All posts tagged Robin Campbell

Who leaked Alberta’s budget details? And who plugged the leak?

by David Climenhaga on February 11, 2013 in Alberta Economy, Alberta Legislature, Alberta Politics, Media with 1 Comment

Some of the members of Alberta’s Treasury Board are pictured above. While not exactly as illustrated, they are all suspects in the leakage of budget details, in the office, with an email to the Calgary Herald. Below: Columnist Don Braid, detective Sherlock Holmes and Treasury Board President Doug Horner.

It’s a whodunit, a little like the one about the dog that didn’t bark.

Why didn’t the Calgary Herald create a huge front-page brouhaha when its columnist Don Braid ferreted out some pretty startling facts about Alberta’s March 7 budget?

Certainly, that’s what most newspapers would have done if their trusted political columnist had sufficient confidence to publish a story stating the government of Premier Alison Redford was about to bring down a budget with an “operating deficit” of about $300 million. Alert readers will recall that just months ago the very same government had vowed no such thing would ever happen on its watch.

In fact, I could go farther. That’s what the Calgary Herald would have done back in the day when the premier’s office didn’t necessarily have its publisher on speed dial.

In the event, Mr. Braid’s oddly subdued column ran on Saturday morning as the so-called Alberta Economic Summit was about to kick off, but with no accompanying news story on the Herald’s front page and no follows or commentary in any other media on the significant discoveries the story outlined.

The information, Mr. Braid’s column indicated, came from within the Treasury Board, the powerful government committee headed by Finance Minister Doug Horner that oversees the civil service and most of the operations of the government.

But at least the column ran, which indicates that the Herald couldn’t question Mr. Braid’s reporting – even if the phone lines running from the premier’s communications staff to the editor’s and publisher’s offices were burning up Friday afternoon and evening.

It certainly would have been fun to have been a fly on the wall when the Herald’s august editors and managers met to decide what to do about Mr. Braid’s column and the no doubt clearly expressed wishes of the premier’s communicators that it not see the light of the next morning.

There may not have been sufficient details in Mr. Braid’s column to let the Opposition credibly call for the resignation of Mr. Horner as finance minister and president of Treasury Board, but there were certainly enough there to have the government launch a full-scale effort to relentlessly track down the leaker. Count on it that Mr. Horner was furious.

You may be sure the other 12 members of Treasury Board are none too happy to find themselves on their boss’s list of suspects, and officials in the board’s offices should brace themselves for a full-blown witch-hunt commencing this morning.

This must be an especially unhappy turn of events if your name, like that of Treasury Board Vice-Chair Kyle “Leaky” Fawcett, so obviously lends itself to a mean nickname!

The premier ended the summit with a news conference in which she tried to blow off Mr. Braid’s revelations, calling out the columnist by name and telling the passive gathering of reporters that the numbers were not from the budget and that was all she had to say about that.

Your blogger was not there, alas, not being paid to attend these things, but can report that no one else in the gathered press corps seems to have followed up with a pointed question.

I have known Mr. Braid for years, he is an excellent reporter and I have confidence in his facts. If his numbers are not from the budget, it’s only because the government has four weeks to recalibrate sufficiently.

As to the motive of the leaker, that remains a mystery. As has been previously reported here, Ms. Redford is sufficiently unpopular with elements of her own caucus to offer a possible explanation.

Meanwhile, a partial list of suspects – at least those who are members of Treasury Board – is reproduced below.

And the dog that didn’t bark? Readers will recall that Sherlock Holmes solved that mystery with the following observation: “Obviously the midnight visitor was someone whom the dog knew well.”

Never mind the meaning of the curried mutton.

List of Alberta Treasury Board Members

Doug Horner, Spruce Grove-St. Albert – President
Kyle Fawcett, Calgary-Klein – Vice-Chair
Mike Allen, Fort McMurray-Wood Buffalo
Wayne Drysdale, Grande Prairie-Wapiti
Doug Griffiths, Battle River-Wainwright
David Dorward, Edmonton-Gold Bar
Ric McIver, Calgary-Hays
Robin Campbell, West Yellowhead
Len Webber, Calgary-Foothills
Jeff Johnson, Athabasca-Sturgeon-Redwater
Cal Dallas, Red Deer-South
Donna Kennedy-Glans, Calgary-Varsity
Jonathan Denis, Calgary-Acadia

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Choosing a Speaker for Alberta: Your chance to vote … sort of

by David Climenhaga on May 1, 2012 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Your blogger with yet another of the candidates to be called Mr. Speaker, the dulcetly mellifluous Gene Zwozdesky, looking none too thrilled about this photo opportunity in Speakerly garb.

