Has Alberta’s sly old fox been outfoxed? Don’t bet on it!

A parade in the town of Barrhead celebrates the first election of Ken Kowalski … OK, I admit it, I just made up the part about it celebrating Mr. Kowalski’s election. But that really is Barrhead. Really! And, seriously, that dog in the picture actually was still around when Ken was elected. Below: The man himself. Below him: Danielle Smith.

Ken Kowalski, the Speaker of the Alberta Legislature, has a reputation as the sly old fox of Alberta politics.

But the celebrated Mr. K seems to have been outfoxed by the far-right Wildrose Alliance, at least for the moment.

In his role as Speaker of the House, the Honorable Member for Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock has quite properly admonished the right-wing Wildrose Alliance for using the taxpayer financed budget provided for its elected members to boost the political fortunes of its unelected leader.

Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith worked herself into a carefully orchestrated swivet last week when the Clerk of the Legislature fired off an epistle instructing the Alliance caucus to stop quoting Ms. Smith in its official caucus news releases – which are paid for by taxpayers.

Now, Ms. Smith could have had a seat in the Legislature if she’d been brave enough to run in the Calgary-Glenmore by-election last fall. However, when she didn’t read the political entrails right, she let low-key former leader Paul Hinman run instead. Presumably, she ground her teeth in frustration when he turned out to be a winner.

Since then, the three-and-a-half member Alliance caucus in the Legislature has been firing off press releases like machine gun bullets, shamelessly quoting Ms. Smith on every topic under the sun. When they did this, they must have known it would run afoul of a Speaker known to slap down Liberal and NDP MLAs guilty of going so far as to put a party logo on a publicly financed napkin or write news releases deemed “too red.”

The Wildrose Alliance, by the way, actually has a three-member caucus in the Legislature. In addition, another member, Independent Fort McMurray MLA Guy Boutilier, calls himself an Independent Wildrose member. So the mainstream media – presumably in hopes of advancing the cause of the far-right Alliance – calls it a four-member caucus. OK, let’s split the difference and be done with it.

Anyway, pretty clearly, Mr. Kowalski had on his side both the rules of the House and the precedent of how he has treated other parties with Legislative caucuses when the Clerk fired off the infamous letter.

But just as clearly, he’s losing the propaganda war to Ms. Smith.

When Ms. Smith screams, the media listens. So media coverage to date has made it look as if the Speaker is being partisan, unreasonable and acting without any justification whatsoever in “censoring” the Wildrose leader’s daily bloviations.

It’s a bit like the federal coalition crisis of 2008, when the public was persuaded that a coalition of democratically elected Members of Parliament completely within the Westminster tradition would somehow be undemocratic, while preventing MPs from exercising their right to vote confidence in the government was a profound expression of democracy.

So we saw today, for example, the Calgary Herald ginning up a campaign to have former Conservative speakers, who may have their own political agendas, vilifying Mr. Kowalski for “abuse of power,” “going over the line,” and “making up the rules as he goes along,” claims that are not backed up in the story.

As a result of her favourable press clippings, Ms. Smith’s accusations seem to have steadily gained traction with the public while the Speaker has maintained a steely silence.

Just remember, though, Mr. Kowalski hasn’t been a member of the House for more than 30 years for nothing. There’s a large new hospital in the tiny town of Westlock and the headquarters of the Education Department’s Alberta Distance Learning Centre in similarly smallish Barrhead to show for it, not to mention a Conservative MP in Ottawa who used to be his executive assistant.

And long ago, after Mr. Kowalski had served in several important cabinet posts, then-premier Ralph Klein tried to edge him out the door. Mr. Kowalski resurfaced in no time - chosen by his fellow MLAs as the powerful Speaker of the House, a role in which he was delighted to be an occasional thorn in Mr. Klein’s side.

So don’t rule out the possibility that the former schoolteacher from Barrhead may yet have a lesson or two to teach Ms. Smith.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

On hitching our wagon to Prime Minister Harper’s favourite ‘star’

Walt Whitman’s house, in blue, amid the wreckage of Camden, N.J. Where is the U.S. government? Below: Whitman himself, considerably less depressing to look at than Stephen Harper, Canada’s Tea Party Prime Minister.

