose Party, but it might bother them enough to vote for another right-wing candidate like Rick Orman or Doug Griffiths.

We’ll see on Saturday, I guess. But if I were Dr. Morton, I’d be thinking that I needed to change some opinions if I wanted to get my chance at last to take the Progressive out of Conservative in Alberta.

And what do you do when you need to change opinions? Why, “you hire opinion changers,” of course.

Anyway, that’s what the people at a little Ontario-based firm called Crestview Opinion Changes said last June when they welcomed none other than Ryan Sparrow to their team as a vice-president with responsibility for the company’s activities in Western Canada.

Mr. Sparrow’s “decade of experience in media relations, strategic communications and public policy will serve Crestview clients well in the areas of public affairs campaigns, provincial government relations and communications,” they said in an announcement that also noted their new VP’s tenure as an advisor to Prime Minister Harper.

And a couple of weeks ago, not long before Dr. Morton’s problems managing his email accounts became public thanks to the CBC, Mr. Sparrow’s name began turning up at the bottom of press releases published by Freddy Lee.

In fact, Mr. Sparrow can probably give some excellent advice to Dr. Morton about what to do, and what not to do, with his public email accounts, having had some interesting experiences in that area himself.

Alert readers will recall that back in the 2008 federal election campaign, Mr. Sparrow got in a spot of trouble himself for sending an email. Indeed, he was suspended from his role as a senior communications advisor to the prime minister after he sent an email to CTV news suggesting that the father of a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2006, who had criticized the PM’s Afghan policy, was a supporter of a Liberal candidate named Michael Ignatieff, who later was that party’s leader for a spell.

The Globe and Mail reported at the time: “‘Note that this guy is an Iggy supporter,’ the e-mail read, followed by a link to a page on Mr. Ignatieff’s website offering condolences on (the father’s) loss.”

This was apparently too much even for some of Mr. Harper’s stronger-constitutioned supporters. And who knows, that email may have been one of the reasons why Mr. Harper had to wait until 2011 to form a majority government?

Regardless, the Alberta neo-Con candidate and his experienced advisor now have until next Saturday to work on changing enough opinions to ensure that Tory voters remember Dr. Morton and forget Mr. Lee.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Ted Morton says everybody does it? Well, stand up straight Alberta, and listen to your mother!

by David Climenhaga on September 9, 2011 in Uncategorized with 8 Comments
Do what your mama tells you! Below: My Mom, circa 1937; Ted Morton; Charles Rusnell.

It’s been a few hours now since a CBC investigative reporter revealed that front-running Conservative leadership candidate Ted Morton used a fake name on a real government email address to evade Freedom of Information searches and had government documents pertaining to his ministry shredded when he left office.

As a result, we now know the details of Dr. Morton’s brazen defence of his outrageous behaviour: Everybody does it.

Now, I don’t know about your mom, or Dr. Morton’s mom down there in Wyoming, but my mom told me that just because everybody else did something didn’t make it right. More than once she also advised me that just because everyone else was doing something didn’t mean that I was going to get to do it any time soon.

My mom’s no longer with us, but her advice remains pretty sound, I think. Ted Morton should have paid attention. I can tell you that Mom used to vote Conservative, but I’m pretty darned sure she wouldn’t vote for Dr. Morton.

Dr. Morton’s ‘covert email’

OK, let’s rewind for those of you who haven’t been following this story all day long.

Early yesterday morning, CBC investigative reporter Charles Rusnell broke a story that said Dr. Morton, a neo-Con intellectual, sometime “Senator in Waiting” and former minister of finance and of sustainable resource development in Premier Ed Stelmach’s cabinet, “used a covert email for his internal communications while he was a government minister to evade potential public scrutiny.”

As part of his leadership campaign, Dr. Morton makes a big deal of calling for transparency in government.

“Emails leaked to CBC News show Morton used the name Frederick Lee – his actual first and middle names – as an official government email address while he was minister of Sustainable Resource Development (SRD),” Rusnell wrote on the CBC’s Website.

