All posts tagged Wildrose Alliance

National Post poll bad news for Alberta Tories … in the unlikely event it’s right

by David Climenhaga on December 20, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
A word of advice, boys: don’t bet all your kibbles on the results of a one-day demon-dialer poll! Alberta political analysts or the chances they take may not be exactly as illustrated.

Toronto’s National Post – or, as I prefer to think of it, the National Pest – states in its meta tags that it’s “Canada’s trusted source for national news, financial news, world news, blogging, twitter, tweets, opinion, vodcast, podcast, commentary, entertainment and sports.” Really, it does!

Nothing in there about polls, though, so we’re not going to get to report them to the Better Business Bureau, tonight anyway.

But for some reason the Toronto newspaper took it upon itself to publish details of a poll about Alberta politics. Who knows why? Their new managing editor lived in Calgary until recently, so maybe he got nostalgic for the warm tickle of a Chinook on his ears. (For you Easterners who aren’t in the know, a Chinook is a nasty warm wind that makes people act crazy when it blows. They get them a lot in Calgary and almost never in Edmonton, which may account for why we elect more New Democrats up here.)

Whatever the reason, the Post was happy to oblige with a story when a Toronto polling company called Forum Research, which has little or no track record in Alberta, took it upon itself to get the skinny on what we Albertans are really thinking, politics-wise. To do this, Forum used robotic demon-dialing technology to call 1,072 Albertans over the course of one day at the worst time of year to get people at home. Forum knows its respondents were all over 18, by the way, because they all pressed a button their phone saying they were.

By doing all this, Forum came up with results that would be extremely bad news for the Alberta Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford if they were true.

Based on this information, the Post’s reporter wrote a story that treated the poll credulously and concluded its results were good news for the Redford Conservatives. As previously noted, the local papers – which surely have journalists on what’s left of their staffs who know better – reprinted this yarn whole cloth.

The Forum poll’s key conclusion was that, on Dec. 14, anyway, the intentions of decided Alberta voters broke down like this:

Progressive Conservatives: 38 per cent
Wildrose Party: 23 per cent
New Democratic Party: 13 per cent
Alberta Liberal Party: 12 per cent
Alberta Party: 6 per cent
Other Parties: 9 per cent

The Post’s report reversed the numbers for the NDP and Liberals, and didn’t mention the “Other Parties” column, leaving some readers with the impression Forum’s numbers didn’t add up to 100. (They still don’t actually, but since they’re only off by one, we’re going to chalk that up to rounding.)

Now, if the Redford Tories are really at 38 per cent three or so months from a general election, they are in deep doo-doo. This would mean they are a full 15 per cent behind where they were at the time of the 2008 general election. It would put them close to their lowest level of popularity since first being elected more than 40 years ago.

So, if there were anything to this poll – and the mood around here sure doesn’t feel like it – it would not place the Redford Tories with “a strong lead heading in to next spring’s vote,” as the Post’s scribbler concluded.

In fact, since former premier Ed Stelmach announced he was stepping down last January, most credible polls have put the Conservatives in a much stronger position. For example:

Environics (Nov. 4-8) – 51 per cent
Citizen Society Research Lab (Oct. 1-2) – 48 per cent
Environics (July 15-24) – 54 per cent

Those results by pollsters who used credible methodology suggest the Forum poll is an outlier at best.

Some of the Forum poll’s other results strain credulity too. The Wildrose numbers seem unlikely, but are within the realm of possibility. The Alberta Party numbers, it is said here, stray across the line into fantasy. As for 9 per cent committed to other parties, we can only ask, what other parties? I know, the Communists and Social Credit run a few candidates now and then, but, uh … 9 per cent? I don’t think so, people.

The poll also concludes that Premier Redford’s personal approval ratings are low, Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith’s are high and Liberal Leader Raj Sherman’s are disastrous. There’s no mention of NDP Leader Brian Mason, despite the fact the New Democrats have outpolled the Liberals in several polls, including this one, and outpolled the Wildrose Party in one.

There’s plenty to like about Forum’s poll – but only if you’re a Wildrose supporter who hasn’t been paying attention. Naturally, the comments section of the Post was full of input from such citizens, concluding that “Wildrose should get 40 to 50 seats,” “Redford is a red tory and will destroy this province,” we need to “get rid of this socialist,” yadda-yadda.

My only advice to these nice folks: Don’t bet the bungalow or even the moose antlers in the den on the results of a single poll! They need to remember that this is the same company that back in June predicted that Ontario Conservative Leader Tim Hudak was well-positioned to form a majority government in October.

As for the Post, I guess, they really need to get polling onto that list of meta-tags.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Wildrose owns up to push polling; now you too can answer a completely unfair push poll

by David Climenhaga on November 2, 2011 in Uncategorized with 12 Comments
Hello! This is Dave Polling Central: Is Danielle Smith a threat or a menace? Below: Wildrose candidate and polling spokesperson Shayne Saskiw, Leader Danielle Smith.

The Wildrose Party has finally owned up to being behind the push-poll that tries to tie Alberta Premier Alison Redford to federal Liberal child care policies and the financial difficulties of a company owned by her chief of staff.

However, they’ve opted for a strategy of brazening it out, claiming that their robo-call survey uses a completely legitimate polling technique.

This is too bad, because as everybody knows, the first of the 12 steps to dealing with your problem is admitting that you have one. (Presumably, the Wildrose Party’s social conservative base doesn’t have any problems with the “higher power” part, but never mind that just now.)