“The lights are going out all over America,” wrote Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in economics and New York Times columnist, earlier this month.

Mr. Krugman was speaking both literally and metaphorically. Among the items he cited:

• Cities across the United States, desperate to save money, are turning off their streetlights.
• Local governments are tearing up their roads and returning them to gravel because they can’t afford the maintenance costs.
• Teachers are being laid off and school programs eliminated throughout the United States.

Elsewhere in the news pages of the Internet we learn:

• The state of Utah is entertaining apparently serious talk of eliminating Grade 12 to save a little cash.
• 48 million Americans, about 14 per cent of the population of the United States, require food stamps to survive.
• The city of Camden, N.J. – once home to Walt Whitman, for pity’s sake – is on the verge of having to close its public library system.

As old Walt observed: “What a devil art thou, Poverty! How many desires – how many aspirations after goodness and truth – how many noble thoughts, loving wishes toward our fellows, beautiful imaginings thou hast crushed under thy heel, without remorse or pause!”

Without remorse or pause, indeed. Where is the U.S. government? Basically it does nothing – other than cutting hungry citizens’ access to food stamps. It is paralyzed by its sclerotic bicameral structure, hostage to big-money interests, in hock to insane wars, in thrall to the ignorance of Birthers and Flat Earthers.

Lights out. Roads closed. … Who needs roads and streetlights, anyway? Nowadays the rich folks fly, and live in gated enclaves at their coastal destinations.

Schools closed. Minds closed. The census emasculated. … Who needs or wants facts or knowledge? Ignorance is Wisdom!

This bad movie is the economic model that our Tea Party Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, would tie us to, and the political model he would turn us into! The economic and political anvil he’d chain us to, more like, before he tosses us into the lake.

As the man himself said in 2003: “The time has come to recognize that the U.S. will continue to exercise unprecedented power in a world where international rules are still unreliable and where security and advancing of the free democratic order still depend significantly on the possession and use of military might.” There’s no reason to believe he’s changed his mind.

Military might, indeed. Talk about unreliable international rules. Well, Mr. Harper’s favourite next-door neighbour is a Third World giant on the verge of collapse, armed with somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 nuclear weapons!

At least those Harperista Conservatives are tough on immigration, because, by the sound of it, we’re going to be facing a never-ending river of frost-back refugees from the Lower 48, streaming across our border from Montana and North Dakota!

The time has come, all right. The time has come to think seriously about the “stark choice” Mr. Harper’s media echo chamber presented us with today and get rid of these so-called Conservatives before the lights go out in Canada, too.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Science won’t shake Alberta’s government – but tourist boycotts might…

The Athabasca River at Fort McMurray. Below, a tar-sends mining operation. Below that: Ed Stelmach.

Don’t expect a study released yesterday that shows water in the Athabasca River is being polluted by tar sands oil-extraction operations to change the way the Alberta government does anything.

The study by two University of Alberta scientists, Dr. Erin Kelly and Dr. David Schindler, and four others was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a publication that carries a certain amount of weight in scientific quarters.

But the government of Alberta has only three instinctive responses to bad news from scientists about oil extraction from the Athabasca tar sands: deny, deny and deny.

The government of Premier Ed Stelmach is big on pouring taxpayers’ money into slick public relations and advertising campaigns – which have the added benefit of stuffing the pockets of their friends in the advertising industry who are going to be needed when a general election is called.

It’s even better, of course, if there’s some travel to pleasant U.S. destinations for some of his cabinet ministers and their flunkies as they spread the word about what “responsible energy developers” we Albertans are.

And the government is big on attacking the credentials and work of scientists who say things it doesn’t want to hear. So Doctors Kelly and Schindler had better brace themselves for some shocks similar to those directed at researchers Kevin Timoney and Peter Lee last spring.

