David Climenhaga's Alberta Diary

No one who has been paying attention should be surprised by Harper government’s fake pension ‘crisis’

2012-02-01T00:12:00.014-07:00

“Holy shit,” this old guy is asking himself, “what was I thinking when I voted for Stephen Harper?” Below, Prime Minister Harper himself, possibly not exactly as illustrated. Below that, Mr. Harper as he appears to people who haven’t been paying attention.

Does it really surprise anyone that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is preparing an attack on ordinary Canadians’ retirement security when even the advice of the government’s own experts affirms there’s no evidence such change is required?

Does it really surprise anyone that’s he’s doing it now, just when he’d persuaded us he was a really fine, avuncular, sweater-wearing fellow, possibly holding a pussy cat, who said absolutely nothing about this topic during his recent election campaign?

Seriously, people, this is the neo-Con modus operandi – when the opportunity presents itself, manufacture a “crisis” and move swiftly to “resolve” it while the opposition is still silently bug-eyed with astonishment and trying to remember where the facts were filed.

If you’re feeling any surprise, then you really weren’t paying attention. Indeed, if the implications for generations of Canadians weren’t so serious, it would be tempting to tell anyone over 50 who voted for the Harper Conservatives that they sort of deserve that “Kick Me” sign someone scotch-taped to their backs.

The bankster-fuelled financial crisis in Europe provides plausible cover in this regard – never mind that, as even the usually reliably Conservative Globe and Mail pointed out on Monday, Canadian pensions aren’t in trouble the way European pensions are because Canada already “spends far less than the OECD average on public pensions.”

As Rabble’s Duncan Cameron noted, we’re 23rd on the list of 30 industrialized OECD nations on overall social spending, and we rank even worse on public spending for pensions.

So this is proof that Mr. Harper, always contemptuous of the Canadian hoi polloi, had it wrong in 1997 when he dismissed us to a friendly audience of U.S. hyper-conservatives as “a northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term.” Apparently not, it turns out!

Indeed, according to the Globe’s coverage, there is no need to make Canada’s national pension plans “sustainable” or “affordable” because they already are sustainable and affordable.

But never mind that. That kind of talk is for Canada’s reality-based community, which, like a sane person dealing for the first time with a pathological liar, is struggling to add up the columns of numbers to prove that big reductions to our national pension system really aren’t needed.

As one of the experts consulted by the Globe put it: “The analysis suggests that Canada does not face major challenges of financial sustainability with its public pension schemes.” Moreover, he went on, “there is no pressing financial or fiscal need to increase pension ages in the foreseeable future.”

But that’s not going to work with this bunch because this isn’t about what’s needed. It’s about what Mr. Harper wants – to satisfy his ideological fundamentalism and to satisfy his friends and financiers in the “wealth management” industry, which presumably refers to their wealth and your management.

And it sure as heck isn’t about facts, at least in the normal meaning of the term – truths known by actual experience or observation.

On the contrary, as you should have known, this isn’t a government that really likes facts very much. That is why they tossed out the long-form census questionnaire, turned climate change science into an ideological issue, muzzled government scientists whose data didn’t match the party’s ideology, took steps to short-circuit the environmental approval process for their beloved pipelines, and ignored Canada’s falling crime rates while plotting to build a multi-billion-dollar prison gulag.

They don’t like facts because facts have a bad habit of contradicting their market fundamentalist dogma, not to mention their wedge political strategies. Faced with actual facts, they’d really rather be in a position where they can just make up new ones.

That’s what Government House Leader Peter Van Loan was up to when he blandly implied that we’ll have to take a little less when retire so that we’ll have anything at all, when in fact, as yet another of the Globe’s pension authorities put it yesterday, “Canada’s pension system is looking good on the measures of adequacy.”

As for the timing, it should have been obvious that Mr. Harper was going to draw his inspiration from the Mike Harris government in Ontario and the Ralph Klein government in Alberta, both driven by a radical ideology whose strategy was to attack public services and social benefits as hard as they could early in their time in power.

The timing of Mr. Harper’s attack on pensions has nothing to do with the crisis in Europe and everything to do with the electoral cycle in Canada. As was explained in another Globe and Mail story Monday, “simply put, the Prime Minister, who has never had the luxury of a majority government before, has a year and a half left to be bold before the ticking of the election clock drowns out everything else.”

But because Mr. Harper is more radical than either Mr. Harris or Mr. Klein – again, something that should have been obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to what he’s been saying over and over and over through the years, from his contempt for Canada as a “second-rate” country to the Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto – it seems likely he will try to go farther, faster, now that he has a majority.

Well, he does have a majority, so don’t expect our Opposition parties to be very effective inside Parliament, which is, as Conservatives used to constantly complain in their years away from power, not much more than an elected dictatorship.

Only one thing can even slow them down – as we proved, oddly enough, right here in perpetually Conservative Alberta during Mr. Klein’s “Third Way” effort to privatize public health care – and that is sustained, noisy public pressure.

A big noise with no letup stopped Mr. Klein’s plan to jam us with his Third World Way to health care, and it can work to save our national social programs too. If we lead, our opposition politicians will follow.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Kevin Taft follows Alberta’s money and finds out where it all went

2012-01-31T00:09:00.008-07:00

Your blogger, with another doomed politician, this time the author of Follow the Money, Where is Alberta’s Wealth Going? Just in case you’re thinking of being sarcastic, the sign says “Red Deer Public Library.” Below, the cover of the book.

Sooner or later, all conversations about the Alberta economy in the modern era come down to one key question: Where the hell did all the money go?

I guess you could rephrase this: Where the hell is all the money going? Regardless, it’s been going somewhere and, over the past couple of decades, that destination has been a matter of lively discussion among Albertans and other Canadians.

This question is so often asked because, while Alberta is known to be rich – Alberta’s GDP per person in 2008 was $81,121, compared with $44,121 for the rest of Canada – to those of us who live here it feels poor.

Whether it’s the shabby condition of downtown Edmonton, our rundown capital city, our pothole strewn streets, the constant sight of desperate street people, the Third World conditions in our Emergency Rooms, the periodic mass layoffs of teachers, university professors and health care workers, or the unending whine by Conservative politicians that we simply can’t afford quality health care, good education or other public services, it always feels as if the whole lot of us are just one paycheque away from the bread lines.

Here we are, plunk in the middle of the snowbelt, and most years even how we’re going to afford to clear the streets is a constant source of worry and debate.

As a weird counterpoint to this constant refrain, we are also constantly reminded how lucky we are to live here in the Richest Place on Earth, the Very Best Province in the Whole Wide World, etc. etc.

So if we’re so rich, how come we’re so poor?

Well, now we know the answer, thanks to an important book by former Alberta Liberal Party leader Kevin Taft, who has been described in this space as the best premier Alberta never had. Follow the Money, Where is Alberta’s Wealth Going? was published with the assistance of the Alberta Federation of Labour by Detselig Enterprises Ltd. of Calgary. It costs $12.95, and it’s also available as an e-book.

The AFL also financed the production of a short video documentary about Dr. Taft’s research by filmmaker Tom Radford.

Before he became an MLA in 2001, Dr. Taft was an education professor at the University of Alberta. After the 2008 election, in which the Alberta Liberals under his leadership were badly trounced by then-premier Ed Stelmach’s Progressive Conservatives, he threw up his hands and resigned the leadership of the party.

This was probably a mistake, as the Alberta Liberal leadership was then held for a spell by David Swann, a well-meaning but ineffectual Calgary physician, and more recently was captured by Raj Sherman, the former Conservative who is now leading the party away from its long-held principles and away from its remaining core supporters.

But if Dr. Taft’s departure from politics was a bad thing for Alberta’s Liberals, it’s not necessarily a bad thing for the rest of us, as he’s recast himself as an author on political and economic topics who has the skills and credibility to definitively answer such questions as the ones posed above. What’s more, he manages to do it in a readable way without sounding too much like a Liberal Party partisan – even going so far as to confess that he was wrong as Liberal leader to join the chorus that bays constantly for less spending on public services.

Working with researchers Mel McMillan and Junaid Jahangir and relying heavily on Statistics Canada’s CANSIM (Canadian Socioeconomic) and Financial Management System databases, Dr. Taft makes a case that I doubt can be effectively challenged by the government’s spokespeople, its apologists among the legions of far-right “think tanks” that serve as the Greek chorus for Alberta’s perpetual state of scarcity and crisis amid fantastic wealth, or far-right entities like the Wildrose Party that demand ever more vigorous attacks on public services.

Before we give away the ending – it won’t surprise you – let’s talk about the places Dr. Taft was able to establish pretty convincingly are not getting our money:

It’s not going to government spending. While government spending in Alberta is incompetently managed by the Tories, gyrating between throwing money at problems to massive and disruptive cutbacks, over the long term our government spending is close to the Canadian average.
It’s not going to public services. “As a society, Alberta spends a steadily shrinking portion of its increasing prosperity on public services.”
It’s not going to education. Comparing five-year averages to smooth out individual years’ ups and downs, K-12 education went up 2 per cent, total, over 20 years.
It’s not going to health care. When you adjust for the size of the provincial economy, spending on health care puts Alberta last in the country. No matter how you measure it, “health care spending in Alberta and Canada is on a gradual long-term upward trend that is well within reason.” Over the long-term, smoothed out with five-year averages, health care spending in Alberta has been rising at about 1.2 per cent a year.
It’s certainly not going to housing and social services.
It’s not going into savings. You can tell from a glance at one of Dr. Taft’s many useful charts that, as he puts it, “Alberta’s natural resource treasure wasn’t going into the Heritage Fund,” or any other savings pool.
And most of it’s not going to personal incomes. Over the last 21 years, average personal incomes in Alberta rose about 35 per cent, accounting for inflation.

So where is it going? It’s going to corporate profits, of course. And the greatest corporate profits are in the oilpatch, naturally. In fact, so much of our money is going into corporate profit that we’re actually selling our collective property at a loss to pad the corporate bottom line!

“Profits in Alberta have grown at rates simply unknown in other jurisdictions, often well beyond double the rates in other provinces and the United States,” Dr. Taft writes. “There is no such largesse for public services, and the government is drawing down public savings rather than building them, doing nothing to prepare for the future.

“The transfer of public wealth to private shareholders is blistering, and our own government, rather than fighting like an owner, or even thinking like an owner, is just happy to find investors who want to cash in.” (Those investors, Dr. Taft notes as an aside, are often state-owned companies from such places as China, Abu Dhabi and Korea. Which makes our “ethical oil” what? Semi-ethical?)

We’re giving away our resources, people, and we’re getting very little in return. “It was going to profits,” Dr. Taft summed up in his conclusion, “and it was doing so at an astonishing rate.”

How astonishing? Corporate profits were up 317 per cent in the same period health care spending rose 28 per cent, incomes were up 35 per cent and education spending increased 2 per cent!

One question Dr. Taft says he couldn’t answer from the data he worked with is where all the money goes once it flows into these bloated corporate profits. But you and I don’t need a book to tell us the answer to that one: It leaves the country for places where it does nothing for Canadians.

No wonder, when you think about it, why corporate special interests and their paid representatives in Canada are so aggressive in defending their right to rapidly export even more of our resources via pipeline to wherever – the environment, the rights of Canadians, and due process itself be damned! This does not, however, explain why so many of our Conservative Western Canadian politicians behave the same way.

Dr. Taft’s highly readable work is important to Canadians who don’t live in Alberta, because the philosophy of government in Alberta is now in the process of being exported to the rest of Canada, thanks to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and because the way we are developing our resources has profound implications for the economies of other Canadian provinces. Our mighty oil-pumped Loony, for example, is contributing to the decline of the manufacturing economy of Central Canada.

Moreover, Dr. Taft’s conclusions are also not going to be something that you’ll hear reported very enthusiastically in the media, either here in Alberta or anywhere else in this country. Was it just a coincidence that at the same time Dr. Taft’s book was being released, a “research paper” worthy of a Grade 9 class project that argued Alberta was paying its public employees too much was being released to massive media fanfare by a claque of neo-Con ideologues associated with the University of Calgary? Whatever the motivation, that was the research that got all the publicity.

No, if you want to read what Dr. Taft and his research partners have to say, you’re going to have to make an effort find it yourself. If you come across a review, it’s most likely to be on a blog like this or in an alternative publication.

Talk to your bookstore, ask the reference desk at your public library to order it or purchase the book online. It’s worth the effort.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Are there really 287,000 law-abiding farmers, trappers, hunters and fishers in Toronto?

2012-01-30T00:21:00.007-07:00

A strong market in central Canada for raccoon coats like the one worn by this man accounts for the large number of urban trappers who live in Metropolitan Toronto, law-abiding gun owners who account for some of the 287,000 long guns in that city. Or something like that, anyway. Below: Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber, some of his fashionable Conservative fellow MPs.

The Conservative Member of Parliament for Edmonton-St. Albert, the riding in which I reside, has made a name for himself by being a noisy defender of the Harper Government’s effort to shut down the national rifle and shotgun registry and destroy all its records.

Brent Rathgeber likes to describe his party’s nearly completed plan to eliminate the registry and permanently trash all its information, despite the pleas of the police whom he also purports to support, as a way to preserve “the liberty of law-abiding farmers, hunters, fishermen, trappers and others.”

Liberty is good, as I think we can all agree, especially for someone who like Mr. Rathgeber also describes himself as a “libertarian.”

I was thinking about this yesterday as I read the Toronto Star’s scoop, based on a geographical breakdown of the federal long-gun registry’s collected data that had fallen into the newspaper’s hands, that there are approximately 287,000 “long guns” registered in Toronto!

Most of these, about 263,000 firearms according to the Star, are held by individuals, presumably in their homes.

I immediately wondered how many of these highly urbanized Ontarians, to use Mr. Rathgeber’s descriptive phrase, require these weapons because they are “farmers, hunters, fishermen and trappers”?

Probably a portion of them are hunters and fishers, although how many farmers and trappers live in Metropolitan Toronto is open to question. That said, heaven knows, if there were still a market for raccoon coats, Toronto might just be the place to set up a trap-line!

Moreover, what an Ontario fisherperson would need a rifle or shotgun for, I’m not sure either, since he or she would be unlikely to encounter a bear, one not driving a BMW to the TSE anyway, on the way down to the Humber River. But I guess a really big bass could be frightening if it started flopping around and snapping its jaws at you. You might want to think twice about shooting it in the bottom of your boat, however.

In Mr. Rathgeber’s defence, it’s true that there is probably a slightly higher per-capita number of farmers, fishers and hunters living in his urban central Alberta riding. Edmonton-St. Albert is, after all, adjacent to a large faming area that is rich in wildlife – quite a large percentage of which will bellow “moo” if you approach it with a shotgun.

In this regard, northern Edmonton and St. Albert may be quite different from Metro Toronto where, we are informed by the Star, police make more use of the long-gun database than in any other Canadian centre.

It’s also quite possible that there’s both stronger police support and more voter support in the ridings of Metro Toronto than on the northern edge of Edmonton, making opposition to the registry more of a consideration for politicians like Mr. Rathgeber. Then again, since Edmonton-St. Albert is an urban riding, perhaps not – but, in that case, citizens are going to need to give Mr. Rathgeber a dingle and let him know how they feel about his position on the registry.

Getting back to Mr. Rathgeber’s “Others” category, I have no idea what my MP had in mind. Perhaps he was thinking of those law-abiding gun owners who, for one reason or another, are about to slip over into the non-law-abiding column whence they are deemed suitable grist for the vast gulag of multi-billion-dollar prisons that the libertarian Mr. Rathgeber also enthusiastically supports.

You know, like the law-abiding Saskatoon gun owner who somehow slipped up and let his 11-year-old boy take a loaded Colt .45 to school, where it went off in the lad’s knapsack. (When I Tweeted this, other law abiding gun owners were swift to inform me that the fellow in question obviously wasn’t law abiding – which, since he was until the gun left the premises, is part of the problem with the whole concept.)