They sent out Shayne Saskiw, their candidate in Lac La Biche-St. Paul-Two Hills to do the unpleasant job of pleading guilty with an explanation to the court of public opinion.

“One of these things where we put forth the facts of the questions that we ask and then we provide people with the opportunity to provide a response,” Mr. Saskiw told the CBC today. “We just want to see what Albertans think on it.”

Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen, and the usual unidentified sources in the mainstream media told me that the party brass were not releasing her itinerary this afternoon, presumably for fear the media would track her down and ask her the obvious.

While this is going on and we wait for the party leader’s response, the spirit of fairness has compelled your blogger to compose a completely unfair and unreasonable push poll of his own. The first question is as follows:

“As reported in the media, in 1999 Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith was fired by Alberta Education Minister Lyle Oberg as a Calgary school trustee along with the rest of the public school board. Disappointment came when school board chair described the actions of the school trustees leading up to the mass firing as ‘a failure of adults to act in an adult manner.’ How does knowing this affect your likelihood of supporting Ms. Smith as premier?”

You can press 1 if it makes you less likely to support her, press 2 if it makes you more likely to support her and press 3 if it doesn’t change your likelihood of supporting her.

Well, actually, you can’t press 1 because I’m not about to phone half the households in Alberta with this sucker. But you can click here and pretend.

Let me admit right here that the poll I have composed is not only unreasonable and unfair, it’s totally unscientific and almost bizarrely biased. But, what the hey, according to Mr. Saskiw’s line of logic, this kind of thing is going to be the new normal in Alberta politics, so I might as well get with the program.

I pledge to publish the poll results in a few days complete with a completely misleading spin based on intentional misrepresentation of the results. I may or may not keep my promise, depending on my mood at the time.

And if you don’t like it readers, well, I guess you can do your own darned poll! It’s not like you’d belong to an exclusive club!

Listen up, people! Hear the entire mystery push-poll for yourself

by David Climenhaga on November 1, 2011 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
Your Voice Alberta pollsters somewhere in Alberta get ready to call you with the latest information about Alison Redford. Alberta push-pollers, of course, may not be exactly as illustrated. Click below and hear the push poll for yourself:

Push-Poll Questions by djclimenhaga

Well, we may not exactly be running the NSA, CHHQ or even the Communications Security Establishment Canada here, folks, but thanks to the Baker Street Digital Irregulars, we’re making a little progress toward discovering who’s behind that controversial push poll that’s been robo-calling Albertans the past few days.

Push polls, as previously discussed, are a slimy political campaigning technique imported from our Great Neighbour to the South, the goal of which is to plant doubts about their victims while pretending to be a humble data surveyor asking (not so) innocent questions.

The push poll caller – nowadays usually a robo-caller – purports to be doing a survey, but is really only pretending to conduct a poll. For this reason, it’s the opinion of your humble blogger that this is an unethical technique and that any organization that uses such a technique is unethical too.

Which is why, of course, it’s so interesting to speculate who is behind this poll.

The Alberta push-poll, first reported in this space on Saturday, attacks Conservative Premier Alison Redford by tying her to a federal Liberal policy the “pollsters” assume will be unpopular with Alberta voters, and in a rather harshly worded segment to the financial problems of a now-defunct company owned by her chief of staff.

The poll also identifies that senior staffer, Stephen Carter, as holding “the top civil service position in the province,” which is either a mistake or a misrepresentation.

Anyway, the point of all this rehashing is to remind you what we’re talking about when we tell you the real news – that we now have a name (although not really the name we want), a phone number (which doesn’t tell us anything much, yet, anyway) and an actual recording of the push poll, which I’m readers are burning to hear.

The name is “Your Voice Alberta.” (That would be, as in “Their Voice Alberta,” I guess, but who they are we don’t know yet. That is, we can’t prove who is paying YVA – although, as readers of this blog know, we have our suspicions.)

The number is 780-809-3687. If you call it, you’ll get a recording in the sort of sophomoric male voice your blogger associates with members of the Campus Republican Club at a third-rate university in a Midwestern state, but maybe that’s just me projecting. You can read some rather dull geek conversation about this number here.

And then there’s the recording of the actual push-poll robo-call, which you really should listen to if you want an education in how this sort of thing is done – right down to the reassuring baby-doll voice of the robo-questioner. (Happy Birthday, Mr. President…) To listen, click on the SoundCloud file at the top of the page, or here.

Just to make one thing perfectly clear, I didn’t make this recording myself. Rather, it was made available to me by one of the Digital Irregulars cited above.

As an alert reader will hear, from the moment of the beeps that signify an electronic push-poll vote being cast, that my electronic benefactor and I do not share precisely the same politics. Nevertheless, we obviously share the conviction that this is a sleazy and inappropriate technique, and we are sorry to see it has come to Alberta.

As was said in this space the last time this topic was discussed, it is the opinion of this blogger that Suspect No. 1 is the well-funded Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith.

Since the mainstream media, which has deep pockets and more resources, now seems to be working seriously on this story, we may know in a little time if that is in fact true.

Certainly, it is interesting to note that since a post on this topic was last published in this space, there has been no denial or indeed any comment whatsoever from the Wildrose Party. But, of course, I am prepared to stand corrected, and to say so right here!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Wildrose leader nails the problem – but not the solution – with Calgary’s shortage of health professionals

by David Climenhaga on October 28, 2011 in Uncategorized with 5 Comments
The “Calgary South Health Campus” rises from a field in Calgary’s southeast corner. Below: Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith, Tory Health Minister Fred Horne, radio host Dave Rutherford.