I have been surprised by the amount of interested generated by my post suggesting there is a three-way or possibly four-way race for the job of Speaker of the Alberta Legislature, now that Ken Kowalski has retired.

Readers will recall that the four named here are:

  • Laurie Blakeman, Liberal MLA for Edmonton-Centre
  • Robin Campbell, Progressive Conservative MLA for West Yellowhead
  • Wayne Cao, PC MLA for Calgary-Fort
  • Gene Zwozdesky, PC MLA for Edmonton-Mill Creek

It occurs to me that Albertans ought to have a chance to express their views in this important matter. Thus I refer you to the short poll at the right above, which asks you to vote on which of the suggested candidates you think should be named the speaker.

This kind of poll is by definition unscientific. But how is that any different that what we have been subjected to for the past two years, one wonders?

I have set the poll to run for one week. Vote early and vote often!

Click here for more details on the quartet of MLAs.

Calculating the odds in the race for Alberta’s Legislative Speaker

by David Climenhaga on April 27, 2012 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
Your blogger with Robin Campbell, Ken Kowalski’s possible replacement as Speaker of the Alberta Legislature. Below: Laurie Blakeman, Gene Zwozdesky, and Wayne Cao with you-know-who.

JASPER, Alberta

Just when you thought it was safe to go out of the house again, there’s another election!

But you don’t get to vote in this one, even though it’s pretty important to Alberta just the same.

Next on the agenda for the Alberta Legislature: the 87 newly elected MLAs need to elect a Speaker to preside over their … er … deliberations.

Sounds routine, but in a funny inside-baseball way, the Speaker’s job is almost as important as the premier’s. The Speaker, after all, is the person who gets to set the tone of debate in the Legislature and can go a long way to make it civilized, or hyper-partisan.

The last Speaker, Ken Kowalski, one of the Tory old guard not-so-subtly given a shove in the general direction of the door in Premier Alison Redford’s pre-election House cleaning, was a Speaker of the partisan school – although I am sure he would dispute that assessment.

As befit a guy who was first elected to the Legislature in 1979, he was a consummate insider, someone who still knows where all the bodies are buried. He’ll also take home a “transition allowance” of $1.2 million, which will give the Wildrose Party something to talk about in its first week on the job in its unanticipated role as Opposition.

Yesterday, Mr. Kowalski could be heard musing on the radio about how the Legislature was certain to go to hell in a handbasket without him and some of the other Tory old-timers there to guide things in the right direction. All I can say about that, Ken, is it’s exactly the way I feel about Canadian journalism. You’ll just have to get used to the notion nobody is listening.

There seem to be three – or maybe four – candidates for the job. They are, in alphabetical order:

  • Laurie Blakeman, Liberal MLA for Edmonton-Centre, who has been openly campaigning for the job for weeks if not months.
  • Robin Campbell, PC MLA for West Yellowhead, who like Ms. Blakeman has been openly asserting his interest for a spell now.
  • Wayne Cao, Progressive Conservative MLA for Calgary-Fort and one of the two best singers in the Legislature, who must be included in this list because he is now Deputy Speaker. He may or may not be interested in the job.
  • Gene Zwozdesky, PC MLA for Edmonton-Mill Creek and the Mel Torme of provincial politics, the Velvet Fog itself, who is tied with Mr. Cao as the Legislature’s best crooner.

Nothing is known here about Ms. Blakeman’s singing voice, but yesterday she sent around an email stating she wants to replace Mr. Kowalski. “An unusual choice but not unheard of to have a non-government member serve as Speaker,” she wrote. “In part I am doing this to see a return to the role of a non-partisan Speaker. A Speaker attending daily caucus meetings sends a mixed message. As well, it would help to have a Speaker who has served in Opposition and understands the challenges, especially with a combined opposition of 25.

“My eight years of experience as Official Opposition House Leader should serve me well, but mostly I just love parliamentary process,” she added.