The legions of Mr. Rathgeber’s fans and allies in the law-abiding gun owner community who now so enthusiastically follow this blog will be quick to point out that a Colt .45 is a handgun, not covered by the long-gun registry, and therefore I am a “fascist libtard” or worse who wants to seize their guns – and, by gosh, I should just come over and give it a try!

All I can say to them is that it would have been awfully hard for the young fellow to hide a rifle or a shot gun in his knapsack, and anyway, judging by their correspondence, a goodly number of them are looking for Mr. Rathgeber to champion their efforts to eliminate the handgun registry too. This is a topic I’m sure he’ll be happy to get back to us about with his position in the fullness of time and public opinion polling.

Like most “conservative libertarians,” Mr. Rathgeber is quite selective about what he chooses to be libertarian about. In this regard, I suppose, libertarians are rather like their frequent political allies the Biblical literalists, who inevitably pick and choose what parts of the Bible to be literal about. Well, one can’t be too libertarian, what with all those taxpayer-built prisons to fill!

Anyway, just in case the gun-registry controversy dies with the registry, Mr. Rathgeber also has another big cause – forcing the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. to rely on charitable donations to survive, sort of like the “charitable” Fraser Institute, only without billionaires lining up to bankroll its efforts to lobby on their behalf. But that’s a topic for another day.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty clear the Conservative rush to wreck the gun registry had nothing to do with the rights of law-abiding gun owners and everything to do with wedge politics and fund-raising, at which it presumably it has been a fantastic success for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives.

In Mr. Rathgeber’s defence, his lush rhetoric about our liberty is typical of Canadians are hearing Conservative MPs in ridings throughout the country, good foot soldiers who have received their marching orders.

No doubt we’ll be hearing from him soon on how our freedom of investment choice must be defended by whittling down our retirement benefits.

Indeed, it’s never a bad time to start worrying when a Conservative politician commences talking about defending your liberty!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Did Forlorn Friday’s leak of Snelgrove resignation sink ‘Super Saturday’ spoiler?

2012-01-29T01:20:00.007-07:00

Somebody blabbed! Below: Stephen Carter, Tweeting; Mr. Carter’s Tweet.

All across Alberta it was “Super Saturday” yesterday and throughout the province members of the eternally ruling Progressive Conservative Party were being nominated to run in the looming general election!

Oh wow! Oh, Holy Cow… Guess what's going to be all over the news today!

What won’t be all over the news is former cabinet heavy Lloyd Snelgrove’s huffy departure from the Tory caucus or his private tête-à-tête in Calgary with Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith, which might have made a nice little Super Saturday spoiler if Mr. Snelgrove’s resignation hadn’t already been conveniently leaked Friday afternoon during the traditional happy hour for governments that want to dispose of inconvenient news stories.

So a well-timed story that might have overshadowed happy talk about all the confident new PC candidates being elected across the province went pfffffft instead.

Now that we’ve all recovered from the shock of Friday afternoon’s revelation that former premier Ed Stelmach’s right-hand man has up and quit to sit as an Independent, not to mention that he was having a private palaver with Danielle Smith, leader of the party challenging the government from the far right, we have also had a little time to think about how this information made it into the public domain.

And, lo, it appears to have surfaced in the form of a Tweet from … wait for it … Conservative Premier Alison Redford’s chief of Staff, Stephen Carter!

Well, think about it. What better way to torpedo whatever it was that Mr. Snelgrove was cooking up, or at least get out there well ahead of it, than by Tweeting his big announcement yourself, resulting in coverage like this, before he could spin it into something really embarrassing? All the better to do so on the Friday afternoon before a much bigger news story was about to break.

By the time the Super Saturday coverage is wrapped up in the wee hours of this morning, no media manager is going to be interested in paying a reporter overtime to follow up on Mr. Snelgrove’s motivations, let alone his powwow with Ms. Smith. And anything Mr. Snelgrove says after today from his lonely perch as an Independent in the Legislature will be significantly diminished, thanks to clever Mr. Carter’s pinprick attack.

As for Super Saturday itself, at the end of which all but half a dozen or so of Alberta’s 87 ridings will have PC candidates, the government was upbeat about the large number of candidates fighting for nominations and Mr. Carter Tweeted determinedly. Still, even before it was over it was pretty hard for anyone who’s not a diehard Tory to get all that excited about it.

After all, lot of us find ourselves thinking the same thing we think every time the Alberta PC Party under its leader of the day starts getting ready for the automatic renewal of its mandate by calling up its ground troops: Who the heck are these people, anyway?

Kelly Hegg? Maureen Kubinec? John Barlow? Darren Hirsch? Everett McDonald? Mike Allen?

Who they are – at least the lucky ones above who won PC nominations yesterday that entitle them in most cases to automatically become their provincial electoral districts’ representative in the Legislature, along with the generous salary, pension and tax-free benefits that accompany it – is the next generation of loyal PC Party functionaries in their communities.

Their names may not mean much to you, but they’ve been town councillors, school trustees, reeves and dutiful volunteers in places like Airdrie and Westlock, Okotoks and Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie and Fort Mac. Some of them are pretty sharp cookies, some of them aren’t. But collectively they’re why the Tory party in Alberta has such bench strength.

For all our American-style political rhetoric (“Super Saturday,” a derivative of Super Tuesday, being an excellent example), politically speaking Alberta at the start of the 21st Century still operates a lot like the Soviet Union at the end of the last one. It’s a one-party state in which every institution is tightly knotted to the ruling party.

Basically, it’s hard to get a job as dogcatcher in a lot of places around here without Conservative connections. So, outside the big cities, there's usually only one place that the genuinely politically ambitious end up.

Every now and then, the winds of change seem to blow, but hitherto they’ve always disappointingly petered out before they amounted to much. There aren’t many signs of perestroika here just yet, I’m sorry to report.

Political change in Alberta is like Lucy Maud Montgomery’s wonderful description of springtime in these northern climes: “The beautiful, capricious, reluctant Canadian spring.”

Like the Canadian spring, it’ll come one of these days. Just don’t get your hopes up that it will be in 2012.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Lloyd Snelgrove’s Dinner with Danielle: far-right desperation or another Wildrose exodus?

2012-01-27T22:36:00.010-07:00

Phone camera photo? Former Stelmach right-hand man Lloyd Snelgrove spotted with Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith in Calgary brewpub! Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated. Below, the real Mr. Snelgrove (caught without his trademark goatee) and the real Ms. Smith.

With election fever gripping the province and the far-right Wildrose Party facing the bleak prospect of a do-or-die election campaign from a weaker position than it has faced since soon after its generously financed and publicized creation, a real rift on Alberta’s historically unified conservative right is opening up.

Whether the divide grows bitter and deep enough to become a meaningful advantage to more progressive Alberta political parties remains to be seen. Ironically, for that to happen, centrist parties like the New Democrats and the Alberta Liberals need to wish the Wildrose Party a modest degree of success in 2012.

At any rate, such an outcome must at least be considered a possibility as the reaction to today’s decision by Ed Stelmach’s former Man Friday to sit out his last months in the Legislature as an Independent illustrates.

Tout le monde political Alberta was abuzz this afternoon with reports Lloyd Snelgrove, Treasury Board President and right-hand man to his friend Mr. Stelmach, had not merely brusquely resigned from the Progressive Conservative caucus but had earlier dined with Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith at a Calgary Brewster’s restaurant.

Some of the further right corners of the blogosphere were soon Twitterifically a-chirp with suggestions Mr. Snelgrove’s atypically ungracious resignation was the start of another great exodus of Tory MLAs disgruntled with Premier Alison Redford for the Wildrose benches.

Needless to say, with Premier Redford and her version of the PCs apparently riding high in public opinion, this seems extremely unlikely. Even Ms. Smith, who needs to manage a pretty serious problem with her own supporters’ expectations, was quick to scotch the suggestion.

In the event, Mr. Snelgrove – who anyway seemed like an unlikely fit for the Wildrose caucus – apparently declined the invitation and a doubtless disappointed Ms. Smith informed the Herald “he told me that he was going to sit as an Independent and that he is looking forward to finally being able to stand up and speak for his constituents, and I respect that.”

Mr. Snelgrove always seemed one of the more sensible and better-grounded members of Mr. Stelmach’s cabinet, so in fairness to those excitedly Twittering, it was very hard not to speculate about what his resignation from caucus might mean. Inevitably, this made one wonder what was most significant about his Dinner With Danielle – the fact it took more than two hours, had a brew-pub for a venue or happened in Calgary, hours from the Vermilion-Lloydminster MLA’s redoubt in east-central Alberta?

It seems most likely that Mr. Snelgrove was simply disillusioned by Ms. Redford’s come-from-behind victory in the Tory leadership race last fall over candidate Gary Mar, the front-runner he had bet on. He announced his decision not to run again on Nov. 28 and has been sharply critical of Ms. Redford on more than one occasion since.

Though he is only 55, Mr. Snelgrove also quite likely strongly disapproved of the 46-year-old premier’s decision to enforce generational change in her caucus and move some of its more geriatric members along while they were still ambulatory without the assistance of a walker.

Regardless, the leak to the media about Mr. Snelgrove’s Dinner With Danielle was convenient for the struggling Wildrose Party, which faces an existential crisis if it can’t regain its former momentum in the face of the onslaught by Ms. Redford, a candidate who appears to have been genetically engineered to defeat Ms. Smith.

As Daveberta.ca blogger Dave Cournoyer recently pointed out, Ms. Smith has not tackled the tough job of managing her core supporters’ soaring aspirations, encouraged in the heady days of 2010 when right-wing journalists journeyed from afar to worship at the feet of Ms. Smith.

“Not properly managing expectations can be a politically deadly mistake,” Mr. Cournoyer observed, pointing to the experience of the late Alberta Liberal leader Laurence Decore who in 1993 “pumped expectations of forming government so high that when his party only formed Official Opposition, he faced open revolt from his caucus and defections to the Tories.”

Moreover, despite its clear No. 2 position in public support, it is not guaranteed the Wildrose Party can emerge from a general election as the Official Opposition party because its support is concentrated in regions of Southern Alberta where the Redford Tories are even stronger.

Facing such a desperate prospect, it seems probably Wildrose campaign manager Tom Flanagan, who can be fairly described as a radical far-right ideologue, will spare no effort to blacken the reputation of the Redford Tories.

If Dr. Flanagan’s efforts manage to snatch the Wildrose irons out of the fire, his success is likely to leave the Alberta right bitterly and deeply divided.

However, if the Redford Tories roll to an overwhelming victory, which at this moment in the campaign seems more likely, the conservative far right personified by Dr. Flanagan will likely quickly return to the Redford fold and resume their perpetual insider schemes to push the Natural Governing Party even further to the right.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Sorry, an Order of Canada for Ralph Klein is not appropriate

2012-01-26T22:44:00.008-07:00

Ralph Klein, as premier of Alberta. Below: Kevin Taft, an Order of Canada gong.

Does the kind of man who would call immigrants to Alberta from Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic Canada “bums” and “creeps” deserve the Order of Canada?

Surely one would think not! But anything can happen in the weird and wacky world of Canada’s “honours system,” so one supposes that, with a noisy campaign under way by the corporate media and various far-right bloviators, an Order of Canada for Ralph “Katastrophe” Klein is a virtual inevitability.

Still, just because one has been the premier of a Canadian province shouldn’t be an automatic ticket to a membership in the Order, nor has it been since the honour was established in 1967. But the Edmonton Journal seemed to think it ought to be, arguing in a recent editorial that since Mr. Klein got a lot of votes, he should therefore be welcomed to the Order. Klein biographer Don Martin made much the same argument.

One would also think that it would be more appropriate to use the Order to honour people who built things up, rather than those who tore them down, although in fairness the Order’s criteria seem to be a little vague. The website of the Governor-General, the vice-regal personage who administers the Order, says it “recognizes a lifetime of outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation.”

It’s still a free country, so presumably what constitutes those qualities is open to a fairly broad range of public interpretation. Still, once he had left his job as the mayor of Calgary, where he contributed to the creation of the city’s light-rail transit system, Mr. Klein didn’t really do much but knock things down, although there are those who might try to make a case that some of the things he attacked needed attacking.

His famously offensive remarks about Canadians from more eastern regions of the country were also made while he was Calgary’s Chief Magistrate, of course, not after he had ascended to the more august role of premier of an entire province.

Mr. Klein’s principal modus operandi in provincial office seemed essentially to be to take a complex area of activity in which government was involved, throw all the cards in the air and see where they landed. Usually someone else had to pick them up and put them away.

Thus he left our health system in chaos – unlike Tommy Douglas (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1981) who contributed mightily to creating the system of medicare from which all Canadians now benefit.

His government sold off publicly owned health facilities to private interests – unlike Peter Lougheed (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1989) who can be credited with building a network of modern public hospitals throughout Alberta.

However, as the Journal rightly points out, Mr. Klein did give us each a payment big enough to purchase an iPod or a Walkman, and “finally erased the provincial debt.”

Actually, if memory serves, Mr. Klein and his government announced several times that they had finally erased the debt. In reality, of course, they did no such thing. Mr. Klein merely pushed it off on another generation – of politicians, and of all Albertans – to deal with.

To lift a useful household analogy from Kevin Taft, the former Alberta Liberal Leader during the Klein era and the best premier Alberta never had, this is like refusing to repair your house for 30 years, then leaving it to your children with holes in the roof, vermin living under the front porch and rusted cars with no wheels and no engines sitting in the driveway, partly obscured by weeds. All Mr. Klein did was hand off the cost of maintaining Alberta to future generations – for whom the repairs will be more expensive, more complicated and more stressful.

Someone should have a quiet word with former Premier Ed Stelmach, for example, and suss out what he really thinks about Mr. Klein being admitted to the Order. Of course, Mr. Stelmach is too courtly a politician to say aloud what’s actually on his mind, but here’s betting it wouldn’t be all that complimentary if he were inclined to speak up.

After all, it was Mr. Stelmach who had to deal with the social debt and wear the infrastructure deficit that Mr. Klein’s irresponsible government created and left behind. Arguably, along with declining petroleum prices and a recession caused in the back rooms of the banking industry, it was part of what crippled his premiership. It will fall to the rest of us to sort out the chaos in health care created by Mr. Klein, presumably in hopes of justifying widespread privatization, an achievement we will struggle for a long time to accomplish here in Alberta.

Mr. Klein’s greatest claim to fame during his years as premier was that large numbers of Albertans said they thought he’d be a great guy with whom to have a beer. Ask the (sober) residents of an Edmonton homeless men’s shelter how much fun Mr. Klein really was after he’d had a few.

Some of us would rather have a couple of brews with Steve Fonyo (Companion of the Order of Canada, 1985-2009). Mr. Fonyo had his failings, as do we all, but he personally raised $14 million to fight cancer, and he deserved and continues to deserve the honour for that effort.

Mr. Klein’s current physical and mental infirmities are a tragedy with which any of us can feel sympathy and empathy. But he was a catastrophe as a premier, and hardly a unifying force in his treatment of Canadians from elsewhere. Awarding him this great honour – as debased as it may now be owing to the continued presence in its ranks of certain unsavoury characters – is not appropriate.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Latest Alberta poll shows Redford Conservatives with commanding lead

2012-01-25T22:13:00.015-07:00

Say it ain’t so! Giant Redford Tory electoral machine crushes everything in its path! Even the ship of state! (Stephen Carter’s electoral schemes may not be exactly as illustrated.) Below: Alison Redford, Tom “Firewall” Flanagan.

As predicted more than once in this space, a methodologically trustworthy public opinion poll has now been published that shows the Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford with the support of more than 50 per cent of the province’s committed voters.

As argued here, even before the poll by Leger Marketing was reported in the Alberta media this morning, numbers like this indicate the Redford Tories are on their way to another significant majority, as long as present trends continue.