The government is also big on making up facts of its own. It claims, for example, that the pollutants in the Athabasca are all natural, just seeping out of the sands. (On the face of it, this might be a plausible explanation for at least some of the pollution. But Dr. Schindler and Dr. Kelley say it ain’t so. According to the Edmonton Journal, the two scientists tested for that specific phenomenon and found it not to have a significant impact. The cause of the mercury, arsenic, beryllium, copper, cadmium, thallium, lead, nickel, zinc and silver pollution, they are certain, is the tar sands industry.)

But what this government just won’t do is what they should do: show a little responsibility.

Make a serious effort to monitor pollutants in the Athabasca River and try to identify their source? Work with industry to get serious about cleaning up the tar sands act? Slow down tar sands development enough to get effective anti-pollution measures in place? Well, they’ll talk the talk, but there’s precious little evidence they’re prepared to actually walk the walk.

And if the slogan of Premier Stelmach is “not on my watch,” don’t expect anything better from Ted Morton, Doug Horner, Danielle Smith or anyone else likely to be the premier of Alberta in the foreseeable future.

That’s why efforts like the campaigns by Corporate Ethics International and ForestEthics drive this government completely bonkers. They could actually work!

Indeed, CEI’s few Re-Think Alberta billboards in the United States and Europe, along with word that several large U.S. retailers intend to try to boycott tar-sands-sourced petroleum products, have caused a remarkable level of hysteria in official and business circles in Alberta.

That’s because the techniques that are used so successfully here in Alberta to brush the government’s and the petroleum industry’s opponents aside don’t work so well when the message they hate finds its way onto a billboard or into the media in Portland or Paris.

Messages like the Re-Think billboards can’t be ignored, dismissed and laughed off the way they can at home. Media managers in Los Angeles and London are less likely than some of their local counterparts to take direction from the premier’s office in return for an early look at a press release. And, face it, Ed Stelmach’s name doesn’t carry a lot of weight in the head offices of Walgreens, Levi Strauss or the like.

Boycotts and consumer campaigns in the United States and Europe have the power to do something the environmental opposition groups here in Alberta, not to mention hard science, can never achieve on their own.

To wit: force the government of Alberta to shape up and start acting like a government.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Court documents reveal more details about Networc dispute with AHS

Networc’s Calgary Health Resource Centre. Below: the Salvation Army Grace Hospital in simpler times.

Plenty of troubling facts have emerged in the media about the bankruptcy of Networc Health Inc., the private Calgary surgical clinic that Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith says Alberta taxpayers should bail out and keep operating.

For example, it is well known to the public from mainstream media reports that Alberta Health Services has intervened in bankruptcy proceedings against Networc in order to ensure that hip and knee surgeries can continue in the Calgary area, and that this court action has turned into an increasingly acrimonious public battle.

It has been reported that in order to keep the private surgical clinic afloat, AHS has had to fork over $765,000 in receiver costs, $1.3 million in secured debt (in the form of two CIBC lines of credit acquired by the province-wide health “superboard” in May 2010) and in operating costs through to January 2011, including $960,000 in rent.

It’s also been reported that a deal under which AHS would have hired employees from the private surgical centre in a former Salvation Army hospital in Calgary, which does business under the name Health Resource Centre, has gone off the rails.

In a Calgary Herald report Friday, Networc Health CEO Tom Saunders accused AHS of structuring the offer to Health Resource Centre employees in a way designed to force his company out of business. In the same report, AHS CEO Stephen Duckett said the health superboard withdrew its offer of a deal because Networc officials rejected it.

As yet unreported by the mainstream media, however, are the following interesting points found by researcher Shannon Phillips in court documents related to the legal scrap between Networc and AHS:

• There is no provision for repayment of the outstanding Receiver’s Certificate balance of $500,000 plus interest.
• Networc argues that in order to meet its most-optimistic financial scenario for its business until January 2011, its three senior managers must be kept on.
• Based on current six-month figures in the report of the Interim Receiver, we can calculate that those officers (Mr. Saunders, CFO Bernie Simpson and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Stephen Miller) were each paid annual base salaries of $239,000, not including other benefits or perks such as a car allowance.
• Cash flow projections by the Interim Receiver indicate that Networc expects to pay $1.4 million in legal costs out of normal cash flow. (According to the Interim Receiver, however, AHS disputes this figure.)
• For its best-case scenario to be met, Networc wants AHS to agree to its position on payment of its legal counsel.
• Unsecured creditors are owed more than $8.4 million, money that could be unpaid if AHS and the taxpayer don’t pony up.
• The largest portion of this debt, $7.4 million, is to Clark Builders for an expansion to Networc’s surgical facilities at its Health Resource Centre in Calgary.