Ms. Blakeman would be a great Speaker, I suspect, but her chances are probably not as good as they might have been if the seat count in the House had been closer after Tuesday. The odds are against her succeeding.

Still, the vote’s theoretically an open one and a candidate without the premier’s enthusiastic approval has won before. That victor was Mr. Kowalski himself, in 1997, who apparently did not have a fan in then-premier Ralph Klein but nonetheless defeated Mr. Klein’s choice for the job, Glen Clegg.

I heard Mr. Zwozdesky’s name come up for the first time in this connection yesterday morning on CBC radio, which in its wisdom hasn’t bothered to post an online link. He’s apparently campaigning for the job too. As a natural conciliator, someone who knows all the Parliamentary ropes – the former choir conductor was first elected as a Liberal in 1993 – Mr. Zwozdesky would also make a terrific Speaker.

By the way, Mr. Zwozdesky was also a professional Ukrainian dancer for a while, and you have to think that would help in a job like keeping order in the Legislature!

As for Mr. Cao (who has a much nicer voice than you’d think from this clip), he’s a bit of a dark horse in this race, but he is Deputy Speaker, so he has to be considered. His Wikipedia biography says he was born in North Vietnam but escaped on an American helicopter from the southern city of Saigon at the end of the Vietnam War. He came to Calgary in 1976 by way of California.

Like Mr. Zwozdesky, Mr. Cao is a conciliator and has a track record as the deputy in the Speaker’s chair. Like Ms. Blakeman, however, he’s probably a long shot if he’s even interested in the job.

Then there’s Mr. Campbell. The fact I’m writing this in his riding is purely coincidental. He’s a former official of the United Mine Workers Union and he was the PC caucus whip under former premier Ed Stelmach. His Wikipedia biography is startlingly uninformative.

Mr. Campbell is no dummy. But he’s not a warm and fuzzy kind of guy like Mr. Zwozdesky or Mr. Cao, and if you don’t count his once being a “union boss,” he doesn’t have oppositional experience like Ms. Blakeman. He strikes me as the kind of MLA who would continue Mr. Kowalski’s partisan approach to being Speaker.

So, this being Alberta, that likely means he has the inside track for the job.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Glenn Taylor quits his day job – now he has a few weeks to save the Alberta Party

by David Climenhaga on January 5, 2012 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Your blogger with Alberta Party Leader Glenn Taylor just after his election last May. Mr. Taylor’s election, that is. All your blogger’s ever been elected as is a “local legend.” Below: Robin Campbell, Barry Madsen.

With an election looming, it’s nice to see that Alberta Party Leader Glenn Taylor has finally cleared the decks for action and is about to start campaigning seriously for the job of MLA in the West Yellowhead riding.

Mr. Taylor announced yesterday that he was at last giving up his day job as mayor of Hinton, the principal town if not the best known community in the huge riding that runs along the B.C. border far to the west of Edmonton, and which includes the famous mountain resort of Jasper.

It’s tempting to dismiss Mr. Taylor’s candidacy as a day late and a dollar short – and it probably is. Still, the man is a natural-born schmoozer – which is the key talent required by any good retail politician – and he has enjoyed solid support at the municipal level in his home community.

It’s also very easy to be critical of the former New Democrat candidate and Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union local vice-president for having done very little outside his home community since he was elected leader of the Alberta Party – the centrist creation of a group of disaffected Red Tories and Blue Liberals that seems to have lost its edge since Mr. Taylor was chosen as its first leader last May.

But in Mr. Taylor’s defence, his hesitant performance to date illustrates the problem serious politicians in any centrist party have in this province keeping bread on the table while competing with the well-financed parties of the right. It’s no slur on Mr. Taylor to say he’s a working person who needed to feed his family while he tried to build a completely new political party.

With a relatively high percentage of union members among its populace, West Yellowhead should have more potential than most Alberta ridings for progressive politicians like Mr. Taylor. Presumably that’s why the local Progressive Conservative constituency association chose Robin Campbell, a former official of the United Mine Workers Union, as its standard bearer in 2008.

Mr. Campbell, who was the Tory caucus whip under former premier Ed Stelmach, won with a decisive 54 per cent of the riding’s vote in 2008 and intends to run again, although it’s unclear what kind of a role he might play in Premier Alison Redford’s caucus if he’s re-elected. He’s a Tory, so he’ll have no shortage of money to campaign with.