I just hate to agree with Danielle Smith.

Regular readers of this blog will understand why I’m uncomfortable finding myself on the same side of any issue as the leader of the Wildrose Party, who is a right-wing fundamentalist whose policy notions would do untold harm to our province if she ever had an opportunity to implement them.

But on the issue of staffing the giant new hospital being built in Calgary’s southeast corner, a topic on which she extemporized at a $325-per-plate Wildrose Party fund-raiser last week, Ms. Smith’s analysis was bang on.

The topic came up during a question-and-answer period after lacklustre speech, in which she is said to have been assisted a little by the studiously neutral QR77 radio host Dave Rutherford lobbing softball questions at her. Ms. Smith suggested poor planning about staffing at the so-called South Health Campus will cause wards to be closed at other Calgary hospitals in the near future when the facility opens.

“I think we are in big trouble with the South Calgary hospital,” Ms. Smith said, according to the Calgary Sun’s account of the event. “I think what’s going to happen with the South Calgary hospital, they are going to be closing down wings and operating rooms of existing hospitals to be able to move staff around.”

She added: “I think Calgarians had reason to expect there was going to be an increase in capacity, an increase in beds, an increase in operating rooms … and ultimately a reduction in waiting lists and I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Sad to say, it’s likely all too true.

Thanks to the catastrophic health-care policies of the Ralph Klein Government, which drove health care professionals out of the province and reduced available space in training programs for new ones, there’s still a shortage of all kinds of health professionals in this province that even wholesale raiding of South Africa can’t fix.

No doubt when the hospital starts to open next spring it will be officially named the Ralph Klein General Hospital in the great Alberta tradition of naming enormously expensive public health facilities after people who tried to privatize our public health care system. (Example: Edmonton’s Mazankowski Heart Institute, named for Conservative-Reform-Alliance Party stalwart Don Mazankowski, the author of a pro-privatization, pro-delisting report commissioned by Mr. Klein.)

Also thanks in part to the bumbling, confusion and wild changes of course under former Progressive Conservative premier Ed Stelmach’s government, this serious problem persists – although at least Mr. Stelmach seemed to come to his senses when he moved the eager privatizer Ron Liepert out of the health ministry in response to a general public rebellion.

Now, given the mixed signals being sent by PC Premier Alison Redford – on one hand, a promise to preserve public health care, on the other the restoration of Mr. Liepert to arguably the most important post in cabinet and the appointment of another friend of privatization, Fred Horne, to the health portfolio – it is far from clear what if anything the government intends to do.

There ends any agreement with Ms. Smith and her remaining hard-right Wildrose loyalists, of course.

After all, her policy prescription for solving the health professional shortage will be essentially the same as Mr. Klein’s, Mr. Mazankowski’s, Mr. Liepert’s, Mr. Horne’s and all the rest of them – more privatization, more market fundamentalism, two tiers, three tiers, and more tiers. And more tears, too, for those of us who can’t afford treatment in the Wildrose Party’s Americanized dream economy.

Notwithstanding the Wildrose Party’s care not to appear to advocate private health care, Ms. Smith hinted at this in her Q&A, in the words of the Sun’s reporter: “To deal with an acute shortage of nurses and doctors, she said the Wildrose Party believes in going back to a market-based approach to graduating enough of them to meet the needs of the population and ensuring they stay in the province.”

If you think about it, it would take state intervention, not the market, to solve both those problems. But with the very real shortage of health professionals, identified by Smith, there’s not much doubt that she’s right about what will happen when the $3-billion-plus south Calgary hospital goes on stream, whatever it’s called.

But “market-based solutions” are not what is needed to fix it.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The jury’s out – or it should be, anyway – on the Calgary Herald’s latest pro-Redford poll

by David Climenhaga on October 23, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
Premier Alison Redford of the Popular Conservatives is really popular with these guys, you can just tell!

Wow! This just in! Alison Redford is so popular….

How popular is she?

Alberta’s new premier is so popular she’s more popular that her popular party. And they’re so popular they’re called the Popular Conservatives, right? So that means, surely, that “the Conservatives have basically recovered from the Stelmach era.”

That quote belongs to a political scientist, so I guess you can take it to the bank. It’s one of several similar comments used by the Calgary Herald to bolster its story about its counter-intuitive new poll, which says that 44 per cent of decided voters and those leaning a particular way would vote for Ms. Redford’s Conservatives if an election were held right now.

What’s more, according to the exclusive poll, done for the Herald by Angus Reid Public Opinion, Ms. Redford herself has the approval of 55 per cent of Alberta’s voters.

So it’s all over but the weeping and the gnashing of teeth, right? Woe unto the Wildrose Party, saith the Herald, since it’s now sitting at a non-heady 22 per cent, the Alberta Liberals at 16 per cent, the NDP at 13 per cent and the Alberta Party at 2 per cent.

Indeed, things look so bad for the sad-sack Wildrosers, said the Herald, that the right-wing party has come a long way down from “the zeitgeist of 2009 and 2010, when the party seemed to be surging ahead of the long-governing Tories.” The zeitgeist of 2009? I guess it’s a good thing that the days are gone when they horsewhip editors for letting stuff like this into their newspapers. But, still…

Well, as they say, just a you-know-what minute.