The Interim Receiver’s report included two financial scenarios to January 2011 – a “base case” and a more optimistic “summer push” that assumed AHS would give the company a larger number of surgeries to complete.

The base case would result in the company facing a shortfall of $1.7 million. The more optimistic projection would result in the company facing a shortfall of $1.4 million – a sum very close to Networc’s expected bill for legal fees.

It would be fair for taxpayers to wonder, if they are being told by the Wildrose Alliance that they should pay for Networc’s legal costs, if this means they are in effect being asked to underwrite the costs of restructuring Networc now that it has failed as a private surgical clinic so that it can go into some other kind of business after January 2011.

Notwithstanding ludicrous suggestions by supporters of privatized health care, “health economists” and the like that a business deal gone bad shouldn’t be part of the debate about the privatization of health care, that is exactly what should happen.

This fiasco clearly illustrates two things: that health care belongs in the public sector and exactly where the Wildrose Alliance intends to take us if they get the opportunity.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Question for the Wildrose Alliance: Where’s the evidence of Networc deal?

Alberta Health Services should fill those efficient Networc beds right now, says the Wildrose Alliance. Below: Danielle Smith.

Where is Wildrose Alliance Leader Danielle Smith’s evidence there was ever a deal between Networc Health Inc. and Alberta Health Services?

Ms. Smith’s whole it’s-not-a-bailout campaign calling for Networc to be bailed out by Alberta’s taxpayers hangs or falls on this thin thread.

And with each passing day, it looks more as if Ms. Smith’s campaign to get Alberta Health Services to bail out a bankrupt private surgical clinic in Calgary is her first major blunder since she became leader of the right-wing Wildrose Alliance in October 2009.

This is a backhanded tribute to Ms. Smith’s undeniable abilities as a charismatic natural politician, but that hardly diminishes the danger she now faces of being hoist with her own rhetorical petard. It will be very difficult for her to defuse this problem of her own creation.

AHS is the province’s so-called health superboard, responsible for all public health care in Alberta. Networc is the operator of a private clinic hired by the now-defunct Calgary Health Region to do hip and knee surgeries. Networc spiraled into bankruptcy after it made an expensive decision to expand its Calgary surgical facilities. Whether or not it had a deal with AHS to do so is in dispute.

Networc and AHS were in the thick of an acrimonious and increasingly public financial spat that had already migrated into the courts when Ms. Smith foolishly jumped into the fray on Aug. 19. In Wildrose Alliance news release that day, she claimed AHS caused Networc’s business problems by making a decision “to terminate its contractual relationship with Networc Health.”

Her release went on to say the Calgary Health region had “committed to increase the number of surgeries performed by Networc Health to 3,500 per year.”

But at a news conference in Medicine Hat yesterday, AHS CEO Stephen Duckett confidently told journalists that “there’s no evidence that’s been presented to the court about any commitments made by the Calgary Health Region or Alberta Health Services about the expansion.”

So either Mr. Duckett has it right, or Ms. Smith does.

The smart money should be on Mr. Duckett. After all, the Australian PhD economist brought in by Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach’s government to head the superboard in 2008 may be many things, but he is not a fool.

It strains credulity to believe, with the fight over Networc’s contract at a boil in both the court of public opinion and the Court of Queen’s Bench, that Mr. Duckett would have made a flat statement like yesterday’s without being confident of his facts.

Moreover, credence is lent to Mr. Duckett’s version of events by remarks made to the Herald in September 2009 by Networc CFO Bernie Simpson, identified in that Herald story as CEO, who was quoted as saying there had been no negotiations when the company decided to expand its facilities.

“It just makes business sense to try to continue to grow,” Mr. Simpson said in the Herald story.