Nevertheless, a number of factors that could work for Mr. Taylor may now be emerging – if he’s lucky, works hard from here on in, and the wind blows in the right direction.

First, as in most rural Alberta ridings, the Wildrose Party has the potential to split the right-wing vote in West Yellowhead, at least a little and possibly dramatically.

Second, it sure doesn’t hurt Mr. Taylor’s chances that the local NDP candidate has adopted the loony idea – if you’ll pardon the expression – of accepting no donations larger than a dollar.

This has proved to be a great way to generate news stories in the media and commentary in the blogosphere, but it is not at all clear, as blogger Dave Cournoyer pointed out recently, if NDP candidate Barry Madsen fully comprehended the implications for his campaign when he made this silly announcement.

Nor does it hurt Mr. Taylor that the Alberta Liberals, which have split the opposition vote about evenly with the NDP in the last two elections, are in a state of complete disarray under the leadership of former Conservative Raj Sherman.

Finally, another factor potentially in Mr. Taylor’s favour is that voters in West Yellowhead are not monolithic Tory voters – having elected a New Democrat back in 1989 and a Liberal in 1993. More than once, a deep Liberal-NDP split has given the election to the Conservatives, as it did in 1997 when Mr. Taylor ran for the NDP.

So if Mr. Madsen’s dollar-a-donation brainstorm has the effect of persuading West Yellowhead voters he’s not a serious candidate at the same moment as the Alberta Liberals are falling apart and a significant split is emerging between the Tories and the Wildrose Party, a victory for Mr. Taylor would not be outside the realm of possibility.

There are still a lot of ifs in this theorizing. On the downside, every moment Mr. Taylor spends outside his riding building his new party can hurt him in what’s sure to be a tight race. Still, now that he has finally put on his track shoes, maybe he can come from behind in this race and surprise a lot of Albertans.

If he does, he will likely have saved the Alberta Party from a quick and merciless extinction, which is all but certain if it elects no MLAs on whatever unfixed election date between next March and next May Premier Redford decides to call an election.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

When government MLAs start blowing whistles, who rats them out? Their legislative assistants, of course!

by David Climenhaga on July 21, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Jonathan Huckabay and Raj Sherman at a Liberal leadership all-candidates’ meeting in Edmonton Wednesday night. Below: Government Whip Robin Campbell.

“When in doubt, tell the truth,” Mark Twain famously advised. “It will confound your enemies and astound your friends!”

Still, it was startling to read in the Calgary Herald that Raj Sherman, the former Progressive Conservative MLA turned Independent turned Alberta Liberal leadership candidate, had just like that admitted he was the one who last fall leaked emails that pointed to Alberta’s top cabinet politicians as the guys responsible for the province’s Emergency Room crisis. (The emails were published on this blog in December 2010.)

The emails showed Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach had promised the province’s Emergency Room physicians 600 long-term care beds would be built to fix hospital overcrowding that had resulted in jammed ERs, but that the promise wasn’t kept and sick Albertans may have died as a result.

Even though as Parliamentary Assistant for Health he was still a junior member of Premier Ed Stelmach’s cabinet at the time, Dr. Sherman told Herald journalist Matt McClure Tuesday, “I will confess to you, I was the person who anonymously sent that email out.”

If the media didn’t treat this as an earth-shattering story, that was likely because pretty well everyone who follows Alberta politics either strongly suspected or actually knew that Dr. Sherman, an Emergency Room physician himself and the only doctor in the entire Tory caucus, was the source of the leak.

Nevertheless, the media’s blasé response to this story may have resulted in another story that many Albertans would find considerably more astonishing being given short shrift. To wit, that the Stelmach government assigned employees to keep an eye on its own Conservative MLAs and report back to the Tory caucus whip.

Is it just me, or does this sound like something that would have happened in the Soviet Union, circa 1934 – only without the firing squads, of course?

Here’s the key passage in Mr. McClure’s story: “While the source of the leak was a mystery to most, legislative assistant Jonathan Huckabay said top Tories knew because he had ratted out Sherman to the government whip.” (Emphasis added.) “‘I was kind of supposed to keep an eye on him,’ Huckabay said. ‘I said, you guys better get ready (because) here’s the email he’s about to send out.’”