First of all, of course, these results are based on a poll conducted from Oct. 17 to 19, before Premier Redford’s run of flip-flops and flip-flop-flips began to make the news.

Be that as it may, back in September, in the midst of the Ontario election campaign, Darrell Bricker and John Wright of the Ipsos Reid polling company had a little sage advice for journalists during election campaigns. To wit: “All polls are not created equally.”

There is, the pair of pollsters said, “a disturbing trend of late in which questionable polls find their way into an outlets coverage because they appear to match an editorial line, or present a counter-intuitive perspective.”

Messrs. Bricker and Wright called for journalists to be more grown-up and responsible about the way they report polls, and they provided readers with a handy list of six easy rules to help us, the “consumers” of the product produced by newspapers, judge their likely accuracy.

Among those rules, they suggested pollsters who use on-line methodologies to predict votes should be asked to provide “unweighted” data, results prior to adjustment for demographics and political support. “You will find some heavy thumbs are being applied to adjust for under-represented voting groups. While the weighting can produce very good results, it really amounts to no more than an educated guess. And if that’s the case, the results should be reported as such.” By the journalists reporting on them, that is.

Just for the record, the Herald story noted, “the Angus Reid poll was conducted as an online survey among 802 randomly selected Alberta adults who are Angus Reid forum panelists.” There’s no information in the Herald story about how the poll was weighted.

Another suggested rule the pair provided was for readers to take the traditional margin-of-error disclosure with the proverbial grain of salt. Merely disclosing a margin or error or listing the questions asked “doesn’t represent meaningful disclosure,” they stated.

They advised journalists: “Be honest when something looks dodgy – either don’t publish it, or publish it with an editorial disclaimer.”

Not that I’m saying anything looks dodgy about this poll, which the Herald reported as if it came down from Mount Olympus with a chorus of political scientists in white robes to reinforce its conclusions. Its margin of error, by the way, “is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20,” noted the Herald.

Just remember, as the Herald doesn’t seem to have done, that Angus Reid doesn’t exactly have a sterling record when it comes to reporting Alberta election results. On Feb. 29, 2008, for example, they released a poll showing the following results: 43 per cent for the PCs, 28 per cent for the Liberals, 13 per cent for the NDP, 10 per cent for the Wildrose, 7 per cent for the Greens.

Three days later, on March 3, in the “only poll that really matters,” as politicians are forever saying of general elections, here’s what the voters actually did: 53 per cent for the PCs, 26 per cent for the Liberals, 9 per cent for the NDP, 7 per cent for the Wildrose, 5 per cent for the Greens.

Oh well, what’s 10 per cent, give or take?

It’s worth noting that most other pollsters got the 2008 election right within a couple of percentage points. It’s also worth remembering that several other Angus Reid polls have been dramatically different from the surveys done by other pollsters with a record of success in this province.

Does this prove Angus Reid got it wrong? Of course not. For all we know, they could have nailed it this time.

But it is a good reason for a word of caution, or a qualifier or two from the credulous Calgary Herald. Well, if so, don’t waste your time looking for it in the pages of that paper, because you won’t find it.

This story also appears on Rabble.ca.

Flippity flop flip… has Alison Redford’s government ‘jumped the shark’ already?

by David Climenhaga on October 22, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments
Alberta Premier Alison Redford, immediately after ‘jumping the shark.’ Alberta politicians may not appear exactly as illustrated. Whaaaaaaaaat?! Below: The quotable LBJ.

Is this the worst start ever, or what?

Barely sworn in as Progressive Conservative premier of Alberta, Alison Redford’s flip-flop yesterday on the Heartland Transmission Line has seasoned political observers wondering if the Redford Government has already “jumped the shark.”

This comes hard on the heels of Premier Redford’s double flip-flop on the fall sitting of the Legislature described in this space a few hours earlier yesterday, not to mention the controversy over $600,000 in unpaid debts owed by a company owned by her just-appointed chief of staff.

If yesterday was an example of a shark-jumping moment, the decline of Ms. Redford’s political reputation from the high point of the Conservative leaders’ debate on Sept. 28 to the ignominy of the Heartland switcheroo on Oct. 21 must surely mark one of the swiftest implosions of political credibility in recorded history.

To turn Vietnam-era U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson’s sage observation about politics on its head, “Son, in politics you’ve got to learn that overnight chicken salad can turn to chicken sh…”

“Jumping the shark,” for those of you who have missed it hitherto, is a TV industry idiom used to describe the moment when a long-running TV series runs out of the ideas that made it a success and moves beyond recovery into irrelevance. It’s a reference to the moment in the 1977 season when the Fonz jumped the shark on water skis in an episode of the TV sitcom Happy Days.

Since the election of a new Tory leader was supposed to put an end to the blundering of the government of former premier Ed Stelmach, Ms. Redford’s accident-prone first days are bound to make Albertans wonder if the entire 40-year-old Tory dynasty has finally jumped the shark. For their part, of course, the Conservative brain trust in Ms. Redford’s cabinet and among her advisors is no doubt, like Fonzie, thinking “Whaaaaaaaaaaat?”

Yesterday morning, Energy Minister Ted Morton announced the government was putting three major power line projects on hold – including the expensive and highly controversial Heartland Transmission Line that’s supposed to run from Edmonton to Fort McMurray to power the oil-extraction mines of the Alberta Tar Patch.