So the ball is clearly now in Ms. Smith’s court to demonstrate to the public that she has evidence for her claims. It’s unclear where she’d be smartest to hit it.

Claiming she can’t comment on a public debate that she started because it’s now before the courts won’t wash.

But then, if Ms. Smith can’t quickly prove she was right to the satisfaction of the public, she has very few politically palatable options for dealing with this situation.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Coalition talk, Alberta style: Tories helping Liberals? Holy Cowtown!

David Heyman when he was Premier Stelmach’s Calgary media thingy, in the unsavoury company of your favourite blogger. Below: Kent Hehr.

Politics, as Carl von Clausewitz didn’t exactly say, is merely a slightly more civilized version of war. Thus, among the immutable laws of politics is this one: When in doubt, shoot those whose loyalty is in question and blame your communications people.

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is in deep trouble in Calgary, thanks to the challenge by Danielle Smith and the far-right Wildrose Alliance. Conservative Energy Minister Ron Liepert, no slouch in the right wing department himself, is one Calgary member of Mr. Stelmach’s cabinet who is likely to be swept away by the Wildrose wave in the city that’s still angry more than a century after it wasn’t picked as Alberta’s capital.

So it couldn’t have been good news for a former journalist, sometime Calgary aldermanic wannabe and Liepert staff communications thingy named David Heyman that the Calgary Herald – his erstwhile employer – outed him this morning as working for Kent Hehr, the Liberal MLA who is running for mayor of Cowtown.

The Herald reporter who wrote the story sounded genuinely astounded to learn that a Conservative would be helping out a Liberal. My goodness, what an oddity, the story all but exclaimed under the headline “Party lines blur in Calgary’s civic race as Grit MLA gets PC help.”

Liberals all mixed up with Conservatives! Good lord, what next? Could this be the end of Alberta civilization as we know it? Could it violate a Biblical law?

After all, this is unheard of. Well, except for the time Alberta Health Minister Gene Zwozdesky gave up his career as a Liberal MLA to sit on the side of the House that has cabinet seats, of course, or when tax-and-spend Calgary Mayor Ralph Klein gave up his Liberal tendencies to become a slash-and-burn Conservative. Or when former Conservative Cabinet Minister Nancy Betkowski re-branded herself as Nancy MacBeth and ran as the leader of the Liberals. Or when…

But, other than those times … nothing like this has ever happened before!

In truth, you’d think that Liberal-Conservative cross-dressers would hardly be news, even in all-conservative-all-the-time Alberta. Just ask any New Democrat what he or she thinks – if he or she can even tell the difference…. You’d surely think such a revelation wouldn’t cause such a sense of journalistic wonderment – but then, presumably they live sheltered lives down there at the Calgary Herald nowadays.

Indeed, one fears that the Herald might put in for a National Newspaper Award for this scoop – and, worse, the way things are going, win it!

One could make the case, of course, that by running to be mayor of Calgary, Mr. Hehr is actually helping the Conservatives. After all, he’s currently the Liberal MLA for Calgary Buffalo – a job he hasn’t yet given up. Nevertheless, just the announcement of his candidacy has weakened the flagging Liberal caucus in the Legislature. If he wins, his departure might mortally wound it.

Then again, Mr. Hehr’s taking a powder from the Legislature could merely open the door to another Wildrose victory in Calgary. Anyway, alas for Mr. Heyman, the foregoing kind of analysis is probably just too subtle for Mr. Stelmach and his strategic braintrust – of which Mr. Heyman was once a part before the premier shook up his bumbling communications team early this year.

More likely, Mr. Heyman’s exposure in the Cowtown gutter press will bring him under the jurisdiction of the immutable political law cited above. He is, after all, now identified as something just a little less than a perfect loyalist, and he is a communications specialist to boot, if only for a cabinet minister with fading prospects. Moreover, if Mr. Stelmach is not in doubt about his own prospects by now, there may be no hope for him.

So, given that the premier is in fact something of a survivor, it seems likely that Mr. Heyman will soon find himself in the gunsights of Mr. Stelmach’s remaining loyalists.