A strong case can be made that the results of the Leger poll are much more likely to be a true reflection of current voter intentions in Alberta than a group of polls touted by Wildrose Party strategists and supporters that show the Conservatives near historic lows for support and Wildrose support brushing 30 per cent.

The Leger poll of 900 Albertans selected by random digit dialing, conducted by telephone between Jan. 13 and Jan. 18, yielded the following results for decided voters:

Progressive Conservatives – 53 per cent
Wildrose Party – 16 per cent
New Democratic Party – 13 per cent
Alberta Liberal Party – 11 per cent
Alberta Party – 2 per cent

Leger says the poll has a margin of error of 3.2 per cent, 19 times out of 20. The poll also indicates that 11 per cent of all voters were undecided.

Leger’s question – “if a provincial election were held today, for which political party would you be most likely to vote?” – associated the party leader’s name with each party in the list the questioner read. For example, “Glenn Taylor’s Alberta Party” or “Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party.”

These results reinforce a number of conclusions that have been argued before in Alberta Diary:

That the Alberta PCs have returned to historic levels of popularity since they selected Ms. Redford as their leader and premier
That Wildrose support has not improved significantly since long-time Tory supporters began returning to the Conservatives after former premier Ed Stelmach announced his intention to resign a year ago
That Alberta Liberal Party support continues to sag under the leadership of former Conservative Raj Sherman
That the Alberta Party has never managed to get on Albertans’ political radar screens, and that what little support they had is evaporating as an election grows closer

The big question, as Leger Alberta Vice-President Ian Large was quoted asking by the Calgary Herald, “is who is going to be No. 2? Who is going to be the Opposition?”

It has been argued here that despite the Wildrose Party’s No. 2 position in popular support, the NDP is more likely to form the official Opposition because splits in voter support in the Edmonton area where it is strong are more likely to favour it than the splits in the Calgary area where Wildrose support is strong by Tory support is overwhelming.

I would not be so bold as to suggest these Leger results support that argument – at least not yet, until Leger provides a complete breakdown of its regional results. However, nor do they rule it out – so that’s my position, and I’m stickin’ to it until persuasive evidence shows otherwise.

We now see the very interesting phenomenon of recent polls of Alberta voters’ intentions sorting themselves into two groups, one that says the Tories have the support of about half of all voters and one that puts Tory support at 40 per cent or lower and indicates a corresponding boost in Wildrose support.

Which to believe?

Well, the three most recent polls that show strong Tory support – Citizen Society Research Lab, Environics and Leger – all used methodology considered to be sound by professional pollsters, telephoned questions over several days.

The three most recent polls that showed the Conservatives weaker and the Wildrose stronger – two by Forum Research and one by ThinkHQ Public Affairs – used methodology not considered to be as reliable, automated demon-dialers over a single evening in the case of Forum and a self-selecting on-line panel in the case of ThinkHQ.

This is not a guarantee that the polls in the first group got it right, or the polls in the second group didn’t, but it leads a fair observer to such a conclusion. Certainly, back in 2008, online polls did not have a particularly good record for reliably predicting Alberta provincial election results.

Other conclusions from the Leger poll:

Satisfaction with the performance of Ms. Redford’s government is very strong, at about 70 per cent
Ms. Redford leads dramatically among the number of Albertan who thought she “would make the best premier for Alberta” – 32 per cent, versus 14 per cent for Ms. Smith, 7 per cent for NDP Leader Brian Mason and 6 per cent for Liberal Leader Raj Sherman.
Two thirds of Alberta voters indicated their voting choice will not be affected by recent allegations of illegal donations made to the PC Party.

The mainstream media, of course, may soon forget the results of this poll because it does not favour the “horserace on the right scenario.”

Some journalists, like Calgary Herald political columnist Don Braid are sticking manfully to the journalistic dream of a right-wing slugfest. Things “will change the minute a campaign starts,” Mr. Braid promised today. “With Tom Flanagan running the show, the Wildrose campaign will likely be focused, smart and extremely tough.”

True enough, with “Firewall” Flanagan at the helm, the Wildrose campaign is indeed likely to be tough – spelled D-I-R-T-Y, as we have already seen – but I don’t doubt the Redford Conservatives have a few dirty tricks of their own up their sleeves.

Anything can happen in politics, of course, so don’t bet the house and the Hawaiian holiday on any outcome until election day is a little closer!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

What – and who – is behind last week’s University of Calgary public sector pay fairy tale?

2012-01-24T23:36:00.013-07:00

Ken Boessenkool and Ben Eisen consider their latest fairy tale. Alberta public policy commentators may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: Tom Flanagan directs the Wildrose Party’s campaign while the Alberta media looks on. A similar caveat applies to this image. Below that: Mr. Eisen and Mr. Boessenkool as they appear to the folks who know them.

Once upon a time, “in the last decade of the 20th century Alberta became a paragon of fiscal virtue.”

So begins a fairy tale spun by Ken Boessenkool and Ben Eisen, Alberta’s equivalents of the Brothers Grimm.

Their fantasy story was treated by journalists with respectful kid gloves and a deceptive lack of background when it was released to the mainstream media last week by the so-called “School of Public Policy” at the University of Calgary.

Indeed, the National Post liked it so much, it practically copied the study’s opening line for the opener of its editorial last Friday.

Alas, unlike the work of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, the yarn spun by Messrs. Boessenkool and Eisen is designed to obfuscate, not to illuminate.

As time goes on and the number-crunchers have a chance to pull at the threads of this colourful but poorly knitted sweater, many more flaws are certain to be revealed that cast doubt on its sensational conclusion that (as summarized by the Calgary Herald) “Alberta’s public sector wage bill has increased nearly twice as fast as the national average over the past decade.”

But the trouble with the reasoned responses that are sure to be made by the reality-based community, however, is that in the time-honoured fashion of the drivel produced by the right-wing “think tanks” for which both Mr. Boessenkool and Mr. Eisen have toiled, they have captured the headlines. The denials or explanations will all be second-day stories to which no one much will pay much attention.

As is clearly intended by the authors of sensational “studies” like this one, this leads lazy or innumerate journalists to conclusions that cannot be supported by the authors’ arguments, but which nonetheless pass directly into the imagination of the public.

For example, consider this point from the National Post editorial noted above, which was written almost as if it were part of a co-ordinated campaign that began with the launch of this so-called study: “While wages for civil servants, nurses, teachers, police officers, firefighters and other public employees have increased 63 per cent across the country, they have risen by nearly twice that amount in Alberta.”

This may seem like a nice distinction to some readers, but what even the authors’ report says is that Alberta’s total public sector wage bill has increased over the decade “nearly double” 63 per cent – not necessarily a surprise in a fast-growing, high-cost province like Alberta. It does not say, as the Post fatuously implies and many members of the public will remember, that Alberta public employees’ average wages have grown by that much.

I personally crunched the numbers for first-year nurses employed by public health care facilities in Alberta in the same period and was forced to the conclusion that their wages had increased … wait for it … 63 per cent! (See the national average, above.)

According to a fact-heavy news release put out Monday by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, which represents direct employees of the provincial government, negotiated wages for its members who work for the government rose only 49 per cent in the same period, which happens to be identical to the increase in the Alberta Average Weekly Earnings calculated by Statistics Canada. What’s more, the number of AUPE members doing these jobs barely changed over the 10 years while Alberta’s population skyrocketed.

The Post also made much of the fact – quelle horreur! – that some Registered Nurses earn as much as $80,000 a year when their overtime is calculated in. So what’s wrong with that, one wonders? RNs are highly trained medical professionals on whom your life may depend – and it’s the almighty international market that normally sets the hard little hearts of guys like Mr. Boessenkool a-pitter-patter that regulates what nurses’ time is worth. (The Post also implied the nurses’ union had just negotiated these overtime provisions. Not true. The same provisions were in place back when Alberta was a paragon of fiscal virtue.)

So if all this is the case, assuming that Mr. Boessenkool’s and Mr. Eisen’s basic numbers are correct, how could the public sector wage bill have “shot up” 119 per cent between 2000 and 2010 when it obviously wasn’t the wages of ordinary public sector workers doing the shooting up?

Perhaps it was because Mr. Boessenkool and Mr. Eisen don’t seem to have accounted for inflation in the figures they used, a reasonable calculation that would have shrunk their sensational estimates by about 20 per cent across the board.

Perhaps it was because they rolled in the huge salaries and bonuses that were paid to senior government of Alberta managers. Managerial bonuses alone added up to $44 million a year in the period, according to Liberal MLA Hugh MacDonald. But Mr. Boessenkool and Mr. Eisen made no effort to break out such management perks, using a definition of salary that included, among other things, such non-working-class benefits as taxable allowances, bonuses, commissions and income in kind.

Perhaps it was the result of the big pay cuts that all Alberta public employees took the decade before. Except judges, of course, who are presumably also included in Mr. Boessenkool’s and Mr. Eisen’s numbers.

Perhaps it was in part the impact of the fact women and new Canadians are paid the same wage as everyone else when they do the same work in the public sector, but are systemically taken advantage of if they work for private companies.

All this remains to be seen when more sophisticated number-crunchers have a go at Mr. Boessenkool’s and Mr. Eisen’s conclusions. But will anyone notice if the media doesn’t bother to cover their analysis with the same enthusiasm it reported their claims of “astonishing growth” in public sector pay?

At this point, much of the Alberta media is too busy running biased polls designed to elicit a predictable response as part of their open campaign for the Wildrose Party, which naturally has jumped on the report’s dubious conclusions as a way to attack Premier Alison Redford and her Progressive Conservative government stewardship over the past decade.

You just have to know, people, that the publicity generated by this report isn’t going to be used to attack the obscene salaries of Alberta’s vast corps of deputy ministers, assistant deputy ministers and public health sector vice-presidents and directors!

No, it’s intended to be used as part of a co-ordinated campaign to push back the modest salaries, benefits and bargaining rights of ordinary working people in the public sector – and, by extension, to attack those in the private sector as well.

This may explain the media’s strange reluctance to inform its readers and listeners just who Mr. Boessenkool and Mr. Eisen are.

Not only has Mr. Boessenkool worked for various far-right “think tanks,” including the thoroughly discredited Fraser Institute (where he obviously learned his lessons well), he has been a strategist for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Office, a corporate lobbyist, the chair of a committee designed to engineer a reverse takeover of the Alberta Tories by the Wildrose Party, and is now Chief of Staff to B.C. Premier Christy Clark, head of a neo-Con coalition that only calls itself Liberal. Of himself, he says: “I came out of the womb right wing.”

With Mr. Harper and Academician Tom Flanagan, who this week was revealed to be the mastermind behind the green curtain working the bells and whistles of the Wildrose Party’s election campaign, Mr. Boessenkool was also a signatory to the famously Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto.

Mr. Eisen is cut from the same piece of cloth, most recently as a propagandist for the Winnipeg-based faux-Fraser-Institute Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

But there’s nary a word of all this in the Post’s editorial, which fails to even mention the names of the report’s authors. It was passed over suspiciously lightly in other coverage by the media.

Look, it’s still a free country. If the University of Calgary and its “School of Public Policy” want to pass off this kind of ideological tripe as academic research and generally act like another right-wing think tank, there’s not much that can be done about it.

But they should have the decency to refuse the taxpayer dollars that pay for their operations and fund many of their propagandists’ public pensions. If they’re so hot to make cuts to the public sector, they couldn’t pick a better place to start than their own front doorstep!

And is it too much to ask that the mainstream media stop acting like their junior auxiliary, check their facts and try to answer the most obvious questions?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Second Forum poll shows Wildrose still soaring: Press 1 if you believe it, Press 2, if you have your doubts…

2012-01-23T23:12:00.008-07:00

A Forum Research Inc. spokesperson counts up support for Alberta’s far-right Wildrose Party. Below: Forum President Lorne Bozinoff.

Well, that’s one strategy for establishing your polling credibility: If you come up with a poll that other pollsters, bloggers and the usual complainers dismiss as an outlier, do another one that says the same thing.

That’s what Forum Research Inc. of Toronto did today, publishing a poll of Alberta voters’ intentions that shows the Alberta Progressive Conservatives under Premier Alison Redford unchanged from its survey last month at 38 per cent committed support.

Today’s Forum poll also showed the far-right Wildrose Party up a startling six points to 29 per cent, leading the National Post newspaper, to which the poll results were provided first, to trumpet: “Alberta’s Wildrose Alliance poised to take official opposition status in spring vote: poll.” (It’s nice to know it’s not just me that still instinctively calls them the Wildrose Alliance; but then, I still call the Harper Cons the Reform Party.)

Regardless of that, Forum’s latest survey of 1,077 Albertans who indicated they were over 18, which was done over the telephone on Jan. 17 using automated Press-Pound-if-You’re-Undecided type technology, showed Alberta’s other parties spread out behind in positions not dissimilar to those where they were in the company’s Dec. 14, 2011, poll that aroused a certain amount of scoffing among the usual suspects, this one included.

To wit: Alberta Liberals 14 per cent (up from 12 per cent), Alberta NDP 13 per cent (unchanged) and Alberta Party 3 per cent (down from 6).

This latest Forum poll result suggests to this blogger two likely possibilities:

Forum got it right and was simply the first to pick up on a dramatic developing trend of growing support for the Wildrose Party that appeared in December.
There’s something wrong with Forum’s sample that is producing wildly different results from those of most other polling companies, which have put support for Redford and the Conservatives at around 50 per cent or better.

If these latest Forum poll results are accurate, they signify a very serious turn for the worse for the Redford Conservatives. If they are accurate, as noted here the last time Forum came up with numbers like these, they would mean that Conservatives are close to their historic low for support, and moreover that they are no better off under Ms. Redford than they were under Premier Ed Stelmach.

In addition, Forum’s results would indicate that Ms. Redford is not experiencing any sort of honeymoon with voters. Indeed, Forum states in material accompanying its results that more Albertans approve of Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith than approve of Premier Redford.

Moreover, it would mean that Alberta voters have completely broken with their historic behaviour patterns and are not just acting in new ways, but in wildly new ways.

Well, anything’s possible, one supposes, but the Conservatives sure aren’t acting like a party that is in the dumper in the polls – and you’ve got to think that they’re polling like crazy right now. Nor does the population, if you listen to Albertans talking, sound like a group of people who are lo longer experiencing that honeymoon glow from their new premier.

“These findings show that the Progressive Conservative party is maintaining a strong base of support among Albertans,” said Forum Research President Lorne Bozinoff in the company’s report. “Despite the strong support base, Premier Redford’s approval rating remains low, while Smith and the Wildrose Party appear to be gaining some traction.”

“It will be interesting,” Dr. Bozinoff went on, “to see if this trend continues in the months to come.” Yes indeed, it will be, and we should have an opportunity to get some insight into this very soon. There are reports that another poll of Alberta voter intentions has recently been conducted by a major national pollster, and that its results will be published shortly – perhaps even later this week.

If that poll’s results return to the pattern of most voter intention surveys before Forum entered the field late last year, it will be strong evidence that the Conservatives are on their way to another huge majority, the NDP is the most likely party to form the opposition and that something is indeed wrong with Forum’s sample.

If its results show the same trend as do Forum’s, well then, it’s a whole new world in Alberta.

In the mean time, Forum’s poll should help Ms. Smith deal with the expectations-management problem she must surely now have with her supporters, the result of persuading them for more than two years that the Wildrose Party was bound to form government whenever a vote was called.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Ex-MLA Shiraz Shariff gives Redford favourite Ken Hughes the bum’s rush in Tory nomination battle

2012-01-21T22:37:00.006-07:00

Ken Hughes, back in the day as chair of the Alberta Health Services Board. He's now Alberta's newest unemployed person. Below: Shiraz Shariff, Joey Oberhoffner.

As the beloved Scottish poet Rabbie Burns so famously observed, “the best-laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”

The best-laid plans o’ mice, of course, are usually wrecked by people with traps. But those of men often go awry because of what might be termed an over-exuberance of democracy.