I know that Mr. McClure will forgive me when I say I phoned Mr. Huckabay the first chance I got and offered him an opportunity to recant. After all, even after Dr. Sherman’s admission, it strained credulity to hear a former legislative assistant say aloud his job was to keep an eye on the government’s own MLAs, and fink them out if they stepped out of line.

This was especially startling since Mr. Huckabay has since quit that job and gone to work as Dr. Sherman’s non-Tory legislative assistant – a job in which, seeing as Dr. Sherman is now the Independent MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark, there’s no need to rat him out to anyone but himself.

Mr. Huckabay, however, minced no words. “That was my job,” he told me matter of factly. “The legislative assistants don’t actually work for the MLAs. They work for the government whip. … The legislative assistant should be paying attention to make sure an MLA doesn’t do something stupid.”

The government can’t deny they knew about the emails, or who’d leaked them, Mr. Huckabay explained, “because I’d ratted Raj out to the caucus.” Period. Full stop.

Well, not quite full stop: He did mention that at the time, he was also acting as the legislative assistant to five other Conservative MLAs: Carl Benito (Edmonton Mill Woods), Pearl Calahasen (Lesser Slave Lake), Dave Rodney (Calgary Lougheed), Greg Weadick (Lethbridge West) and David Xiao (Edmonton McClung). Did they ever do anything that had to be reported to Government Whip Robin Campbell, MLA for West Yellowhead? … Maybe…

It wasn’t having to blow the whistle on one of his MLAs that troubled Mr. Huckabay about the life of a caucus legislative assistant, he noted, however, although he recalled how “I actually had the Whip come over to my desk and ask me to show him Raj’s email.”

No, it was hearing well placed members of the government caucus lying about what meetings they’d been at and what they’d heard there when the whole health care crisis started to spin out of the government’s control. “People lied bare-facedly!”

Well, there’s no more of that, by the sound of it, where Mr. Huckabay now sits!

Meanwhile, back in the Conservative caucus, he noted, there’s one legislative assistant for every two Conservative MLAs. That should make the job of staying on top of things – and MLAs – considerably easier, one would think.

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

New Alberta Party leader’s challenge is to turn a New Age blip into lasting political phenomenon

by David Climenhaga on May 29, 2011 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Your blogger discusses the state of Alberta (pun intended) with Alberta Party Leader Glenn Taylor. Below: Randy Royer.

In the end, the Alberta Party’s leadership vote yesterday came down to a choice between old-style plebeian NDP politics and old-style patrician Liberal politics.

It wasn’t much of a contest. The New Democratic Party approach won easily in a well-organized slam-dunk, and three-time Hinton Mayor Glenn Taylor became leader of the new political party without the need to resort to a second ballot. It helped that Mr. Taylor appears to have had the backing of the new party’s principal movers and shakers.

Mr. Taylor, who obviously honed his campaign-organization skills when he was an NDP candidate back in 1997 in his mill and mining town home, ran a professional campaign and mopped the floor with his three rivals. He won better than 55 per cent of the 1,200 ballots cast over the Internet, by telephone and in person at the two-day conference attended by more than 250 Alberta Party supporters in Edmonton’s Shaw Conference Centre. In all, the party has about 2,000 members.

Mr. Taylor’s closest challenger, Calgary businessman Randy Royer, who was once a rare federal Liberal supporter from Alberta’s conservative deep south, didn’t even come close despite a polished and professional campaign. He captured only 287 ballots, or 24 per cent of the vote.

Mr. Taylor’s election is, quite literally, a defining moment in the history of the fledgling party that has up to now defined itself as the one that “does politics differently” than all those others.

The Alberta Party now has a leader with an identifiable style that may not appeal to everyone, and a practical political need to develop policies that could turn off many current adherents. In other words, the Alberta Party’s days as a New Age political experiment are over, whether its leaders and adherents like it or not.

Until yesterday, the party was more of a social movement among Alberta’s chattering classes than a real political phenomenon. It has one member in the Alberta Legislature – Calgary-Currie MLA Dave Taylor (no relation) – but more by happenstance than design. The disaffected former Alberta Liberal switched to the Alberta Party in January after quitting the Liberals and sitting for nine months as an Independent.