Dr. Morton used his official Freddy Lee email account to discuss the extremely controversial details of his land-use legislation, which has caused a brouhaha in rural Alberta and has been a major rallying point for the far-right Wildrose Alliance, allowing that party’s supporters to portray themselves as defenders of “property rights.”

When Dr. Morton left the cabinet, Mr. Rusnell also quoted a government official saying, “our office staff shredded all our documents when Dr. Morton resigned from cabinet.” The documents shredded included the Freddy Lee emails.

Shredding documents of historical or forensic value is not a government employee’s decision to make – unless, as it turns out, the minister in question is a neo-Con ideologue to whom the rules don’t apply.

Dr. Morton’s everybody-does-it defence

OK, that was the situation by early afternoon, when Dr. Morton was scheduled to show up at an Editorial Board meeting of the Edmonton Journal.

Dr. Morton’s instinct, obviously, was to bob and weave. He snuck in and out of a back door at last Thursday’s leadership forum in Red Deer to avoid the famously dogged Mr. Rusnell, who was waiting outside with a cameraman and a long list of questions (no doubt prepared well in advance and in the right order to aid the preparation of his story).

With no opportunity to gracefully wiggle out of the editorial board meeting, Dr. Morton chose to try to blow his behaviour off as standard operating procedure. “‘I know it’s common practice (federally), not just for cabinet ministers, but for MPs’ to have more than one email account, one public and one internal, and then perhaps an additional internal one,” the Journal live-blogged during the meeting.

This in fact is true. The difference is, of course, that they’re both in the same name. Even Jack Layton had a private email account – in the name of Jack Layton, of course, not “Freddy Lee Layton” or its equivalent

“Anybody’s who’s the head of a public or private corporation follows the same type of practice,” the Journal quoted Dr. Morton as saying. “There’s a public email, and one or two internal ones.”

So there you have it, the first pillar of his defence: Everybody does it.

“If I was trying to avoid FOIPP, I wouldn’t have used my own name,” he told the Journal, conveniently forgetting that he used a version of his own name that he knew no one would know. “Morton says he believes the archived emails would be maintained by a systems operator” – well, you can believe that if you wish, I guess.

In Alberta we shoot, shovel and shut up

The probability seems high that documents and emails were destroyed illegally, but we’ll have to wait for a planned investigation by Alberta’s outgoing Information and Privacy Commissioner, Frank Work, which was reported yesterday evening by the Globe and Mail.

No one seems to know right now what the Alberta government’s rules are for this sort of thing. Here’s a link to the B.C. government’s approach, under which Dr. Morton would not have been allowed to destroy all his mail.

The good news is that Mr. Work can be as dogged and independent as Mr. Rusnell. The bad news is that even fast-tracked, there’s no way the investigation can be completed in time for the Tory leadership first ballot, a week Saturday on Sept. 17.

And while this is not exactly said in Dr. Morton’s defence, Alberta government insiders have known that since Ralph Klein was premier the destruction of public records has in fact become a practice that is not unknown in this government.

As Mr. Klein himself described his philosophy during the Mad Cow Disease crisis in 2003, “any self-respecting rancher would have shot, shovelled and shut up.” This kind of thinking means that when future historians come to study the Klein, Stelmach and – God help us! – the Morton years, there will be huge holes in the story.

The interesting question now is whether this will affect Dr. Morton’s candidacy. It’s simply hard to predict if this will be enough to move right-wing Albertans back to the Wildrose Alliance, or toward support for untainted Tory candidates like Rick Orman and Doug Griffiths who are also on the right side of the political spectrum.

One of Dr. Morton’s strengths – a reason he’s thought to have moved back into the front-runner position in recent weeks – has been his assiduous work over the summer with conservative evangelical Christians. One would think, surely, that people espousing such a doctrine would be troubled by this kind of conduct!

Everybody does it? That excuse just won’t cut it if Albertans are listening to their mamas!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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