Consider the sad case of Alberta’s newest unemployed person, Ken Hughes, who on Dec. 28 last year announced he was stepping down as the first and only chair of Alberta’s giant public health care board, known nowadays as Alberta Health Services.

He didn’t make the other announcement official until a few days later – but it was so obvious at the time that even the tame stenographers of Alberta’s mainstream media included it in their reports of his resignation: Mr. Hughes was quitting so that he could seek the Progressive Conservative nomination in the riding of Calgary-West.

From there, it was assumed, he would be elected MLA with ease, since the riding has a reputation as one of the most easily winnable in the province for Progressive Conservative candidates. After all, since 2004, it’s been held by Finance Minister Ron Liepert, the perennial bull in Alberta’s political china shop until he announced his plan to resign. The federal riding of the same name, which occupies much of the same real estate, is home to the execrable Rob Anders, best known for calling Nelson Mandela a terrorist.

After that, it seemed likely, Mr. Hughes would take his appointed seat in the Legislature in Edmonton, whence he would be welcomed into Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s cabinet, quite possibly as health minister.

Alas, just as Robert Burns warned us might happen, this afternoon Mr. Hughes’s plans went spectacularly awry and his sure-thing ascent to cabinet became dust in his mouth. After a close fought race, to the utter astonishment of the Alberta political cognoscenti, Mr. Hughes was edged out on the third ballot by former Calgary-McCall MLA Shiraz Shariff, who doesn’t even live in the riding.

Whoopsie-doopsie all ’round! Back in the 2008 election, Mr. Shariff was narrowly defeated in Calgary-McCall by Liberal Darshan Kang, and later unsuccessfully claimed in court there had been election irregularities.

Apparently the PC electors of Calgary West were not nearly as impressed as the premier with Mr. Hughes’s accomplishments as an insurance salesman, as the undistinguished Member of Parliament for Macleod and as chair of the shambolic behemoth that is Alberta Health Services.

Indeed, while the Tory story as told by Health Minister Fred Horne in the official government news release announcing Mr. Hughes’s resignation is that “Ken’s leadership helped AHS to deliver solid results, including over $660 million in administrative savings that has since been reinvested in patient care,” there’s precious little evidence any money has actually been saved.

Moreover, it is simply impossible to claim health care operates more efficiently in Alberta under AHS than it did before the huge agency was created in 2008 to replace nine health regions – a move almost universally believed to have been a politically motivated strategy by the government of former premier Ed Stelmach to curb the burgeoning power of the Calgary Health Region.

Indeed, health care in Alberta seems to the public to have been in an enduring state of crisis almost from the day AHS was created.

No one knows what former AHS CEO Stephen Duckett, the plain-spoken Australian PhD economist hired to run AHS by Mr. Hughes and Mr. Liepert and then publicly sacked by premier Stelmach in November 2010, thinks of today’s development. Presumably, he has returned to the Antipodes, his $736,000 payout in hand. A for-sale sign rocked in the bone-chilling breeze today in front of Dr. Duckett’s residence in a posh Edmonton neighbourhood near the University of Alberta.

After yesterday’s nomination of Mr. Shariff, Mount Royal University communications professor David Taras, a political scientist who is a quotable favourite of the media, told the Calgary Herald the outcome was “shocking” and scrambled for an explanation. “It’s all about the ground game and obviously (Shariff) had a better ground game,” he told the no-doubt equally nonplussed Herald reporter. … Well, yeah!

Actually, the Calgary West nomination was but one of four Tory nomination races in southern Alberta yesterday. However, the only item of interest to come out of the rest of them is that one losing candidate in Calgary-Fish Creek, Joey Oberhoffner, was described by the media as a “political blogger” as if this were a reasonable job description for an aspiring office holder.

I would conclude from this, people, that there is hope for the world. Mr. Oberhoffner is known online as “the Enlightened Savage,” which judging from his political pedigree is at least half right. Calgary-Fish Creek is represented by Heather Forsyth, a Tory MLA since 1993 who crossed the floor to join the Wildrose Party on Jan. 4, 2010.

Getting back to Mr. Hughes and Calgary-West, the surprise nomination outcome served him right, according to the only commentator about the Edmonton Journal’s story by late afternoon. “It takes a lot of arrogance to think you can just resign from a cushy high-profile patronage job and step into a Tory nomination,” said someone identified as Old Grey Badger. “Gee I wonder if Hughes can get his old job back now. … Most likely Redford will appoint him as Alberta’s Trade Ambassador to Moldova or some other ‘really important’ position.”

Actually, much the same thing occurred to many Albertans. Who would bet against Mr. Hughes turning up in an important post-election position advising Premier Redford?

In other political surprises yesterday, south of the Medicine Line, serial adulterer Newt Gingrich served up a can of whoop-ass to former Mormon bishop Mitt Romney, the front-runner, in the South Carolina Republican presidential primary. Why can’t Canadian politicians have names like Newt and Mitt?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Time to loosen up and let federal NDP Quebec caucus learn in public – out here in Alberta

2012-01-20T22:08:00.004-07:00

The Liberal Party rises from the dead? Not going to happen. Even Justin Trudeau doesn’t look like the guy with his hand in the air. If you want to skid the Harper Conservatives, it’s NDP you’re going to have to ask to do the job. Below: Lise St. Denis.

The time has come for the federal New Democratic Party to loosen up and let its rookie-rich Quebec caucus learn how to be good Members of Parliament right out there in public.

Yeah, there are risks in such a course of action. But there are risks in trying to control the caucus with an iron grip worthy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper as well, as the last few weeks of chatter about an NDP in “disarray,” culminating in the Jan. 9 defection of Lise St. Denis to the faltering Liberals, have revealed.

I’ve got bad news and good news for you. Worse is almost certain to come. Hell, a Quebec New Democrat may even defect to the Harper Tories for all we know. It’s a pretty big caucus with enough people who didn’t expect to get elected that one supposes anything could happen. And that would be like … what? An Alberta Conservative crossing the floor to join the Trudeau Liberals? (Hey, Jack Horner, c’mon down!)

Ms. St. Denis’ decision to cross to Liberals, or even a few more like it, doesn’t add up to the L-shaped Party putting the L back in Lazarus and rising from the dead. Canadians have cottoned onto their arrogance and entitlement, and the exaggerated notion of their corruption has been firmly implanted in our collective mind, so it’s said here that stain isn’t going to wash out.

That may be why Liberal Party Interim Leader Bob Rae admitted at his news conference announcing the defection of the MP for St-Maurice-Champlain that he didn’t really think it meant very much. “It’s certainly not a day where we’re going to make some exaggerated claim as to what trend does this represent,” he told the media. “I have no idea.”

And that may even be why the virulently pro-Harper mainstream media seems to have let the matter drop.

Still, under the Liberal Party’s present circumstances, you can hardly blame Mr. Rae for taking an MP wherever he could find one – even if it was a pleasant and rather elderly person who seemed thoroughly confused about why she ran in the first place.

So what’s the good news? Loud arguments, tears shed, or even several defections over the next few months are not going to keep the NDP Quebec caucus from turning into an effective political force, and they’re not going to keep the NDP from turning into the government of Canada, especially if it manages to pick the right leader.

As NDP leadership candidate Brian Topp shrewdly observed on his recent visit to Edmonton, “all politics ends in tears.” The Liberal Party has already had its lachrymose moment, no matter what lies they told themselves last weekend at their convention in Ottawa. The Conservative government led by Mr. Harper, whom Canadians instinctively dislike and distrust, will have its moment too.

But if you want to see the Harper Conservatives skidded from power, it’s going to have to be the NDP that does the job.

This is why, even before a national leader is chosen, now would be a good time for the NDP to loosen the reins a little on its Quebec caucus a little and let those members learn to be good MPs in public, early in the game.

As even the National Post admitted, while there may be a few duds among the MPs last year’s Orange Wave washed up in Ottawa (one less as of last week, as a matter of fact), there are also some remarkably talented people who are already shining pretty brightly.

Which is why I think, even as the leadership race continues, that NDP Interim Leader Nycole Turmel should offer those MPs the opportunity to shine in front of the entire country, not just in their own constituencies.

And you know what? Some of them might mess up, and mess up publicly. If that happens, the Tory Rage Machine will certainly jump on it and try to use it to sow seeds of doubt about the NDP.

But so what? I think Canadians would get it. They already get it that the Conservatives are a sleazy American-style party that will stoop to anything to hang onto power. They don’t particularly like it. But like voters here in Alberta, they’re unlikely to vote for another party until they are shown that it can govern too.

They also get it that the Quebec caucus is full of rookies, and it is said here they will mostly react with sympathy and understanding as those committed new MPs learn how to be an effective governing party in public.

Finally, there is the matter of our depressed and progressive young people – who here in Alberta are a significant factor in the fact almost 60 per cent of eligible voters didn’t bother to cast a ballot in the last provincial election.

I think the sight of articulate, young, successful New Democrats from Quebec on their Alberta doorsteps would energize and motivate young Albertans not just to vote, not just to vote NDP, but to run for office themselves!

A recent comment under a post on this blog about 29-year-old leadership candidate Niki Ashton’s visit to Edmonton said, “I’m tired of the ageism, tired of the inside bullshit that’s going on, tired of the Boomers and their old-school ways. It’s time to move forward, to engage youth and to be the progressives we say we are.”

What better way to inspire progressive young people in Alberta than the example of progressive young people who have succeeded in politics in another province?

What better way to show Albertans of all ages that, notwithstanding the Tory and media propaganda, the NDP Quebec caucus is full of talented people who could contribute to a humane and progressive national government?

And what better way to let our new Quebec New Democrats learn and grow in an atmosphere where the impact of any mistakes are likely to be minimized?

In case any New Democrats in Ottawa have missed it – easy to do since the Ottawa media ignores Western Canada – there’s a provincial electing coming up in Alberta in which the NDP has hopes of forming the official Opposition.

I say the best way for the NDP to put Lise St. Denis behind them where she belongs – and to make a significant positive contribution as well – is to fill a couple of planes with those new Quebec MPs and bring them to Alberta to help with our campaign.

+ + +

While we’re on the topic of the NDP, I’m afraid I just can’t get my knickers in a twist about the fact NDP leadership candidate Thomas Mulcair has dual Canadian-French citizenship.

For one thing, Mr. Mulcair has been totally open about this, declaring it to be so without being prompted at NDP leadership forums long before the press got onto it. I guess this is what passes for a big scoop at Postmedia News nowadays.

Maybe it matters to most Canadians, like it might have mattered when it turned out that Stephane Dion held Canadian and French passports. Maybe it doesn’t, as it doesn’t seem to have been a problem for Ted Morton, who is widely assumed here in Alberta to be a dual Canadian and U.S. citizen.

It’s a disadvantage, without a doubt, for those of us who don’t enjoy the advantages of dual citizenship. My guess is raising this issue, as both Prime Minister Harper and the late NDP leader Jack Layton have done, will prove to be a double-edged sword. Back in 2006, according to the CBC, 41 MPs qualified. So did at least two signatories to the famous Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto, although one of them was apparently not Mr. Harper. So do a dozen or more Alberta MLAs.

Is this to become a question for anyone running for public office in Canada? I guess so. I’ll certainly be asking all my local candidates.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Liberal Conservative appoints conservative Liberals to battle progressive conservatives, true conservatives

2012-01-19T22:15:00.012-07:00

I’m with him… Conservative Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman with his new chief of staff, Jonathan Huckabay. Below: Jeff Melland, from his Facebook page.

Earlier today, Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman emailed out a press release announcing big changes to his staff.

Key among these were the additions of Jeff Melland, a former spokesthingy for the British Columbia Liberal caucus, and Ryan Pineo, a former Legislative Assistant with the same West Coast Liberals.

Mr. Melland will be moving to Edmonton and taking up his duties on Feb. 1, said Dr. Sherman’s release. Mr. Pineo, by the sound of the statement, has already started work as Dr. Sherman’s executive assistant. Dr. Sherman, according to his news release, is “very excited about my new team.” (Emphasis added; explanation to follow.)

Makes sense, you say? Liberals helping Liberals, right?

Nothing is that simple. Given the permutations and transmogrifications among the various parties of the right in Western Canada – not to mention their occasional name changes, both formal and informal – it’s very hard to keep track of what’s going on without a program and a GPS unit.

This is where it starts to get complicated. I’ll try to explain.

First of all, we need to remember that Dr. Sherman is a former Progressive Conservative, who was fired by former Conservative premier Ed Stelmach for criticizing his former conservative party when he was still a member of it. Last September, Dr. Sherman was elected as the leader of the Alberta Liberals, who were still Liberals in the normal Canadian sense of that word, when the party threw its leadership vote wide open to non-Liberals as well as members of the party.

That situation seems to have left the current eight-member Alberta Liberal caucus divided into two groups: Seven traditional Liberals, and Dr. Sherman, who with some of his unelected candidates is known as “The Sherman Team.” Of the seven Liberal Liberals, three have announced they don’t intend to run again in the next Alberta election.

Until a few days a go, the Liberal caucus had nine members, but Bridget Pastoor, an MLA from Lethbridge, crossed the floor to join the Conservatives. So now she’s a traditional Liberal who has become a Conservative, under a Conservative Party led by Premier Alison Redford, who some Albertans accuse of being too liberal. But let’s not worry about that right now.

The B.C. Liberals, by the way, really are Conservatives, and have been for years.

That would be why, over in British Columbia, Liberal Premier Christy Clark has just hired a well-known Conservative to be her chief of staff. Now, that particular Conservative, the one hired by Ms. Clark, is a fellow named Ken Boessenkool, who is a former adviser to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Calgary MP who nobody is going to call a Liberal. Back in the day, Mr. Harper, Mr. Boessenkool and a couple of well-known dual-citizens signed the famously Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto. But never mind that just now either.

Getting back to Dr. Sherman, the Conservative who leads the Alberta Liberals, who are still Liberals, he apparently hired the B.C. Conservatives who are called Liberals to help him do well enough in the election to turn the Liberal Liberals into either Conservative Conservatives or Conservative Liberals. Capische?

By the way, some of the old Alberta Liberals who are still Liberals and still MLAs, including the leader before last, Kevin Taft, turned up at an event last night sponsored by the Alberta Federation of Labour to publicize a book by Dr. Taft and a movie about it that describes how Conservatives like Dr. Sherman have been mismanaging the Alberta economy.

Since Dr. Taft is one of the Liberals who won’t be running again, there’s a school of thought he’s “gone rogue” and is openly clashing with Dr. Sherman over the more conservative direction he is trying to steer the Alberta Liberals.

Regardless, somewhere along the line, you may have noted that there is also a British Columbia Conservative Party, which calls itself “B.C.’s only true conservative party.” But they are not really conservatives exactly. They are really Wildrosers, except from British Columbia, although the Wildrosers, who are from Alberta, say they are really conservatives.

The Wildrose Party used to be called the Wildrose Alliance. It is running to replace the Progressive Conservatives under Ms. Redford, who replaced Mr. Stelmach. Neither of them, according to Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith, are true conservatives either. Mr. Harper, for whom Mr. Boessenkool used to work, is widely thought to back the Wildrose Party in Alberta because it’s more conservative than the Conservatives.

So, the Alberta Liberals are being turned into Conservatives, the Alberta Progressive Conservatives are Conservatives, the Wildrose Party are conservatives, the B.C. Liberals are conservatives, and the B.C. Conservatives are conservatives and they all want you to believe they are the only true conservatives. If this sounds like Protestant churches to you, you may have a point.

After Conservative party members elected her Alberta premier in October, Alison Redford appointed as her chief of staff a fellow named Stephen Carter, Up to then, Mr. Carter was best known for running the successful campaign of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nensihi, who is seen as a liberal and who as associated with the Alberta Party, a party that is considered to be pretty much the same as the old pre-Conservative Alberta Liberals.