Huge sighs of relief were heard from many folks – including plenty of conservative politicians in places the Heartland line is supposed to traverse – because the project and the Stelmach Government’s legislative framework to fast-track transmission line approval and expropriate land aroused such passions throughout rural Alberta and gave an effective wedge issue for the farther-right Wildrose Party.

The potential multi-billion-dollar cost of the transmission lines also left Albertans deeply fearful of what will happen to their already sky-high electricity bills.

The general consensus was the that government intended to defuse Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith’s exploitation of the property-rights wedge until after the next provincial election.

However, by the middle of the afternoon, Ms. Redford had pulled the plug on her minister’s announcement – the Heartland part of it, anyway. The premier tried to explain the latest flip-flop away as a miscommunication with her minister, just an early-days woopsie. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that someone with real clout put in a call to the premier’s office to say the line must go ahead, now, and that was that.

This has plenty of Albertans shaking their heads at Ms. Redford’s seeming trail of missteps. As Linda Osinchuk, mayor of Strathcona County (home of the non-city of Sherwood Park, the world’s largest legal village) told Global TV: “If it’s going to reverse itself, now that would be terrible for future elections, I would think, for this particular party, for this brand new premier, for this brand new caucus.”

Of course, that’s exactly what every one of Alberta’s opposition parties, right, centre and left is hoping and praying will happen.

Meanwhile, there’s evidence that the potential for new miscues by the Redford Government has not yet exhausted itself.

Alert readers will recall how the government of Ms. Redford’s predecessor really went over the edge with the hospital overcrowding crisis this time last year. It was soon apparent that the Stelmach Government didn’t have a clue in a carload how to deal with the situation – which was only defused when Mr. Stelmach appointed the soothing Gene Zwozdesky as minister of health and we were persuaded things were getting back on track.

Now, just days after Ms. Redford chose not to put the competent Mr. Zwozdesky back in her cabinet, the same physicians whose public statements sounded the warning on last year’s Emergency Room crowding crisis are back in the news saying much the same thing.

They say the problem is unresolved – this government’s unwillingness to build public long-term care facilities, leaving patients who should be in long-term care in acute-care beds and backing up the system into the province’s Emergency Rooms. The result will likely be the same, they say, especially as the fall rush and flu season hits the province’s Emergency Departments.

So, is the Redford Government up to handling a full-blown Emergency Room crisis just like last year? After this fumbling start? With the same old suspects sitting in the senior spots around the cabinet table – including Ron Liepert, the champion of privatizing long-term care, now the finance minister?

Never mind sharks. This is starting to sound like another one of LBJ’s pithy assessments, this time of Richard Nixon: “He’s like a Spanish horse, who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backward. You’ll see, he’ll do something wrong in the end. He always does.”

Surely this can’t be all she wrote about the Alberta Tories?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Cheap shots: how a good crop can get you far in politics!

by David Climenhaga on October 14, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
The Alberta Liberal Party website in context. Below, a detail from the site, your blogger’s shot of the same event, shots of the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan, from various angles.

Back in the day in the newspaper business, the staff of the Photo Desk used to spend a lot of time agonizing over whether it was ethical to manipulate a news photograph – and, God bless their earnest souls, they used to define manipulation pretty broadly.

One always suspected their real motivation was to keep the city editor’s grimy paws off any photo they thought had a chance of winning an award if only it were cropped some goofily tight way. City editors, of course, had this weird prediction for photos with news in them, something that sometimes precludes aggressive cropping.

Still, it passed the time and it beat carping about price of coffee in the canteen as a way to generate interest in joining a union. And, anyway, we all saw where that led.

Well, thanks to a newspaper strike, it’s been a long time since I was anywhere near that kind of discussion, but who’s to say it doesn’t still go on even as the good ship Print Media MV settles deeper in the water?

I got thinking about this as I scanned Alberta’s political websites in an increasingly desperate search for a reasonably entertaining blog post topic when I stumbled across proof that a photographer can still go a long way on a good crop.

Consider the recent shot of Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman rallying his troops on the steps of the Legislature, which has appeared on the Liberals’ website. (Gotta love the NDP style signs, eh?)

Now, I was there that day, as it happens, and as you can see from the good people in the photo, it was a chilly one, and some of them were pretty under-dressed for the occasion. It was so cold, in fact, that it brought tears to my eyes and for the life of me I can’t remember what Dr. Sherman was talking about.

I do remember, though, that he did go on and on, and as the freezing west wind drove me to scuttle back indoors, I mumbled that it’s OK to give a four-hour speech in Revolution Square, but you really should fill it with a million people first and possibly have had your picture taken playing golf with Che Guevara.

Be that as it may, as I departed, I turned and snapped off a shot with my handy iPhone – which, by the way, people, has been working fine these past couple of days. It’s sure to come in handy, I remember thinking as I fled the West Wind, and now it has!

This is because it provides us today with useful context on Dr. Sherman’s run-on announcement, and, what more, provides proof that no event is too small or too picayune to be covered by Edmonton’s unbelievably enthusiastic and hard-working French-language CBC staff.

Speaking of photos, notwithstanding the brouhaha back in the day about Alberta branding advertisements featuring English beaches with North Country children gamboling upon them, the fact it was noted in this space that the Wildrose Party uses a photo of the U.S. Court House in Manhattan on it’s website has elicited nary a breath of comment.