The party as we now know it (the name’s been around for a while in various ideological guises) was pulled together in 2010 by a group of disaffected Red Tories, Blue Liberals and small-c conservative Greens. For the better part of 2010 and early 2011, its supporters have met in kitchens and living rooms talking (and talking) about their vision for Alberta politics, an exercise they dubbed The Big Listen.

The question, of course, is whether anyone not at these coffee parties was listening – and the consensus is that they were not. At least, recent public opinion polls show the Alberta Party has barely registered with rank and file Alberta voters.

Its most enthusiastic supporters nowadays seem to define their mission as listening to everyone, or, as one member put it during a discussion Friday night, being “a party that is over the full spectrum of the political spectrum.” The problem with this, pretty obviously, is that by trying to be everything to everyone, the party has ended up not really representing very much of anything to anyone.

So, after all this talk and warm feeling, the practical step that confronted the party was choosing a leader who could turn it into a real political force without turning off the many enthusiasts who liked the fact their party dreamed of practicing politics as they have not been practiced before.

The big question confronting Glenn Taylor is whether he can be that politician.

It’s not at all clear he can persuade the party’s current membership to trade their idealistic notions about New Age politics for the old-school, nitty-gritty, NDP techniques he used in his campaign and which pretty obviously work.

It’s equally unclear if a former New Democrat from a working-class town can continue to appeal to a group who are mostly disaffected former Alberta Liberals and disgruntled centrist Tories. For that matter, it’s unclear if such unhappy Liberals and Conservatives will stay unhappy now that Liberal leader David Swann and Premier Ed Stelmach, the joint causes of most of their grief, are on the way out.

If the party only manages to further fragment the centre and centre-left vote in Alberta, it could well end up electing no MLAs in the melee that is sure to be the next Alberta general election. Mr. Taylor himself vows to run in his West Yellowhead riding – now held by former trade unionist turned Tory Robin Campbell, who won overwhelmingly in 2008. With no MLAs, it is said here the Alberta Party will quickly fall apart.

On the other hand, the Alberta Liberals are now in a state of advanced decay, a situation from which the Alberta Party could benefit. Mr. Taylor may be the right leader with the right political skills to exploit this possibility.

But that will depend a lot on whom the Liberals choose as their leader – a decision that won’t be made until fall.

Mr. Taylor’s job now is to turn a New Age blip into a lasting political phenomenon. Good luck!

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Tweet! Tweet! Character counts in Alberta Party leadership race, and maybe not just the way you’re thinking…

by David Climenhaga on February 10, 2011 in Uncategorized with No comments
Tweet! Tweet! Little birdies are telling us things. Is Alberta ready for their message? Below: Glenn Taylor, Dave Taylor, Ken Chapman, Robin Campbell.

OK, people, if Tweets can win an election, maybe Glenn Taylor will be the next premier of Alberta.

“Glen Who,” you wonder?

@TWEET: “You know, Glenn Taylor, the Mayor of Hinton… He’s running for the leadership of the new Alberta Party!” (85 characters)

“Oh, I thought he would. He’s already their only MLA…”

@TWEET: “No! Wait! Not that Taylor. That’s Dave Taylor, old style politician the Alberta Party had to hook up with to start getting counted in the polls. This is different.” (135 characters)

“Uh… OK?”

@TWEET: “This is Glenn Taylor, mayor of the mining and mill town by the Jasper Park gate, a new style politician committed to doing things a new way for a new day!” (123 characters)

(Faintly.) “Oh. OK. That Taylor…”

@TWEET: “You bet! You’re going to be reading a lot about him, mostly in 140 characters or less!” (70 characters)

That’s enough twittery levity. Let’s get down to business. The important thing from the media’s perspective – and fair enough – is that Mr. Taylor, the one who’s the mayor of Hinton, that is, as of Tuesday is the first official candidate for the leadership of the new Alberta Party. That rates a good news hit.

The Alberta Party, as alert readers will recall, is the new political movement, or something, that insists it will practice politics in a new way, is determinedly attempting to occupy the space the 48-year-old Mr. Taylor defines as “the vast territory between extreme left and extreme right” and which has made quite a splash among Alberta’s chattering classes.

The problem, Alberta Party doubters are bound to point out, is that while the province’s political cognoscenti may be chattering about the new party that’s not interested in “the politics of yesterday,” nobody else is. Indeed, as the most recent poll of Albertans’ voting intentions shows, the party hasn’t even registered as a blip on the provincial radar.