(I’m waiting for someone to write and tell me that Glenn Taylor, the leader of the Alberta Party is a former New Democrat. Well, you can’t have everything. If he still has his NDP card, we’ll send someone around to pick it up!)

Dr. Sherman, meanwhile, appointed his former Conservative legislative aide Jonathan Huckabay as his chief of staff. Mr. Huckabay also stayed with Dr. Sherman during the spell he was an Independent. He also once taught political science for a year at the Instituto Technologico y Estudios Superiores de Monterrey.

So, to sum up the chief of staff changes, Ms. Clark is a Liberal with a Conservative chief of staff, Ms. Redford is a Conservative with a liberal chief of staff, and Dr. Sherman is a Conservative Liberal with a former political science teacher from a Mexican college as chief of staff.

Dr. Sherman also appointed Earl J. Woods, a former CBC broadcaster, as his senior communications advisor. Mr. Woods will have his work cut out for him. And he thanked Rick Miller, his former chief of staff, who is stepping down to run as a Liberal Alberta Liberal and Communications Director Brian Leadbetter, who sensibly took a job doing public relations for a school board.

I hope that cleared things up!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Tories who tout Internet lawbreaker must remember: what’s good for the goose…

2012-01-18T23:27:00.004-07:00

Your blogger with Minister of State of Making Canada Way More Democratic, Really, Tim Uppal. Pssst! Tim! Dump that election reporting law, would ya? Below: Paul Bryan, Victoria Times Colonist picture snatched off the Internet.

What should you do when good legislation is introduced by bad political parties?

It’s hard – though not completely impossible – to argue the federal Conservatives are not doing the right thing with last week’s Tweeted announcement by Edmonton-Sherwood Park MP Tim Uppal that they’ll make a virtue of necessity and de-criminalize reporting election-night results from eastern parts of the country before the polls have closed in the West.

Not being able to discuss a public event that had already happened was always an affront to free speech, and was pretty much obsolete to boot – thanks to radio waves and long-distance telephone lines, not to mention the Internet. Indeed, where I grew up on the West Coast, the U.S. radio station next door used to gleefully report Canadian election results from the Maritimes as soon as they clattered off the AP wire. The only difference now is that anyone can do it.

What’s more, it was unfair to those of us out here in the West, since no one in Newfoundland could face prosecution for the same thing – surely there must have been a Charter challenge awaitin’ in that geographical fact!

There was a school of thought that the answer lay in just not having the polls report their results in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia until they had closed in British Columbia. But, no doubt, Nova Scotians and Newfoundlanders wouldn’t have been very happy about having to wait until midnight, or half an hour after, to learn how they’d voted.

Still, at the risk of sounding churlish, just as you want to check that your watch and your wallet are still in place after an encounter with a Harper Tory, when I hear a report like this it inevitably makes me wonder what the Harperistas are really up to. After all, the announcement came from a guy whose Orwellian sounding official cabinet title is Minister of State for Democratic Reform, which sends a little chill up my spine every time I read or hear it.

Have the Harperites got a plan to run election night radio ads to exploit developing trends in Eastern Canada? Unlikely, I suppose, but not so outlandish you wouldn’t want to bother checking if anyone’s been booking election day advertising a time zone over the next time a federal writ drops. Make a note to follow up on that!

Or are they just softening us up for an inevitable pitch to install Diebold voting machines that – really, honest! – will make vote counting so much more efficient, and maybe even let you vote from home…

However, I guess we shouldn’t look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth. The law makes sense and it’s hard to imagine that the Opposition parties won’t support it.

Arguably, the most interesting part of this story is the account of Mr. Uppal’s kind words for Vancouver software architect Paul Bryan, who intentionally broke the law in order to fight it.

Now, Mr. Bryan does indeed deserve some credit – if his campaign failed in the courts, it nevertheless seems to have succeeded in the court of public opinion. But it always makes me wonder just a little when I hear a Conservative praising someone for breaking the law.

Aren’t these the same Conservatives who along with their online Tory Rage Machine were in an absolute swivet about the Occupy Movement protesters breaking municipal bylaws by camping in civic squares around the nation to make a point about the way our society’s economy is organized? Practically wanted the tanks sent in, didn’t they?

Don’t I recall hearing one of the Conservatives’ most vociferous supporters calling Occupy protesters here in Alberta “the socialists, communists, anarchists and petty criminals who inhabited downtown Calgary’s Olympic Plaza.” I think that pretty accurately reflects the Tory take on people who break laws Conservatives approve of.

Well, again, I suppose we shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

But if the Harper Conservatives want to lionize Mr. Bryan for breaking a law that needed to be broken, and that’s OK with me, they’ll need to be careful about the way they assail the rest of us when the hoof is on the other foot and the gift horse is pointing the other direction.

We all need to remember that sometimes the only way to fix a bad law is to break it, or to break another one and inconvenience someone in the process. So the next time someone has to pound in some tent pegs in a public place to make that point – like, say, when the ground here in Alberta thaws again – we may need to remind our Conservative friends that civil disobedience is a two way street and you can travel on it in more than one direction if you’re prepared as Mr. Bryan was to pay the tariff. (Which in the case of the election reporting law unsurprisingly turned out not to be very steep.)

This kind of thing makes me think of the recent Conservative effort to “go nuclear” and pretend foreign environmentalists have no right to try to influence our Canadian pipeline debate as giant multinational energy corporations do routinely with Conservative connivance, both openly and with cash laundered through their Canadian subsidiaries.

What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. In the mean time, here’s to Mr. Uppal. I guess.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Never Mind Northern Gateway, Keystone XL remains the main objective of Canada’s pipeline propagandists

2012-01-17T00:35:00.000-07:00

A Canadian lobbyist ratchets up the pressure on the Obama Administration to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline. Meanwhile, foreign celebrities boost the morale of radical Hollywood environmentalists as they prepare to interfere in Canadian affairs. Government and corporate officials and environmental radicals may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Joe Oliver in a nice conservative blue suit.

Never mind the rhetoric about the Northern Gateway Pipeline, the main objective of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives continues to be successful completion of the Keystone XL Pipeline to Texas.

The Northern Gateway line to Kitimat is not a replacement for Keystone XL in the minds of Conservatives in Ottawa and Edmonton or the corporations that bankroll them. It’s an enhancement.

Mr. Harper said as much in his interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. yesterday, rattling his sabre at Iran, then attempting to link recent Iranian naval exercises in the Strait of Hormuz to his high-pressure XL Pipeline pitch. “When you look at the Iranians threatening to block the Strait of Hormuz, I think that just illustrates how critical it is that supply for the United States be North American,” the PM told CBC interviewer Peter Mansbridge.

Our prime minister, of course, has a wonderfully Orwellian ability to simultaneously spout contradictory positions, so he slipped seamlessly from that into whinging about how Canada is “dependent or possibly held hostage” on decisions made in the United States – quite a laugh for a politician who has been striving for decades to tie Canada more closely to the U.S.

Before the prime minister spoke, the Washington Post was reporting that ahead of the Feb. 21 XL-decision deadline imposed on President Barack Obama’s Administration by pro-pipeline legislators in Congress, the usual Canadian and American suspects were ratcheting up their efforts to pressure the U.S. government to approve the line TransCanada Corp. wants to build to the Gulf Coast.

Does anyone doubt for an instant that official propaganda from the Harper Conservatives or the government of Alberta Premier Alison Redford defending Keystone XL and denying it will cost Canadian jobs will be back at full volume the instant the American federal authorities approve the southbound pipeline?

But the Stateside news being generated by the noisy Canadian debate over Enbridge Inc.’s Northern Gateway project provides a convenient backdrop to lobbying by official Canadian and corporate backers of the Keystone XL project to increase the pressure on President Obama to make the “right” decision about the U.S. pipeline.

This may be the simplest explanation for the crude McCarthyite tone of the effort by Conservative Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver, amplified by the Online Tory Rage Machine, to portray the pipeline’s opponents as jet-setting Hollywood celebrities.

As the Dayton News reported Friday, a senior TransCanada representative has also been busy telling U.S. legislators and journalists that “it is clear that the Canadian energy community, the Canadian government, and the provincial Government of Alberta, where most of the oil exists, are looking at other options.”

“They are looking at other customers because, right now, they basically have one customer, the United States,” TransCanada “project representative” Jim Prescott said. “I don’t think any of us can blame them for looking at who else wants their oil: Asian markets, China, India. They are doing the prudent business and political actions to pursue that. I don’t blame them a bit, especially in light of what we’ve seen here.”

Mr. Prescott doubtless hit the proverbial nail precisely on its head, however, when he added that a Canadian pipeline to Kitimat doesn’t mean there can’t be a pipeline to the Gulf as well: “Does that mean it is a zero-sum game between either send it to Asia or send it to the United States? No, that’s not it. That’s not the choice.”

Meanwhile, back here in the True North, the fact Keystone XL stalled last year for political reasons south of the border also provided Mr. Oliver with his convenient opportunity to vilify pipeline opposition in British Columbia as being guided by radical foreigners determined to interfere in Canadian affairs.

Of course, accusing “foreign special interest groups” of trying “to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda” is pretty rich for a government vigorously lobbying its U.S. counterpart, encouraging the sell-off of a significant chunk of our natural resources to Communist China’s state-owned oil company and apparently neglecting the future energy needs of central and eastern Canadians.

As journalist Andrew Nikoforuk reported in The Tyee, energy analyst David Hughes argues the Northern Gateway pipeline will “compromise the long term energy security interests of Canadians, as well as their environmental interests.”

Mr. Hughes, who is not an environmentalist, a foreigner or a radical asked: “Why does the Canadian government support a proposal to export oil to China when nearly half the country (Quebec and Atlantic Canada) is nearly 100 per cent dependent on declining or volatile reserves from the North Sea and the Middle East?” (Or is Mr. Harper only worried about the impact of Iranian manoeuvres in the Straight of Hormuz on Americans?)

Mr. Hughes asks a good question, one we’re unlikely to hear answered by any of the usual suspects mentioned above.

But the main thing to understand amid all these hypocritical Tory contradictions is that the current emphasis on the Northern Gateway Pipeline does not indicate any diminishment in the commitment of the Conservative-corporate axis to see the Keystone XL Pipeline pumping Canadian oil south.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Federal Liberal adoption of Alberta Liberal leadership voting rule is sure end badly

2012-01-15T02:54:00.010-07:00

Your blogger with Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman. Below: Federal Liberal Leader Bob Rae.

If he loses his seat in the next provincial election, will Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman run for the leadership of the Liberal Party of Canada?

He can if he wants, if the timing works out. And what the heck, he’s even a Liberal now. It’s said here that losing his seat is a virtual certainty.

At any rate, we are reliably informed that the federal Liberals yesterday adopted the same nutty leadership voting rule as their Alberta counterpart, the one that will allow any interested Canadian to vote for their next party leader.

According to a report in the Toronto Star yesterday, “Interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae implored party members to back the move, calling it a ‘historic change’ to the party’s makeup.”

Oh, it’ll be historic change, all right. But one suspects Mr. Rae will wake up this morning, shake his head and say, “what was I thinking?” If not this morning, eventually.

According to the Star’s report of the federal Liberals’ national convention Friday, yesterday and today in Ottawa, the rule will create a new class of party “supporters” who are not dues-paying, card-carrying members but who will get to vote in party elections anyway.

Anyone from Alberta who’s been paying attention will be familiar with this scheme, as it’s essentially the same one adopted by the Alberta Liberals last summer in the run-up to the provincial party’s leadership vote.

But that innovation did not play out exactly as advertised. Dr. Sherman, an Emergency Room physician and mercurial former Conservative who had been fired by then-premier Ed Stelmach for going over the top criticizing his own party’s health care policy, handily defeated a stalwart and effective Liberal MLA named Hugh MacDonald and several other candidates for the party leadership.

It was said in this blog immediately after the Sept. 10 Alberta Liberal vote that there were two schools of thought about Dr. Sherman’s election:

“One is that the former Progressive Conservative Parliamentary Secretary for Health, who was fired from his post and kicked out of the Tory caucus last November by Premier Ed Stelmach is a remarkable politician who has the power to shake up Alberta politics and challenge the government from the centre. …

“The other is that the MLA for Edmonton-Meadowlark is a divisive and impulsive one-issue politician who will be the final stake driven through the heart of the moribund Alberta Liberal Party. As veteran NDP campaigner Lou Arab observed in a Tweet moments after the results were announced to a mostly empty gymnasium at the University of Alberta: ‘Raj Sherman is built for speed, not distance. This will end badly for the Liberals.’”

Subsequent events suggest Mr. Arab got it right.

Mr. MacDonald, MLA for Edmonton-Gold Bar, pulled the plug later in September, disgusted at the outcome of the leadership race and the way it was conducted, announcing he would not run in the next election. At the end of November, Lethbridge-East MLA Bridget Pastoor crossed the floor and joined Premier Alison Redford’s Conservatives.

Two other MLAs, former party leader Kevin Taft, Edmonton-Riverview, and Harry Chase, Calgary Varsity, had already announced they wouldn’t run again. That means only four MLAs from the party’s current eight-member caucus will even be running again, at least as Liberals. To date, the Alberta Liberals have nominated only 23 candidates for 87 provincial seats in an election that must take place in March, April or May.

Now, you can argue that the Alberta Liberals’ problems stem from Dr. Sherman’s leadership, or from external problems, but it’s said here that an election process that allowed a high-profile outsider with extremely shallow roots in the party to seize the leadership is a significant part of the problem.

This is not to say the same thing will happen to the federal Liberals if their party administration, which is sure to be larger and more effective, can keep control of the process. But one thing is certain – if the federal Liberals for any reason can’t put forward a promising, high-profile candidate with deep roots in the party, anyone can get elected, and that anyone can turn out to be very bad for the party, as seems to have happened in Alberta.

The problem is not that members of other parties will put up candidates to make mischief, or even vote for candidates that they think are weak. This is unlikely. Rather that "supporters" without deep roots in a party will be swayed by a high-profile candidate who means well, but may not be the the best bet for success when all aspects of party leadership are considered.

This idea is often touted as being a little like the U.S. primary system in its ability to raise a party’s profile and test potential leaders. That metaphor might work if Liberal Party elections were run by Elections Canada, but not in what is still seen as a private party election that will only attract a tiny portion of the electorate. Indeed, the small number likely to vote relative to the total population increases the potential for mischief.

If the federal Liberals hope to spread Alberta political culture to the rest of Canada, a strange idea for a party that has not exactly been a historical success here, it seems like it will be a hard sell in places where multiple party membership is not considered normal political behaviour.

As things stand – and the Alberta experience illustrates – if you are looking for proof the Liberal Party of Canada had lost faith in its own future and is grasping at straws to survive, the adoption of this rule is it.

Just as it seems to have for provincial Liberals in Alberta, this will end badly for the Liberal Party of Canada.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Will only NDP and Wildrose mount full slates to challenge Alison Redford this spring?

2012-01-14T01:02:00.003-07:00

Alison Redford: Why is this woman smiling? Why not? Below: NDP Leader Brian Mason: the next leader of the Opposition?

Even with Alberta Premier Alison Redford in a mood to tarry just a little and not call an election until after her government has passed its first budget, only one centrist political party is likely to be in a position to challenge her in all 87 ridings come election day – the New Democrats.

With 73 candidates already nominated, the Alberta NDP under Brian Mason will have no trouble going into the election with a full slate capable of confronting Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservative government from the left, while the Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith takes them on with a full slate from the right.

Not only that, but the New Democrats will be the only Alberta party, including the government, with a leader who has actually led his or her party through an election.

As a result, even mainstream media are starting to pick up the refrain – first heard in this small corner of the blogosphere – that the NDP might well emerge after the election as Alberta’s Opposition, thanks to splits in voter support that favour the party in the Edmonton region while the Wildrose Party is unlikely to similarly benefit in its Calgary heartland, where the Tories are stronger.