I’m bitter about this, but never mind. Let’s have another kick at the cat… Note the Wildrose Website, and the shot of the same building from a slightly different angle.

I guess this kind of thing is OK as long as you don’t have a lame functionary explain that you used the photo on purpose to illustrate the many influences on Alberta’s courts – then make your advertising agency fall on your sword to make the flap go away.

Regardless, I’d like to suggest yet another photo, shown at the bottom of this post, for the Wildrose Party’s website. It’s another part of the same building, actually, and the words contain profoundly good advice for any civilized society – advice, indeed, that our unprogressive Conservative masters in Ottawa would do to take to heart.

Never mind the media narrative… the real fight’s between the NDP and the Wildrose!

by David Climenhaga on October 12, 2011 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment
NDP supporters in the streets of Edmonton. Caution, Alberta crowds may not be exactly as illustrated, and neither may Alberta polls. Below: Brian Mason; Queen Victoria and Prime Minister William Gladstone – cabinet making was always tough.

A poll by conducted during the weekend that the Tories were selecting Alison Redford as their leader illustrates why Alberta voters should be extremely cautious with the inevitable media claims the next provincial election will be a titanic battle between two articulate and powerful women leaders.

The telephone survey of 1,237 Albertans conducted Oct. 1 and 2 by the Citizen Society Research Lab at Lethbridge College, which shows the governing Progressive Conservative Party with an overwhelming lead in public support, tends to reinforce the conclusion of an Environics Research Group poll in July that showed the Conservatives with an even more commanding lead.

But if these two polls are in fact an accurate reflection of voter sentiments at the time they were taken, as seems likely given their methodology, then they strongly suggest that the real fight is not between the Tories under Alison Redford and the Wildrose Alliance led by Danielle Smith, which is almost certain to be the mainstream media narrative regardless of the facts.

If the Tories can hold onto their dominant position, the interesting battle will in fact be between the Wildrose Party on the right and the New Democratic Party under stolid old (and uninterestingly male) Brian Mason on the left to see who forms the Opposition.

According to both polls, the NDP and the Wildrose enjoy statistically identical levels of support province-wide. Both also have strong regional stomping grounds – the Wildrosers in Calgary and the NDP in Edmonton – an advantage in our first-past-the-post electoral system.

Indeed, forget such concepts as statistically identical and margins of error for a hopeful moment – the more recent CSRL poll shows the NDP running ahead of the Wildrose Party in overall support throughout Alberta.

Furthermore, again basing our conclusions on just these two methodologically sound polls, the NDP would appear to be the only party in Alberta right now whose support is growing.

So if present trends continue it is entirely possible that the NDP, and not the Wildrose Party, could emerge as the Official Opposition after the next election.

But don’t expect to hear this interpretation of the numbers from the mainstream media, which is deeply committed to the Titanic Battle Theory. Moreover, as we saw during the lead up to the last federal election, the media will do almost anything to downplay any talk about an Orange Wave, here in Alberta or anywhere else except Holland or the Ukraine. You have to forgive them, though, for they are so deeply set in their ways that they just can’t help themselves.

I can almost hear the squeaks and Tweets of protest from supporters of the Alberta Liberals, but, really, none of these polls shows anything like a promising trend for that party.

CSRL first: this poll places support among decided voters as follows:

Progressive Conservatives – 47.7 per cent
New Democratic Party – 16.3 per cent
Wildrose Party – 16.1 per cent
Alberta Liberals – 13.4 per cent
Alberta Party – 3.4 per cent

Environics second, back in July this telephone survey of 900 Albertans placed support among decided voters as follows:

Progressive Conservatives – 54.2 per cent
Wildrose Party – 16.4 per cent
New Democratic Party – 13.6 per cent
Alberta Liberals – 13.6 per cent
Alberta Party – 4 per cent

Now, as in all discussions of polling of this type, there are plenty of caveats about any conclusions based on this data or anyone else’s.

First, to muddy the waters, there are two other polls by a company called ThinkHQ Public Affairs. The ThinkHQ surveys – one back in July and the second of 1,000 Albertans between Sept. 19 and 24, use someone’s self-selecting online panel (Angus Reid’s, perhaps?) and consistently yield higher results for the Wildrose Party. Naturally, these are the results that are touted by Wildrose supporters.

The latest ThinkHQ poll put the Tories at 40 per cent support among decided voters, the Wildrose at 24 per cent, the NDP at 16 per cent, the Liberals at 14 per cent and the Alberta Party at 3 per cent.

As readers know, it’s the view here that online polls should be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, especially when we don’t know important facts such as who actually did the polling. So it’s interesting that this polling company seems to consistently different results among right-wing parties but produce results in line with other pollsters for the centrist parties.

Second, all four of these polls are too early. Conservative support is bound to fall now that the governing party has a leader – and it wouldn’t have mattered who the leader was for this to happen. Premier Redford will have her fans and her detractors within Tory ranks, and some of the detractors will go somewhere else.

It remains to be seen if they move toward the Wildrose Party on the right or the NDP a little to the left, but it will take some time and then more polls to show us what is happening.

To a degree, this is likely to depend on Ms. Redford’s performance in office – and today, when she unveils her new cabinet, will have a lot to do with what happens next.

If she tilts to the right or appears to be underperforming sufficiently to disappoint the progressive non-traditional Tory voters who flocked to her side during her campaign, the NDP may benefit.