Well, never mind that, says blogger Ken Chapman, the party’s most avid supporter, and now Mr. Taylor’s too, by the sound of it.

Mr. Chapman is a principal author of the party’s Tweet-your-way-to-power strategy and surely the most enthusiastic participant in social media among Canadians over 55, present company included! As he said of the poll in question in a comment on this blog earlier this week, “it is pretty useless now given it was done before Dave Taylor joined the Alberta Party, Ed Stelmach announced he was quitting as Premier and David Swann took a dive too.”

Well, maybe. But that’s among the key questions in this whole affair. Can an essentially unknown party become a contender for power virtually overnight led by a basically unknown candidate (say, a mayor from Hinton)? Even if everything has changed, which ain’t necessarily so? If it can, can it do it on the basis of Tweets and other social media, rather than hard work in the traditional political trenches?

Alberta Party supporters are sure to point to the successful campaign by Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, in which a relatively unknown candidate came to prominence almost overnight, and which used social media creatively.

We’ll see, one supposes. But a mayoral campaign in one municipality, even a big one, is a different creature than a political campaign throughout a province in which large numbers of voters are tied in and loyal to particular political parties. What’s more, Mr. Nenshi was a remarkable campaigner, and there was more to his adequately financed campaign than just Tweets. It is true, however, that he drew some talent from Alberta Party ranks and will no doubt return the favour.

But the jury remains out on all these questions, as it is on the question of what the Alberta Party really stands for. You can only get so far on saying you’re neither left nor right before voters start asking probing questions about what the heck that means when it comes to specific policies.

And will the Alberta Party’s new-fangled, social-media-reactive supporters have the patience to stick around and plug on if their first provincial campaign fails to produce results?

Finally, there is the matter of Mr. Taylor – both Messrs Taylor, actually – who sounds suspiciously like an old style politician who does politics in the old style way.

He’s a small-town mayor, after all. He’s a former New Democratic Party candidate and trade union official. None of these are bad things, obviously – but not one of them is conducive the idea of doing politics in startling new ways that resist ever being pinned down to specific policies or positions. Savvy old-style voters wouldn’t stand for it.

Indeed, there are those who say Mr. Taylor has modelled his career on the old-style success story of Robin Campbell, the former United Mine Workers local president turned Conservative MLA and party whip who is now MLA for West Yellowhead, the provincial riding that includes Hinton.

It’s fair to assume Mr. Taylor is moving on to new approaches because he feels the old approaches didn’t work. But it will be interesting to see how the Alberta Party’s supporters take to Mr. Taylor’s blue-collar mill-and-mining town background, which is sure to assert itself at some point.

In the mean time, however, Mr. Taylor’s boosters are certain to do their best to elevate him to the Tweetheart of the social media set.

So stand by for plenty of Tweets about this! (4,400 characters)

This post also appears on rabble.ca.

Alberta’s ER crisis moves from full-blown swivet to three-ring circus!

by David Climenhaga on November 28, 2010 in Uncategorized with No comments
Alberta’s health care debate is set to resume Monday in the provincial Legislature. Historical Alberta buildings may not appear exactly as illustrated… is it just me, or is this joke wearing a little thin? Oh well, in for a penny… Below: Raj Sherman, Fred Horne. A couple of nice guys caught up in something bigger than both of them?

Can Ed Stelmach’s Conservative government really be so vindictive they’d go after a high-profile critic’s medical license?

That kind of thing was being said in Alberta last week by people who didn’t appear to be joking.

The province is in enough of an uproar over the government’s spectacular mishandling of the health care file that plenty of Albertans are inclined to believe it. You can’t go into a restaurant, a hair salon or a Tim Horton’s in Alberta these days without hearing things like this said aloud by ordinary folks for whom politics and health care policy are normally a foreign country.

Even a week ago, most people who noticed would have said impossible. After all, nobody’s that dumb!

Well, today – as the province’s Emergency Room crisis morphs from a full-blown swivet into a three-ring circus – Albertans are not so sure.

Alert readers recall that a waiting-time crisis in Alberta’s hospital emergency wards has been growing ever larger on the provincial radar screen for weeks.

Then things really started to spin out of control around 3 a.m. on Nov. 17 when Dr. Raj Sherman, an emergency room physician and the only medical doctor in Premier Stelmach’s Conservative caucus, sent an emotional email to numerous political and medical colleagues. The email tore a strip off his own government for its handling of the crisis.