Under the leadership of former Conservative Raj Sherman, the discombobulated Alberta Liberals are apparently on the verge of abandoning their traditional strategy of flashing left while turning right, and have only nominated 23 candidates. It is said here they are unlikely to have a full slate ready by whatever date Ms. Redford calls the election. If they somehow manage, there is no way many of their candidates will be credible or election-ready.

As for the Alberta Party – which a year ago was being touted as the next big thing in Alberta politics – they have never risen above 5 per cent in popular support, and with only 11 candidates nominated, they are right now contesting fewer than 13 per cent of the seats in the Legislature!

So, even if the election is not going to be quite as early as some observers expected, it will still be upon us very soon thanks to the government’s new legislation that says it must take place between March 1 and May 31. And with their present nomination numbers, that’s too soon, no matter what, for the Liberals or the Alberta Party.

That’s the good news for the NDP. The bad news is that the Conservative position is so commanding that another massive Tory landslide seems an almost virtual certainty barring a disaster of, as they say, Biblical proportions.

The nine public polls published in 2011, which show Conservative support ranging from 38 to 54 per cent province-wide, give a more ambiguous reading than the apparent mood of the province, where Ms. Redford seems very popular and support for her government buoyant.

Here’s betting that the latest private Conservative Party polls, which are surely now being conducted pretty much round the clock, show support for the government and Ms. Redford personally increasing sharply, especially since she made it clear she would enforce generational change in the party and pushed many of the old guard toward the exits.

If support for the Conservatives climbs toward the 60-per-cent range – which is well within the realm of current possibility – the news will not be good for any Opposition party, even the best organized one with the best candidates.

This is why no one should be particularly surprised that Premier Redford announced late last week she would allow Finance Minister Ron Liepert to see his career swan-song budget passed in the Legislature before she pulls the electoral plug.

Why not? It’s not as if she needs to race into an election before Albertans get to know her – as might have been the case had Gary Mar won the Tory leadership. On the contrary, the more voters see of Ms. Redford, they more they seem to like her.

So there’s little risk she’ll significantly weaken her position by delaying – but she will gain the opportunity of forcing the Opposition parties to give up their responses to her positions.

Since the Conservatives have been reading the same clippings as the rest of us for the past two years, they obviously still view the Wildrose Party and Ms. Smith as the principal threat they face. So their goal in this exercise is likely going to be to appear tough enough in the budget to appease their own right wing while making the Wildrose Party look like far-right loonies who would go after popular programs like health and education.

So expect Mr. Liepert’s budget to squeeze, but not to squeeze until the pips squeak!

Beyond that, don’t expect Premier Redford to have weakened her position by having a full spring session that begins on Feb. 7, followed by a revealing budget debate and a nice break for Easter, which this year is on April 8, and then an election sometime in mid-April.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Ground Zero of the Cold War is right in Stephen Harper’s ’hood

2012-01-13T00:43:00.010-07:00

Your blogger gets ready to go through the door at Ground Zero of the Cold War. Since Igor Gouzenko is no longer in residence, he thought he might look for law-abiding gun owners. (Joke.) Below: Igor Gouzenko and a couple of shots of the dingy building on Somerset Street. The apartment on the second floor at right was where the Gouzenko family lived.

OTTAWA

Being in Ottawa this week as Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his minions tried to recreate the Cold War on many fronts, I thought to honour the strategy of our fearful leader by making a little pilgrimage down to Ground Zero of the real Cold War, the one between Team NATO and Team Warsaw Pact.

How many of you, dear readers, remember that the first skirmish of the Cold War was fought on a dreary block of Ottawa’s Somerset Street on Sept. 5, 1945, just three days after the official end of the Dubya Dubya Two?

It was in a second-floor walkup at 511 Somerset where Igor Gouzenko, a low-ranking cipher clerk in the Soviet Embassy, lived with his wife and their infant child. Most low-level Soviet diplomatic families like the Gouzenkos had to live communally so that Embassy staff could keep a watchful eye on one another. Fortunately for the Gouzenkos, given the game that was afoot, legend has it their baby was so colicky they were given special permission to live on their own.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost… Of such little things is history made!

Ottawa was not exactly a happ’nin’ place in the fall of ’45 – still isn’t, as a matter of fact – but it must have looked good compared to Moscow at the time. At any rate, Mr. Gouzenko gathered up the elements of personal exit plan, the files he hoped would prove his employers were spying on their allies of a few days before plus a couple of code books for good measure, and headed home to his dreary flat on Somerset Street.

On Sept. 5 he was famously turned away by the RCMP, then even more famously by the night editor of the Ottawa Journal, and finally had to hide his family out across the hall in the neighbour’s apartment while the NKVD or some similarly sinister Soviet agency kicked down his door and ransacked the place until the Ottawa cops turned up.

Think about that too, when you contemplate the Cold War. Its first battle with the predecessor of the mighty KGB was apparently won by a couple of ill-tempered Ottawa Police constables.

Well, whatever secrets Mr. Gouzenko brought with him when he finally talked the Canadian authorities into listening to him the next day, it obviously suited plenty of folks here in the West to have a great ideological battle with the Soviets, and what started small on Sept. 5 continued in quite a big way on quite a lot of battlefields until the USSR was officially dissolved on Christmas Day, 1991.

As Patrick McGuinness entertainingly observed in his Romanian adventure The Last Hundred Days, which won the Man Booker Prize for 2011, “the communists abolished God but they kept the theology. They knew it would come in handy when they cocked up. At least God had an excuse for screwing up – he doesn’t exist. These bastards most certainly do.”

But, back to the future, which is the present, what’s a guy like Mr. Harper going to do to distract attention from his own shortcomings now that the Commies don’t exist any more either? After all, generating fear is the guy’s whole shtick!

That’s where the New Cold War comes in – even if it’s starting to be fought on so many fronts it makes our well-mannered little Canadian heads spin.

There are the Iranians, the Syrians, the Taliban and the Pirates of the Mediterranean. According to Mr. Harper’s personal ideological Praetorian Guard, the Online Tory Rage Machine, there are “far left parties” (like what, the Liberals?), the “Socialists” (who they?), the Chiquita Banana Company, foreign criminals and other offshore riff-raff, all subject to the portentous rhetoric that brings back such fond memories of the good ole, bad ole, cold ole Cold War.

And now there’s the biggest threat of all – as was said in this space the other day, the greenest menace since the Fenians invaded – foreign environmentalists.

By God, as Winston Churchill might have said, a Macrobiotic Curtain is descending across our continent! A legion of Birkenstock wearing tree-huggers, their scruffy pockets stuffed with $5 and $10 donations from unsuspecting Americans, is ready to storm across and border and … what? Lobby politely? We’re not too sure actually. But it’s bound to be bad!

Don’t they understand that it’s only foreign oil companies who are allowed to spend big bucks on public relations in Canada, so that the Canadian government can use our tax dollars to lobby the U.S. government to build pipelines to ship Canadian jobs to Texas?

Anything else wouldn’t be the Canadian way!

These are our jobs to expert to Texas and Tangshan and no tofu-breathed American environmentalist is going to tell us any different!

So welcome to Canada’s New Cold War. This one’s sure not to be as engaging as the last one, but as Donald Rumsfield might have said, you’ve got to pump up your troops with the war that you have!

As surely Mr. Harper knows, the War of 1812 is all very well, but the Cold War has to be more appropriate for what he has in mind.

And that old apartment on Somerset where the Cold War started? It looks like it’s a cinch for the wrecker’s ball any day now. If the prime minister is really at the top of his game, he’ll put in a call Monday to the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada and slap a plaque on that sucker!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Guest Post: Niki Ashton is young, but formidable, a future force to be reckoned with in the NDP

2012-01-11T15:06:00.005-07:00

Niki Ashton at the City Arts Centre last night. Below: Post author Olav Rokne.

Business forced me to be in our nation’s capital when Niki Ashton, the latest candidate for the leadership of the New Democratic Party to visit Edmonton, spoke at the City Arts Centre in Old Strathcona last night. Since Edmonton’s mainstream media, the folks actually paid to do this work, have up to now been ignoring this important race to replace the late Jack Layton as leader of Canada’s Opposition, it seemed as if the job had fallen to me. Accordingly, since I couldn’t’ be there, I asked my friend and former Saint City News editor Olav Rokne to provide this report. These are Olav’s observations, not mine, but as he’s a smart fellow with a keen eye, I think you’ll agree they’re well worth reading… I’m also pleased to report that according to brief sightings recorded on Twitter, the mainstream media showed up, with camera crews from City TV and CTV. DJC

By OLAV ROKNE

When asked exactly how many languages she speaks, New Democratic Party leadership candidate Niki Ashton modestly replies that she speaks four, but has a smattering of five others.

But seeing her – and listening to her – mingling with attendees last night at her campaign event at Edmonton’s City Arts Centre tells a more complete story. She effortlessly moved among several languages and clearly engaged people of a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. First she was chatting away in Greek, the next person spoke Spanish. I think I heard her getting by in Ukrainian.

There’s a lot to like about this polyglot wunderkind. She has a good political resume: a two-term MP who represents a large rural riding, she has served as post-secondary education critic, rural development critic and chaired the Standing Committee on the Status of Women.

And as a 29-year-old university lecturer from Thompson, Man., who was the second-youngest woman ever elected to the Canadian House of Commons, she engages youth in a way that bodes well for the long-term prospects of the NDP.

After the event, a young woman was effusive with praise because she felt Ms. Ashton had listened to her in a way that other politicians – including other NDP leadership candidates – rarely do.

When speaking off the cuff, Ms. Ashton peppers her speech with youthful turns of phrase like “pretty cool,” and “Edmonton-Strathcona has got it goin’ on.” From a more conventional (antediluvian, Anglo-Saxon and male) politician, this would sound contrived, but from Ashton, it sounds natural because she speaks the language of youth as fluently as she does both of Canada’s official languages.

Impressively, she does this while still engaging people who are as old as her grandparents. The audience of more than 100 people at last night’s campaign event in Edmonton was pleasantly diverse in age, and some of her most vociferous supporters were among the most venerable. The person next to me was a few months shy of being three times Ms. Ashton’s age, and nodded enthusiastically throughout her speech.

It can be difficult in a leadership race to differentiate a campaign on policy issues, so it came as no surprise that Ms. Ashton’s platform puts her in the mainstream of the NDP. Her stump speech was irresistible to most of the audience: She’s pro-union, pro-social justice, pro-health care, pro-education.

Where she did differentiate herself is that she knew Western Canadian issues, shared anecdotes about her connection to Edmonton and was able to engage the audience in a discussion about the Conservative dominance of the Prairie Provinces.

“If the Conservative agenda is toxic to Canada,” she said. “It is doubly toxic to the West because they think that they own us.”

It’s a good piece of rhetoric, and one that I think speaks to a lot of Albertans who aren’t pleased with the way that the Grits and Tories have taken turns ignoring the Prairies. It seems clear that Ms. Ashton speaks the regional political languages of Canada.

The one language Ms. Ashton doesn’t seem to speak fluently is the language of sound bites. She speaks for meaning, rather than for brevity, and fills her sentences with parenthetical thoughts and explanatory clauses. This is an admirable quality in a policymaker, but an unfortunate one in a public speaker. I had not expected someone so young to be as impressive as Ms. Ashton is, but I had also not expected someone so young to occasionally sound so academic.

The New Democrats – and in fact Canadians in general – are better off for having a candidate like Niki Ashton as a candidate in this contest. I have doubts about her chances of winning the race to replace Jack Layton, but suspect that she’ll be a force to be reckoned with during any subsequent leadership race.

The last insignificant link between the Calgary Herald and downtown Calgary will fall soon … but so what?

2012-01-10T15:10:00.009-07:00

Brian Brennan, at left, accepting a piece of paper from a copy boy. Your blogger remembers that haircut, and thinks he had one a lot like it himself. As for the copy boy? That’s Roman Cooney, now VP of Communications for Alberta Health Services. Below: Brennan today.

It seems that the Calgary Herald is the only media organization some corporate executives will talk to when it comes to the news stories they’d rather not talk about.

This convoluted fact goes a long way to explaining why, even though the last link between that newspaper and downtown Calgary is about to fall, it makes little difference because the ties that mattered were severed ages ago. And not just in Calgary.

The other day, a blogger working for one of those online news aggregators – no doubt for mere pennies – plaintively recounted a problem she had encountered while researching a story about extreme corporate executive pay packages.

She wrote: “In the case of Niko Resources Ltd., whose CEO Edward Sampson pocketed $16.4 million in 2010 … an operator at the head offices explained that the company only entertains media requests from The Calgary Herald.” (Emphasis added.)

Well, you can hardly blame Niko Resources or Mr. Sampson, now, can you? I’m sure they’d be just as happy not talking at all about how much the boss took away last year. But since it sounds as if the Herald’s mandate now includes not reporting the sorts of things oilpatch CEOs don’t want reported, how convenient for them!

Alas, we’ve come a long way from 1930, when the Herald and four other Alberta Newspapers were honoured with a special Pulitzer Prize for what my friend Brian Brennan called in a recent post on his blog “its spirited crusade against the Social Credit government’s attempt to gag the press.”

In the post in question, Mr. Brennan lamented the fact that the 100-year-old Herald Building at 7th Avenue and 2nd Street in downtown Calgary, where both he and I worked together in the early 1970s, is about to be torn down to be replaced by a 50-storey office tower.

“A lot of good journalism was done in that building,” Mr. Brennan wrote – a good deal of which, I should add, was done by him. “A columnist for the competing Albertan used to dub our paper ‘The Old Grey Lady of 7th Avenue,’ which he intended as an insult but which we accepted as a compliment because of the obvious comparison with The New York Times. … We earned that trust by dint of hard work and independent reporting. We didn’t pander to politicians and we didn’t pander to advertisers.”

“I always felt we were standing on the shoulders of distinguished predecessors,” Mr. Brennan went on, “who believed their fight to preserve the freedom of the press was a fight for democracy itself.”

Well, he was right about that. That’s what we thought, and we were right. Alas, that fight is over now. It’s been lost – and not just at the Herald.

Indeed, it’s a little unfair for me to slam the Herald for the demise of journalism that is more than perfunctory because that is a trend throughout the media business – and it has been ever since newspapers like the Herald started, metaphorically and literally, to leave their cities behind.

They did it by abandoning their downtown offices for suburban plants where they could more easily distribute their products during rush hours, and they did it by abandoning their local ownership to out-of-town media barons would saw towns like Calgary and Edmonton as profitable cash generators but looked down their noses at local journalists and the local issues that mattered to them.

It was business decisions like the moves to suburban plants like the one the Herald opened in 1981 near Deerfoot Trail and Memorial Drive that contributed long before the Internet to the unhappy, and increasingly unprofitable, situation in which most of Canada’s urban dailies find themselves today.

The Herald’s new building – known as “The Bunker” during my tenure there – was a long enough and expensive enough cab ride from downtown, where the political and corporate decisions still got made, that it wasn’t long before corporate bean-counters in Hamilton, Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg, or wherever they happened to be located that week, were discouraging such fripperies as actually going to an event to report on it. (The notable exceptions, of course, were hockey games.)

As Mr. Brennan put it better than me – as is so often the case – the Herald Building “was connected to the downtown’s beating heart in a way that’s never possible when you live in the suburbs. City Hall, the police station, the courts, the library, the school board and the corporate head offices were all within easy walking distance. We did most of our interviews in person, not over the phone. If a freight train had derailed near the Palliser Hotel, the Herald’s reporters and photographers would have gotten to the scene before the fire trucks.”

The irony of course, is that the technology and business practices that mandated the move to the Bunker on Calgary’s east side were soon irrelevant – the Herald switched to morning publication, partly eliminating the need for a suburban press location, and communications technology not long thereafter meant the press and the newsroom hardly needed to be at the same address.