If she appears too much like a squishy lefty to the party’s market-fundamentalist and social conservative hard core, the Wildrose Party will probably benefit.

One thing is certain, cabinet building is the hardest job that must be faced by any premier. Ms. Redford must balance regional interests, the rural-urban divide, questions of diversity, points within the political spectrum under the big Tory tent, and personalities, almost all of them ambitious and some determined not to be thwarted. What’s more, she must do it without either alienating too many voters or causing a riot within her caucus.

If her choices today seem sound to you, even if you don’t particularly like some of the people involved, she has probably done her job right.

But if they seem flaky, they probably are!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Creepy Wildrose attack ads set the tone as Alison Redford prepares to be sworn in as Alberta premier

by David Climenhaga on October 7, 2011 in Uncategorized with 6 Comments

Wildrose Integrity? The Wildrose Party’s creepy video attack on premier-designate Alison Redford.

Honeymoon? What honeymoon?

Alison Redford was elected leader of Alberta’s governing Progressive Conservative Party in a vote announced in the wee hours of Sunday morning. She hasn’t even been sworn in as premier and everyone is piling on and screeching like banshees.

Just a thought, but rank and file Albertans may want to give Ms. Redford a few days to get her transition under way in an orderly fashion, and to drop a couple of hints about what her policy plans may actually be, before we all light our hair on fire.

The National Citizens Coalition, a loony-right Toronto-based propaganda shop once led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, attacked the premier-designate for making an unholy alliance with unions in a “highly controversial backroom deal.”

The NCC couldn’t actually find a backroom deal to call controversial, but it did the next best thing and reported that a certain number of unionized teachers and public sector health care workers went out all on their own and joined the PC Party. They did it to vote for Ms. Redford on the strength of her promises to preserve public health care and restore funding to public education. And we all know the NCC hates “special interest groups” like women, teachers, health care workers, parents with children in school and seniors – you know, citizens – who don’t share their brutalist dogma of economic perfection.

Meanwhile, the president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the province’s largest union, told the Edmonton Journal yesterday that behind the “veneer” of Ms. Redford’s health care and education policies “is a very sinister approach to public services overall.”

This was based, the union said, on a statement on Ms. Redford’s website that some government departments would be required to conduct program reviews “and demonstrate why programs and services cannot be delivered by community-based organizations or the private sector.” Ms. Redford’s policy statement went on: “Within six months, I want to identify services that can be transferred to community leadership or privatized.”

Well, one can certainly sympathize with the concern about privatization talk among members of AUPE, who have faced such destructive policies under premier Ralph Klein, but since Ms. Redford has left the door open to listening to arguments against it, instead of throwing down the gauntlet, persuasion might be the place to start this discussion.

As for the right-wing media (which would be pretty much all of it), the Calgary Sun hyperventilated that “female health-care workers and moms peeved about teacher cuts” were to blame for the outrage of Alberta being led by a woman premier bent on perpetrating a dreadful plan to spend more on education. Also at fault, the Sun lectured, were members of the Alberta Teachers Association, whose executive director, quelle horreur, encouraged members to “get involved in choosing the next premier of Alberta.”

Regardless of all this, the blue ribbon for sheer brass must go to the far-right Wildrose Party, which along with almost everyone else in Alberta (your correspondent included) assailed Ms. Redford on Monday morning for saying immediately after her victory that she didn’t plan a fall sitting of the Legislature.

On Tuesday, she said she’d decided to have a fall session after all. So yesterday, which was Thursday, the Wildrose brain trust rushed out a creepy video attack ad that complained Ms. Redford “tried closing the Legislature.”

Well, you know what, you just can’t please some people!

The Wildrose strategy is pretty clearly to get in fast, before Ms. Redford is in a position to defend herself, and Swift Boat the premier-designate with attack ads that cement the notion in voters’ heads that Premier Ed Stelmach’s successor is a flip-flopper and someone “who will do anything for power.”

The conventional political wisdom in the United States, where parties have some experience with this kind of thing, is that some of the sleaze always rubs off on the attackers when they go negative, but that it can be a net benefit to their campaign.

We saw in this country how effective this can be when former federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff was preemptively smeared into irrelevance by the U.S.-influenced Harper Conservatives.

Still, the menacing Wildrose attack ads, complete with a soundtrack that in one sounds weirdly as if dogs are barking in the background, could work – if Alberta happened to have the U.S.-style system of government the right-wing party admires so overtly it uses U.S. images on its website.

But it can also have interesting unintended consequences when you imagine, as the Harperistas did this year, that you’re operating in a U.S.-style two-party system when in fact it’s a multi-party democracy with, say, an Orange alternative.

Indeed, the new Wildrose ads are eerily reminiscent to the TV spots purchased by a coalition of labour unions in 2007 to plant the idea in voters’ heads that Mr. Stelmach had “no plan.”

We all know how well that one worked out!

Ms. Redford will be sworn in today just before noon.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Three lessons that can’t be drawn from Alison Redford’s election – but will be anyway

by David Climenhaga on October 4, 2011 in Uncategorized with 3 Comments
Alison Redford shouts to make herself heard over the din Sunday morning after news of her victory had been announced. She can now expect people to simmer down and listen carefully whenever she speaks. Below: the media myth-making machine machinating.

The Wildrose Party will have a great target in Alison Redford, you say? Don’t bet on it!