His best hope? Probably he should pray for a nice job at Calgary City Hall.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta Notes: Electrical storm brews in premier’s riding; Alberta Party makes a move

Opposition party leaders research Vegreville power issue – but where’s Ed Stelmach? Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: That darned Vegreville egg.

What could turn out to be a significant political development in Alberta took place this evening, when the leaders of all three opposition parties with seats in the Legislature showed up in front of a large crowd of agitated rural landowners in the town of Vegreville, about 100 kilometres east of Edmonton along the Yellowhead Highway.

The 500 rural folks at the meeting are riled up about plans to build a high-voltage electrical line through many of their farms. Since there is more than one proposed route, no one is yet sure which farms will be affected – magnifying the furor all the more.

So that noise you hear is the sound of rock-solid Tory voters from Vegreville, hitherto best known for its huge roadside Ukrainian egg, sticking their heads out their windows and yelling “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more!”

The only party leader missing? Vegreville’s MLA: Premier Ed Stelmach.

According to the Edmonton Journal, Mr. Stelmach skedaddled, claiming that facing the crowd in the Vegreville Social Centre could amount to a conflict of interest because … uh, like the other farmers, one of the proposed power line routes passes through his fields.

Oh dear! If Mr. Stelmach intends to run again – and maybe this is evidence he doesn’t – nothing good can come from his absence from the meeting, or the empty chair that sat mockingly at the front of the room throughout the evening.

Count on plenty of political fallout from this still developing story.

Meanwhile, as was predicted in this space a few weeks ago, the fledgling Alberta Party has now hired community organizer Michael Walters as its $70,000-per-year full-time organizer.

The party – which thinks of itself less as right wing or left wing as middle-of-the-bird – circulated a news release making the announcement earlier today.

According to the release – which interestingly has so far appeared neither on the party’s Website nor in the local media, which was probably more interested in the premier’s travails in Vegreville – Mr. Walters “will focus on continuing the Alberta Party’s community engagement and policy development campaign known as The Big Listen.”

The Big Listen, for those of you who weren't listening, involves small groups of party supporters getting together in over coffee and cake in someone’s home to ponder the Big Questions about Alberta’s future.

Clearly, however, this seemly endless talkfest is finally about to morph into an effort to build a real political party, instead of a mere network of kaffeeklatsches. The release said that Mr. Walters “will be organizing constituency associations across the province as well as developing a Community Organizing training program for all Alberta Party candidates, campaign staff and volunteers.”

It quotes Chima Nkemdirim, a Calgary lawyer who was one of the founders of Renew Alberta, the effort by a group pf ambitious Blue Liberals and Red Tories who engineered a reverse takeover earlier this year of the Alberta Party, which got its start as yet another Alberta party of the right-wing fringe in 1985. Mr. Nkemdirim was elevated to party president at the start of this month in an unsurprising restructuring that shuffled aside party officials leftover from its days on the loony-right fringe.

Mr. Nkemdirim lauded Mr. Walters as “a skilled and experienced community organizer with a great track record of engaging a wide range of citizens in political life.” But that was just political news release boilerplate. More significantly, he said, “Michael will also play an instrumental role as co-chair of our policy development committee leading to our November policy convention.”

Mr. Walters comes from the Greater Edmonton Alliance, a non-partisan faintly leftish group that has tried to bring together labour, religious, cultural and community groups to push for incremental change.

The chief knock against the GEA was that it’s engaged in a lot of talk over its five-year history, but doesn’t really have a lot of major successes to point to – other than a huge potato giveaway in a field in northeast Edmonton in a quixotic effort to preserve urban farmland.

Nevertheless, Mr. Walters is a talented and ambitious character who grew up in rural Alberta and should bring some drive to the activities of the party.

And remember, if some people sniff at him for being a “community organizer” (say what?), remember that that guy in the White House started out in the same field, likewise influenced by the late Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation.

Since the last prediction proved to be right, here’s another one: Mr. Walters will not be satisfied with the back-room role of party organizer, and will seek the Alberta Party nomination in an Edmonton riding when the next provincial election comes to pass.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.