As Mr. Brennan wondered back in 1981, why not leave just the editorial offices downtown? That’s what the Edmonton Journal did, and perhaps that’s why the Journal is arguably a marginally better newspaper than the Herald today.

Similarly foolish decisions were being made all over Canada at about the same time – another disadvantage of chain ownership.

Here in Ottawa, for example, where I am momentarily residing, the press and offices of the Citizen were moved in the same general time period to a location so far in the city’s west end that it’s practically on the Prairies – remote from all the things on Mr. Brennan’s list, and Parliament and the Supreme Court as well!

Canadian newspapers everywhere also switched from afternoon to morning publication at about the same time as the Herald – mainly to solve the traffic problem of moving papers from the downtown core at rush hour. This was also the problem the move to the suburbs was also supposed to fix. Morning publication guaranteed the news in their pages was almost a full day behind the electronic news cycle – another shot in the foot.

And finally, there was chain ownership – soon concentrated into the hands of people like Conrad Black and Izzy Asper. This resulted in an editorial creep toward the right, as well as the bleeding of editorial opinion into the news columns.

For all the constant justification by newspaper bosses that this reflected their readers’ biases – and their claims that what resulted was “fair, balanced and accurate” – it is said here readers didn’t like it. When the Internet came along, it was the opportunity many newspaper readers were waiting for to get out of info-dodge and find their news somewhere more agreeable to their centrist sensibilities.

Newspaper profits began to fade. Newspaper executives, whose minds and hearts had long ago left their cities and the people who lived in them, couldn’t figure out how to pick up the pieces.

Postmedia News, which owns the Calgary Herald, continues to talk about “transformation and revenue development” but like most of the rest of us remains unable to figure out how to generate sufficient profits from the Internet. According to a report in the Globe and Mail earlier this week, Postmedia still relies on print advertising, a dying medium, for 63 per cent of its revenue.

As for providing the kind of genuinely fair, balanced and accurate news coverage readers crave, it’s become instead the favoured medium of executives who want only to massage the news, or keep things out of it.

So yesterday the Globe reported on how Postmedia is begging Ottawa to let it sell its Canadian newspapers to foreigners. There was a day that would have seemed like an outrage. Today, it hardly matters.

As Mr. Brennan rightly noted, the Herald Building itself is of no particular architectural significance. Still, he wishes Calgary wouldn’t destroy the landmark.

On this one, though, I have to say think he’s guilty of sentimentality. Let it go. The last real links between the Calgary Herald and downtown Calgary fell a long time ago and nothing is likely to restore them.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Celebrating a royal birthday in our nation’s capital as the greenest threat since the Fenians looms

2012-01-09T18:25:00.005-07:00

Your blogger with the King, in livelier times. Below, Prime Minister Stephen Harper (“Old Dickery”), at left, meets with his majesty. Kings and prime ministers may not be exactly as illustrated.

OTTAWA

With our Canadian government’s new emphasis on all things royal, I’m deeply regretful to have to report that in the excitement of keeping up with current events I have missed an important royal birthday – that of The King himself, no less, which took place yesterday, Jan. 8.

Unfortunately, as I am sure is well known to readers of this blog, the King has left the building. Nevertheless, thanks to our prime minister and his oddly named Republican Party of Canada, we now have put the Royal back in Canadian Air Force (FARC in our other official language) to remind us of his majesty’s mellifluous tonality.

Indeed, here in our nation’s capital – located so very far from the major areas of population and commerce in order to make it difficult for American invaders – one can hardly fail to be heartened by our government’s recent celebration of our proud royal heritage, not to mention the War of 1812.

One wonders, however, if our prime minister knows with whom we Canadians and our Crown were fighting in that war? Presumably he does – so we must assume that what he is really celebrating is the 200 years of continual happy intercourse between our two great nations since the British stopped a’ comin’ in 1814 in New Orleans – the one in Louisiana, not somewhere across the river hereabouts.

This is timely, very timely. Now our prime minister – Old Dickery himself, as he shall no doubt be fondly recalled – has warned us that we face another grim invasion from the south, this time by a horde of radical American environmentalists bent on thwarting our great national imperative, which dates to November 2011, to diversify our national energy market away from our bitter foe of 1812-14.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more! Surely this is the greenest threat we have faced since the Fenians came in 1871.

Long Live the King!

Is political gun violence on Canada’s agenda too, thanks to Stephen Harper's Conservatives?

2012-01-08T00:14:00.008-07:00

Sarah Palin’s notorious “target” chart. Below: Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in 2008; Ms. Palin herself; mug shot of Jared Lee Loughner.

Last year’s North American political news cycle began horribly and tragically on this day with the attempted assassination of Arizona Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six people who had the misfortune to be standing near her when the bullets started flying. One of them was a nine-year-old girl. Another 13 people were injured in the incident.

It’s hard to say whether the Canadian gun lobby or the Conservative politicians in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government who have worked so closely with it to eliminate the Canadian long-gun registry would consider Jared Lee Loughner, the mentally ill man who pulled the trigger in Tuscon that day, “a law-abiding gun owner.”

Judging from Mr. Loughner’s Wikipedia biography, he had had only ever been charged with possessing drug paraphernalia and defacing a stop sign. The purchase of the nine-mm Glock automatic pistol he used in the shootings seems to have been completely legal under Arizona law.

Regardless, we would all presumably agree that even if Mr. Loughner was a law-abiding gun owner up until Jan. 8, 2011, he ceased to be one the moment he started pulling the trigger that morning.

Which is precisely the problem, it is respectfully submitted, with the argument frequently touted during the Canadian debate over the national rifle and shotgun registry that “law abiding gun owners” should not be “treated like criminals” by being subjected to regulation of their interest or registration of their weapons.

Mr. Loughner was known to hold extreme negative views on such topics as the right of women to have an abortion or to hold public office, as well believing that the U.S. government was practicing mind control, faking spaceflights, and had backed the 911 attacks. But such beliefs, while they are associated with the Tea Party right, are of necessity completely legal in a democracy.

Given the shooter’s association with the right, a short-lived debate took place in the United States about whether the increasingly violent rhetoric of American rightists might contribute to an increase in political violence in that country. The fact that Sarah Palin, then still considered by many to be a likely Republican presidential candidate, had published her infamous “target map” of politicians disliked by the far right, including Ms. Giffords, added fuel to the fire.

Having written several critical posts on this blog about the Harper Conservatives’ decision to push the elimination of the national rifle and shotgun registry, it has been interesting to observe the how crude rhetoric of the American gun lobby has found its way into our Canadian debates about Mr. Harper’s adoption of National-Rifle-Association-approved policies.

Several trends stand out in the well-organized reaction to my posts:

The abusive and threatening tone of many individuals in the Canadian pro-gun lobby
The determination that gun owners will never again “submit” to registration laws
An attempt to define reasonable restrictions on gun ownership as a form of “bigotry”
A risible effort to define opposition to wide-open gun ownership as a psychiatric condition comparable to paranoia or some other diagnosable form of mental illness
The apparently sincere belief that since the speaker is a law-abiding gun owner, guns aren’t a problem
The determination of the gun lobby, as predicted in this space, to go after Canada’s restrictions on hand guns next

Anyone who makes a public statement in favour of sensible gun laws can expect this kind of reaction, of course. I doubt these messages have much impact on the attitudes of most real voters, but I believe they illustrate the true attitudes of the entity with which the Harper Conservatives have sat down to sup, and without the long spoon usually advised for such culinary experiences.

This, in turn, should raise the same concern as in the United States after the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Giffords and the mass slaying that accompanied it. If threatening, abusive behaviour is considered reasonable political discourse by the armed right, especially in defence of wide-open firearms ownership, can actual violence be far behind?

Now, in fairness, not all responses by people who disagreed with my posts were abusive. Some – in the form of Tweets and comments – differed respectfully. Occasionally there was even a glimmer of humour, like the fellow who acknowledged my black belt rank in karate and argued for a national registry of martial artists’ hands and feet.

Interesting, too, that a blog with at most a few thousand readers engendered such an energetic response from gun enthusiasts. Indeed, if this keeps up, I may have to consider running ads for gun shops in order to retire profitably and early!

Much more typical, though, was the tone were the following Tweets:

“You can have them all, right after every last one is red hot and empty, you fascist prick.”
“If you want my guns so badly, then get off ur fat ass & PERSONALLY kick my door in and take them. #fuckingloudmouthcoward…”
“We’re here. We’re armed. Get used to it.”

Indeed, the come-and-get-them-yourself theme was a prominent one, although one shrewd fellow noted that would-be “gun-grabbers” (quite frequently identified as “libtards”) are such cowardly worms that they would prefer to send armed and uniformed police to do their dirty work. This, note, is typically in response to a call for registration of firearms. (See conspiracy theories above.)

Another popular theme in this discourse is the belief that some future government of New Democrats and/or Liberals would come to seize all the guns, which it is usually explained are needed to resist just such governments. Again, we need to ask, are such fantasies being encouraged by the Harper Conservatives, and if so are they in fact increasing the chances of actual future gun violence for political reasons?

This frequently segues into another theme popular with the gun-obsessed right: Never again, and we’ve got the guns to make sure.

“We won’t bow again, ever.”
“There won’t be a next time sunshine. Never again will law-abiding gun owners be duped into registering long guns.”

At that point, presumably, they won’t be law-abiding gun owners any more either, although this thought seems not to have occurred to the people who favour this line.

Meanwhile, the bigotry theme typically takes the form of whining about people who see the need for sensible controls on weapons as being bigoted against firearms enthusiasts, as if we were all born with a Walther PPK grafted to one hand:

“#gunregistry is hate speech dressed as law.”
“Let the fantasy of #gunregistry hate machine go. It’s gone anyhow.”

This in turn gives way to the gun-right’s most creative argument, that people who are “unreasonably fearful” of firearms are, in fact, crazy. They’ve even cooked up a name for this condition, hoplophobia. Thus:

“A visit with mental health may help with your hoplophobia.”
“The mentally ill gun grabbers like DJ will never be reasonable. They’re lost.”

Amidst this loony-tunes cacophony, one can almost feel a little sympathy with those hobbyists who plaintively seek justification in their own essentially law-abiding nature, and those of their sons, daughters and spouses with whom they enjoy potting away at things, animate or not:

“Protect society from whom? I have been a competitive shooter for 40 years and never harmed a soul. How am I a threat?”
“Despite the fact that I have fired several hundred thousand rounds in my many guns, not a single person has been harmed. … No one is harmed by the typical gun owner.”

Finally, in response to my post suggesting the Harper Conservatives will not be able to resist using this wedge again, was the triumphalist crowing of those who intend to encourage just that:

“Since it’s just as useless, the handgun registry should be next to go. Actually, the entire firearms act should be scrapped.”
“I assure you, this is just the beginning. Next will be decriminalization of simple posession (sic) of a firearm. Then the lame OICs will be rescinded. ATTs demolished. SAPs for grandfathered prohib owners will be issued, so they can actually take their guns to the range. Magazine limits will be scrapped. This is truly just the beginning. We make elections, we break elections…”
“Every Canadian needs the right to bear arms.”

This is the can or worms that Mr. Harper and his so-called Conservatives have opened.

Clearly, from the tone of these comments, it is fair to conclude that in addition to sincere and safety minded hobbyists, many deeply troubled Canadians demand the right to own and use firearms and have been emboldened and encouraged by this government for short-term political gain.

We cannot assume that we not see “political” gun violence in Canada like that which happened a year ago in Arizona simply because Canadian gun owners are, as a group, more sane or more law-abiding than their U.S. counterparts.

However, if we do experience this kind of violence, we can count on our domestic “law-abiding gun owners” to deny all responsibility, and the Harper government to call for more prisons and more punishment after the preventable fact.

I am not ready to despair yet, not ready to embrace firearms as a reasonable response to the troubling mix of right-wing politics and guns, but it will be hard to put this Harperite genie back in the bottle, at least without more exemplary blood being needlessly shed.

What a pathetic state of affairs, brought to us by a deeply cynical and incompetent governing party.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

First impressions: No false steps that matter for NDP candidate Thomas Mulcair

2012-01-07T01:41:00.003-07:00

Your blogger yesterday in a future vanity wall picture with NDP leadership candidate Thomas Mulcair.

Thomas Mulcair turned in a virtually faultless performance in Edmonton last night, proving once again that the federal Opposition New Democratic Party is attracting top-quality candidates as it completes its sad duty to replace Jack Layton.

Leastways, as far as this blogger could see, the 57-year-old Member of Parliament for Outremont, Que., never made a false step, except for a stumble that didn’t much matter when he left the stage.

This wasn’t because he was asked no tough questions. He faced a few of those, and a couple that bordered on truculent, from NDP traditionalists unhappy at the thought their church may be on the cusp of becoming a political party that really could form the next national government.

But the choice between doing what traditionalists are comfortable with and continuing the work Mr. Layton started is really pretty stark, Mr. Mulcair told the biggest and most energetic crowd seen to date at the Edmonton “kitchen-table talks” for party’s leadership candidates.

“Do we really want to form a government or not?” In other words, if the NDP is going to live up to the promise Mr. Layton made possible, it’s going to have to aspire to be something more than the national finger-wagger. “We’re not going to win with slogans. … One of the knocks I hear is, ‘All you want to do is win.’ Well, I thought that was the idea!”

So, last night, Mr. Mulcair was by turns funny, charismatic, insightful, passionate and feisty. He even looked like he’s probably pretty telegenic – but who can be sure, since, as usual, Edmonton’s pathetic media didn’t bother to turn up to cover his standing-room-only conversation at the Strathcona Community League hall?

His comedic timing was great. On the need to re-engage young people, Mr. Mulcair cracked up the mostly graying crowd: “Maybe we’re not connecting with young people as well as we can. (Beat. Beat.) What we did in Quebec was we got them elected.”

As Mr. Layton’s Quebec deputy and one of the principal architects of the party’s astonishing victory there last year, he was blunt about the need to help those new Quebec MPs put down roots. Naturally, he argued he’s the best candidate to do it.

He also offered lessons for Albertan New Democrats in how the Quebec NDP worked to make that victory possible, arguing there’s a striking similarity in the role played up to the May 2011 federal election by the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec’s psyche and that played now by the Conservatives in Alberta.

Describing the Prairies as a “target rich area” for New Democrats, he argued that Alberta Conservatives need to be defined in the same way as party that’s not serving the interests of Albertans who, like Quebeckers with the Bloc, habitually vote for them anyway.

That would require different arguments but the same basic strategy as the party used in Quebec, where the Bloc for years flashed left while turning right: “We took the BQ apart by attacking them from the left and they never saw it coming.”

Mr. Mulcair even kindly started the work of dismantling the Harper Tories here in Alberta – or at least defining them as they ought to be defined. “They love snapping their suspenders and saying what good managers they are … and they have absolutely nothing to show for it!” Well, nothing except blueprints for billion-dollar prisons and plans to buy fighter jets that won’t work in Canadian conditions. “These are good administrators?”

Mr. Mulcair also dealt effectively with the slam he was a provincial Liberal in Quebec – since, after all, there is no other provincial party for Canadian federalists there. And he was blunt in dealing with the few questioners who wanted to return to state ownership of Petrocanada or Air Canada. The decisions to privatize them might have been mistakes, he said, “but you have to deal with the situation that’s in front of you. … So the answer is no.”

His skill at stick handling tough questions makes this crowd sound less friendly than it actually was. There’s a lot of interest in Mr. Mulcair because he’s perceived as a candidate who can preserve the gains made in 2011 in Quebec. So Alberta New Democrats are serious about seeing if he can do the job in English Canada as well.

From this observer’s perspective, there’s not much doubt that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives should worry that Mr. Mulcair might win.

Bilingual almost from birth, he even passed a French-language test, Alberta style – answering the single question of the evening in the other official language, apparently quite thoroughly, but ending it after only one minute and 15 seconds, well before members of the mostly unilingual crowd started to shuffle their feet and squirm. Then he provided a nice summation in English.