Yesterday, we considered six inescapable conclusions drawn from Alison Redford’s victory in the race to lead the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party:

  • Gary Mar blundered badly
  • Public health care matters to Albertans
  • We’re not in Ralph Klein’s Alberta any more
  • The Love Machine is broken
  • Labour votes matter
  • Democracy is dangerous to undemocratic elites

Now let’s look at the other side of the coin – the conclusions that are bound to be drawn from Ms. Redford’s historic party-election victory Sunday morning that are anything but inescapable.

Here are three that you can count on hearing from the likes of the Wildrose Party, the mainstream media and disgruntled supporters of other candidates within the PCs. They all sound plausible, but none of them are really supported by verifiable facts.

1 – The Wildrose Party will profit from Ms. Redford’s election

Well, the Wildrose Party will try, of course, and who can blame them for that?

But the Danielle Smith’s dwindling right-wing legions won’t win over voters from other parties who joined and supported Ms. Redford because they saw her as the most progressive Tory candidate. Nor will they change the minds of the many Tories who supported hard-liners like Ted Morton and Rick Orman on the first ballot, then ignored their candidates’ recommendations and switched to Ms. Redford on the second ballot as an obviously tough and capable leader.

If historical precedents hold – as precedents tend to do – Albertans most likely will be prepared to give Ms. Redford a chance.

Ms. Redford, for her part, is an obviously skilled politician who will likely manage to make the Wildrosers look like extremists while appearing conservative enough for typical Alberta voters. And typical Alberta voters, remember, see themselves both as fiscal conservatives and as supporters of completely public health care and mostly public education. So Ms. Redford’s pitch may strike just the right note with them.

Add to this the fact that Ms. Smith, with her strident Fraser Institute dogma, looks and sounds like a callow youth compared to the more nuanced Ms. Redford.

When the general election comes, you can put money on Ms. Redford mopping the floor with the Wildrose Party and its leader.

2 – Low turnout in the vote means right-wingers have abandoned the PCs

This story that the decline in votes in this in-house Conservative Party election from 144,000 in 2006 to 78,000 in 2011 was caused by legions of old-line social conservatives and extreme market fundamentalists permanently abandoning the Tories serves the current needs of the Wildrose Party and those who have hitched their wagons to its falling star.

We’re talking here about the kind of people who are desperately sticking with Wildrose ideological nostrums as their party’s support slumps in the polls. These are the ideologues who would like to close down the Human Rights Commission, hand out education vouchers and privatize the provision of health care services, come what may over at Tory HQ.

Now, these folks sincerely believe this yarn, of course – in the same way a fellow whistling past a graveyard really believes there are no ghosts. But just because they repeat it over and over again, doesn’t mean the rest of us have to accept it as gospel.

No doubt the erosion in the number of Conservative Party voters was partly the result of disillusioned ultra-conservatives joining the Wildrose Party – but are there really that many hyper-conservatives in Alberta? If so, why was the Wildrose Party always so anxious to pretend it was “moderate” and “centre-right.”?

The low turnout may also have been influenced by a general trend toward electoral apathy encouraged by parties of the right, plus the fact the novelty was worn off Alberta’s system of directly electing premiers through privately run governing-party elections.

But it’s said here that the total turnout was lower in 2011 than in 2006 mainly because a key part of the Tory Old Boys’ strategy was to encourage the public belief that Mr. Mar’s election was inevitable, thereby suppressing the vote by supporters of other candidates while maintaining the illusion of democratic choice.

It worked. But like so many things thought up by the brainiacs who ran the unsuccessful front-runner Gary Mar’s campaign, it just didn’t work as well as intended.

3 – The “progressives” have taken over the Progressive Conservatives

Of course, that this would happen was precisely the hope and intention of a lot of the “new Tories” who signed up to take part in the election. And you can expect this story to be pushed by the mainstream media, because it encourages the idea there’s going to be a horserace between right and “left” in the upcoming general election.

Journalists love the horserace narrative because they have been taught that conflict and competition make for good stories that, as they metaphorically say, sell newspapers.

But it’s not really an expression of Alberta’s reality today. Ms. Redford is still a very conservative politician. And the Conservatives are still an appropriately named party.

You can expect the Redford PCs to stick pretty closely to the Big-C Conservative script – low taxes for the well-heeled, dogmatic emphasis on balanced budgets, a preference for mega-projects over managed economic development, hostility toward working people’s rights, distrust of green solutions and little patience for a major state role outside education and health care, where public sentiment demands it.

Since Ms. Redford is a smart politician with a good ear for the electorate’s mood, she’s more likely to grow in popularity than to sink. So if the opposition parties are counting on voters to tire of her quickly, they’re out of luck. Indeed, it’s a virtual certainty that she’ll be more popular that Premier Ed Stelmach ever managed to be. But she won’t stray too far from the eternal conservative verities of her party.

What this means is that over time the parties who offer clear progressive alternatives to the Conservatives’ tired formula – as the Liberals used to, the NDP still does and the Alberta Party may yet – will be in a better position to attract voters than the increasingly wild-eyed extremists of the Wildrose right.

It would help the more progressive parties if the Wildrose fable is partly right and the far right really has abandoned the PCs. A bad vote split on the right worked well for Canada for years, and could work for Alberta too. But don’t get your hopes up.

More likely, the Wildrose Party will swiftly degenerate into a bitter, increasingly marginalized and radical rump, cut off from the oilpatch funding that made its rise possible, while most of its members are welcomed back aboard the Tory mothership.

Oh well, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time…

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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