The next day the likeable Dr. Sherman, then the Conservative MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark, apologized to Mr. Stelmach. The premier publicly forgave him and sensible political observers concluded everyone would soon go back to sleep.

After all, surely that’s what would have happened if Premier Stelmach and his close advisors had even a grain of political common sense. Well, boy, was that bet ever out to lunch!

On Nov. 19, a Friday, Dr. Sherman got up on his hind legs in the Legislature and continued to criticize the premier. He also aimed some barbed shots at the managers of Alberta Health Services and former Health Minister Ron Liepert, a politician with a reputation for being thin-skinned. (Mr. Liepert seems to be the person principally responsible for setting in motion the whole loony plan to eliminate the province’s nine health regions, which by and large had been working pretty well, and replace them with a single health board, which has been a disaster.)

Also on Nov. 19, Stephen Duckett, the undiplomatic Australian CEO of Alberta’s single province-wide health board, did his now notorious Cookie Walk on his way back from a meeting about how to fix the ER brouhaha. Who can know what he was thinking when he started waving an oatmeal cookie at reporters and screeching while the cameras rolled? Maybe he was homesick for Australia?

Needless to say, these events ratcheted up the level of hysteria considerably.

We can only speculate on this next point, but it appears as if over the weekend, Mr. Liepert and possibly other hard liners in the Conservative caucus demanded that the premier sack Dr. Sherman. As if that would shut him up!

On Monday, the premier flip-flopped and canned Dr. Sherman.

On Wednesday, Mr. Stelmach all but demanded that Mr. Duckett be fired by the supposedly independent AHS Board.

Wednesday night and Thursday, the Opposition parties organized a 27-hour health crisis filibuster in the Legislature that left everyone tired and cranky, and several with graying stubble on their chins.

On Thursday, a divided AHS Board complied with the demands from the premier and Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky that Mr. Duckett be forced to take the high jump. Over the side he went – with the promise of $680,000 in Alberta taxpayers’ money to ease his way.

At this point, as readers can imagine, it seemed impossible matters could get any more hysterical.

But that was before Friday, when we learned from the press that Dr. Sherman was accusing several Conservative MLAs and the president of the Alberta Medical Association of taking part in a smear campaign orchestrated by the Conservative government to discredit him.

Among Dr. Sherman’s startling accusations, all reported in plain English in the pages of the Edmonton Journal, were:

  • That he’d been told by the head psychiatrist of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta that his medical license could be suspended if he didn’t submit to a mental health assessment.
  • That he’d been informed by Yvonne Fritz, the minister of children and youth services, the pleasant-looking lady usually seen sitting behind the premier’s right shoulder during Question Period: “Raj, you need to be taken to emergency, and you need to see a psychiatrist to be locked up.”
  • That Government Whip Robin Campbell, “Called me a cancer. He said: ‘Raj, you’re a doctor. You know what we do with cancers. We cut them out.’”
  • And that Edmonton-Rutherford MLA Fred Horne took part in the alleged conspiracy when he discussed Dr. Sherman’s mental state early in the week with AMA President Dr. Patrick White, a psychiatrist.

Needless to say, everyone named by the Journal forcefully denies Dr. Sherman’s interpretation of events.

All we can say with conviction at this point is that more sound and fury – though, signifying what remains an open question – is sure to be heard on Monday, when NDP Leader Brian Mason says he will rise on a point of privilege and allege that the usually mild-mannered Mr. Horne engaged in “intimidation and obstruction” against Dr. Sherman.

Now, Mr. Horne strikes most people a man normally as likeable and positive as Dr. Sherman. One can’t help but think that these are two nice guys caught up in something bigger than both of them.

Be that as it may, Mr. Mason’s argument is pretty clear: “Mr. Horne has been around the medical profession a very long time and he undoubtedly knows that when you bring those kinds of suggestions forward to someone in a senior, responsible position, they have to take some action and they have to initiate something,” the NDP leader told the Journal. “I can’t see it as anything else but a calculated attempt to harm Mr. Sherman’s reputation and interfere in his ability to do his job.”

So fasten your seatbelts, folks. We aren’t getting off this rollercoaster any time soon!

This post also appears on rabble.ca.