Mr. Mulcair did one other persuasive thing that we haven’t seen from any of the other candidates up to now. He carried himself like he was already the winner. It was a pretty persuasive performance.

Actually, he did two things that were unique. He told us he was tireless, and then proved it by reconvening the meeting in a pizza parlour and pub, where he was still schmoozing when your faithful correspondent toddled off home.

We’ve now heard from Brian Topp, Peggy Nash and Mr. Mulcair – who by my reckoning are the Big Three in this race. Judging by their performances in Edmonton, I’d give it to Mr. Mulcair by a nose.

The federal NDP leadership vote is on March 24. Then, as one member of the audience was overheard saying, “if we want to have a real chance in four years, this is the guy.”

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Re-regulating electricity – a great issue for the Alberta New Democrats

2012-01-06T00:06:00.010-07:00

An Alberta voter contemplates what’s likely to happen to electricity prices if “deregulation” continues. Below: Brian Mason, Dilbert.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t understand Alberta’s shocking electricity prices. You’re not supposed to.

Sales of electricity in Alberta are now managed through what Dilbert calls a “confusopoly.” It’s a system of near-monopoly marketing designed to defy explanation. Its goal is to make it easy for you to sign a bad deal, or to manipulate you into feeling that there’s no point creating a ruckus about the worse deal you’re stuck with. Resistance is futile. Shut up and pay.

You think this is too cynical? Well then, you explain it in a way that makes sense!

All anyone really understands – and I suspect this includes most of the so-called experts who are busy advising us how to lock ourselves into long and expensive contracts with the confusing welter of power resellers out there that phone us at suppertime and prowl our neighbourhoods two by two – is that the price of power is going up, up, up.

How much, you wonder? Well, $25 a month last month for the “typical” monthly household power bill, and another average $11 this month. And remember, that average includes folks with no kids who sit in the dark calculating their savings on an abacus, so if you’re a householder with children, laundry to do more than once a month and a crappy job to pay for it all, well, you’re hooped!

Now, let me qualify that stuff about no one understanding. The friends of the Alberta government in the private-sector electricity generation and marketing industries, which was kindly “deregulated” (“turned loose,” more like) by Ralph Klein back when he was our market fundamentalist premier, understand perfectly well what’s going on. Someone’s manipulating the market. Or, as one of our local newspapers put it relatively uselessly yesterday, the problem is caused by “unexpected plant shut-downs and strong demand.”

You see, people, that’s what you’re doing when you close down a plant at a time of strong demand: manipulating the market.

“I don’t know why Albertans are willing to put up with this crap,” NDP Leader Brian Mason put it considerably more usefully in the same newspaper report, and it’s not just a good question, it’s a good question for the NDP.

Let me explain. The usual discussions on this topic deal with the wrong questions, such as how Mr. Klein’s deregulation was designed to pay private power suppliers to close down plants that should be kept open and make taxpayers pay to rebuild their private investments, or how the intricacies of a deregulated electricity market affect prices when there are only a limited number of for-profit suppliers.

Whatever Mr. Klein thought he was doing or was actually trying to do, he sold us a bill of goods about how market “deregulation” was going to make everything better because “consumers” would have “choice.” Well, we’ve got choice all right – the trouble is, all our choices are more expensive than what electricity cost in the not-so-bad old days of market regulation.

For those of you old enough to remember how things worked back before the perfection of the almighty market was imposed on us, the regulator guaranteed private players in the un-manipulated market a fair return for their investment and consumers were guaranteed reliable power at a price that was both steady and affordable.

In other words, what the business guys like to call a win-win.

But what’s really important to remember is that while virtually no one in Alberta understands what is going on, practically everyone is mad about it. Businesses, private citizens, seniors thanking God it’s a mild winter – very large numbers of Albertans are furious about this situation, and they blame the Conservatives.

How do I know this, you wonder? Well, a couple of years ago, back when Ed Stelmach was still premier of Alberta, I had the opportunity to sit in on a series of focus groups held all over the province to find out, in part, about what citizens thought about privatization.

The surprise was, no one really wanted to talk about privatization. They wanted to talk about what idiots Mr. Stelmach and the Alberta Conservatives were to deregulate electricity. It didn’t matter if you were talking to right-wing business people in Calgary, trade unionists in Edmonton, small-town residents or farmers, everybody was as mad as hell about this issue.

And that was before prices really started to go crazy.

And remember, while a poll might tell you what people think right now about a particular issue, a well-run focus group will help you understand what people are really thinking about. And an awful lot of Albertans are thinking about electricity.

Now I said it was a good issue for the NDP, and that’s for two reasons. Reason No. 1, Mr. Mason knows what the right answer is, and he’s not afraid to say it out loud: Bring. Back. Regulation.

“Electricity is an essential service people need and it should not be subject to market manipulation,” he told the local press. “I don’t think it’s fair to force ordinary families to become experts on the electricity market and under-stand how to hedge and gamble with their families’ budgets.”

I think an awful of a lot of Albertans agree with this statement, which brings us to Reason No. 2: Every other political party in Alberta is so committed to the market fundamentalist state religion, at whose alter we have bent our knees for 30 years, that not one of them can speak this obvious truth aloud.

Tell me I’m wrong, but how can the Liberals or the Alberta Party advocate a regulated electricity market, let alone the Redford Tories or the Wildrose Party of Danielle Smith? Not one of them dares say it – even if they know in their hearts it’s the only solution that can avert the power catastrophe we face.

But Alberta seniors, contemplating the possibility of freezing to death, if not this year, maybe next year, just might. Ditto small business owners who use their heads, families with kids and all the rest of us form whom electricity is an essential service of the sort we elect governments to ensure we have.

Albertans should also remember the kind of choice we got in electricity the next time they’re offered choice in health insurance!

Mark my words, the Redford Tory strategy on this one is going to be to fly as far as possible under the radar. If Mr. Stelmach or Mr. Klein can be made to wear it, it’ll work for them.

Ditto the Alberta Party and the Liberals, I’ll bet. As for the Wildrosers, they’ll boldly promise us the same thing Mr. Klein did – more deregulation to somehow make things better. If you believe this, I’ve got a leech that will cure everything that ails you!

The only party that’s in a position to offer a solution that will actually work is the NDP. It’s a good thing for them to say out loud. And it’s a good thing for them to keep saying.

+ + +

Hold Page 1: Stephen Harper treats Edmonton with contempt

Stephen Harper, the Canadian prime minister guy, will be making a house call in Edmonton tomorrow. He’ll be visiting the Boilermaker training facility in the north end, we’re told by the Edmonton Journal in an otherwise virtually information-free report, which nevertheless drips with Conservative contempt for the reliable schmucks who regularly reelect them out here in Wildrose country.

He’s actually in town to ask the labour union movement how Alison Redford got so many of their members to vote for her. Just kidding.

OK, he’s here to keep an eye on Thomas Mulcair, the NDP leadership candidate from Quebec who will also be in Edmonton tomorrow. Just kidding about that too, although Mr. Mulcair really will be here – not that you’ll know about his visit from the media coverage he’s likely to get.

Uh, maybe a union hall’s the only place in town safe from Greenpeacers dropping on strings from the roof? Or maybe he just wants to learn how to weld garden sculptures.

No, the Journal’s 49-word story informs us, if that’s the right word, that it’s none of our damn business: “The event is not open to the public, and the purpose of Harper’s appearance has not been announced.”

Oh, thanks for that, Edmonton Journal! Are you familiar with the term “sources”? Evidently not.

As for Prime Minister Whatsizname, can you imagine him treating voters in Toronto, or anywhere in central Canada, with the same contempt?

My friends, this is truly pathetic. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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

2012-01-05T00:05:00.006-07:00

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.

They said WHAT? What is to be done about Sun Media?

2012-01-04T00:05:00.013-07:00

Sun Media: Not your father’s unbiased journalism. Note the ad at the bottom of the page. Below: The Super Snipe. What a car! So buy one from another dealer; more irresponsible innuendo, juxtaposition in a Sun Media paper.

On New Year’s Eve, without justification or evidence, Sun Media newspapers published a column that called Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi an anti-Christian bigot. His apparent sins: he is identified with small-l liberal politics and he is a member of another faith.

Many of us are pretty shocked by this kind of thing, but are tempted to conclude this company and its operatives are “best left in the shadows.”

On New Year’s Day, Sun Media moved beyond a year full of self-serving and intellectually dishonest attacks on the CBC with a self-serving and intellectually dishonest attack on the CBC.

Many of us value the CBC and are concerned about the full-court press now being put on by Sun Media and the neo-Con brain trust in Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office to destroy this important national asset.

A few days before Christmas, a commentator on Sun Media’s 24-hour television service closed a commentary opposing the boycott by a few U.S. companies of oil extracted from the Athabasca region’s bitumen deposits by emphatically telling one firm’s public affairs vice-president, a man with a Hispanic family name, “Chinga tu madre!” This translates as: “F*ck your mother” or “go f*ck your mother.” Never mind that the official of the company in question was apparently saying his firm was not boycotting tar-sands oil.

Perhaps from the perspective of Sun Media’s head honchos the offensiveness of this remark was ameliorated because it was spoken in Spanish, which would suggest they don’t speak Spanish. Or maybe it was because the commentator in question was the same person who attacked Mayor Nenshi in print a few days later. Or perhaps they just don’t give a … you-know-what.

Beyond these examples, as those of us who look at the Sun’s newspapers or watch excerpts from its cable broadcast network know, the company has moved dramatically to the right and that has had a worsening impact on its news coverage – which was already very poor after years of brutal staff cuts.

It is one thing to consistently back far-right causes in a newspaper’s editorial pages – in that regard, but for its page size, Sun Media is barely distinguishable from the Globe and Mail or the National Post. It is quite another to let it infect the coverage contained in its news pages. This, however, has now become routine in all Sun newspapers and it is openly boasted of as the mandate for the company’s amateurish TV efforts.

Just watch how, in the upcoming Alberta general election, Sun Media openly campaigns in its news columns for one particular party. (Hint: It won’t be the NDP.)

When there are few facts to massage, the Sun is quite prepared to add sexual innuendo, misleading juxtapositions or whatever else it takes to give the impression there might be something going on. Consider its Alberta papers’ ugly and innuendo-laden attack on Alberta Premier Alison Redford, apparently deemed by the chain’s executives to be too “left wing,” and on her chief of staff.

Clearly Sun Media is morphing from a typically right-wing media company to an incubator of anti-social behaviour that deserves the sobriquet Fox News North.

Arguably, this and its planned role as the Conservative Party’s Pravda make Sun Media a genuine threat to democratic discourse in Canada – which is why, it’s said here, it’s best not to leave it in the shadows.

Meanwhile, coverage by legitimate news sources suggests the company’s financial situation is now quite precarious – which might account for the particular virulence of its recent commentary about the CBC.

A Canadian Press news story in late November on Sun Media plans to cut 400 more jobs from its media operations and possibly outsourcing pre-press work to India noted that parent Quebecor “has been squeezed by the slowing economy, which has hurt advertising revenues and eroded the company’s profits.”

In the previous quarter, CP reported, Quebecor had seen a 69-per-cent drop in profit. “With a big chunk of its assets in Ontario and Quebec, the company has been particularly vulnerable to the slowdown in the manufacturing economy of central Canada.”

Moreover, according to a letter to non-union employees from Sun Media Human Resources Vice-President Christopher Krygiel reproduced on the plaintive blog “Toronto Sun Family, 1971-2011,” all wages will be frozen in 2012. “

“With the continuing economic downturn newspaper organizations are experiencing, there is significant pressure on both the advertising and circulation revenues,” Mr. Krygiel wrote on Dec. 13. “We have also been forced to look at reducing our operating costs in light of the economic climate. We have made some very difficult decisions and one such decision is to announce that Sun Media will be implementing a salary freeze for 2012.

“We understand that this decision is disappointing, but it was made after a great deal of discussion and not made lightly,” he said. “This decision applies to all levels within the organization.”

So while Sun Media seems particularly aggressive in its advocacy of far-right-wing causes for which there is still relatively little support among Canadians, it is at this moment uniquely vulnerable to economic pressure as well.

The trouble is, it is quite difficult for progressive Canadians to apply economic pressure to a company like Sun Media for a variety of reasons.

The first instinct of most Canadians, of course, is to turn to government for solutions to situations like this. Obviously, however, that’s not on when the government of the day is actively encouraging the problem – and profiting from it.

Moreover, for readers to boycott a media product in the Internet age is very difficult – it’s too easy to be drawn to Sun Media’s stories, and thereby its advertisers, via an Internet link. We can boycott the 50-cent paper, but then, most of us do anyway, whether intentionally or not.

Boycotting businesses that advertise in anti-social publications is also likely to meet with failure. Even in an era of diminishing advertising revenues, there are just too many advertisers to make this effective. Some well-meaning groups are trying this, and predictably not getting very far. We can’t boycott everything, people!

Likewise, we can’t expect much support from the union movement. While Sun Media’s anti-union credentials are impeccable in both its editorial polices and its labour relations, unions do represent some Sun employees and cannot be expected to be a part of an effort to apply economic pressure to their members’ employer, even by cutting their own ads.

So what are we to do?

Well, think about what Napoleon said about the use of concentration of force to defeat a larger enemy.

It might not be fair, but a boycott applied to one Sun Media advertiser would likely yield better results than a confused and cranky campaign against a large number. The advertiser that got picked would certainly cry foul. But who said life was supposed to be fair and all the bad guys were going to get caught?

So, whom to pick? Well, think about this. What business advertises in Sun Media’s papers more than any other by a factor of about 90 per cent? Auto dealers, right?

And what do auto dealers sell? The same thing as dozens of other auto dealers in the same region. Correct? If they still sold Humber Super Snipes in Canada, there would likely be more than one Super Snipe dealer in every region. (Then again, and I say this as someone who learned to drive on a Super Snipe, maybe not!)

Regardless, how many lost sales would take before an auto dealer picked up the phone and put a call in to the publisher of his local Sun Media rag?

Not very many. I’m just saying.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Sun Media’s inappropriate obsession with Calgary Mayor’s religion needs to stop

2012-01-03T00:02:00.009-07:00

Your blogger with Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Calgary-Fort MLA Wayne Cao, the best singer in the Legislature. Below: Sun columnist Ezra Levant.

Demagoguery is not an accusation that stings very much nowadays. Almost anyone can be accused of being a demagogue for saying almost anything, and one’s inclination is merely to shrug it off with a snort.

Still, a reasonable person could conclude from the evidence that when Sun Media columnist Ezra Levant wrote his New Year’s Eve column about Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, he risked arousing the emotions, passions and prejudices of some of the people of that city, which is a workable definition of demagoguery.

In his column, Mr. Levant tendentiously and unsuccessfully tries to build a case that Mayor Nenshi, whom he repeatedly (four times in approximately 650 words) identifies as a Muslim, is guilty of “anti-Christian bigotry.”

Mr. Levant’s logic, if I understand it correctly, proceeds from the fact that Mr. Nenshi is a Muslim, to the fact that during Mr. Nenshi’s tenure in office Occupy Calgary protesters were allowed for a time to camp in the nearby Olympic Plaza, to the fact that a group of evangelical Christians were asked not to conduct a public service without permission inside Calgary’s Civic Building, and, when they didn’t co-operate and move on, their leader was apparently arrested.

Ergo, Mr. Levant preposterously concludes, “the Muslim mayor thinks religious tolerance is a one-way street — a point he made again brutally this Christmas.”

Regardless of Mr. Levant’s very colourful language, it is clear taken directly from his own account – if one actually takes the trouble to read it carefully – that there was no brutality, that the evangelical pastor who tried to conduct a private service within the Civic Building has broken Calgary’s civic bylaws more than 70 times over the past six years, and that Mayor Nenshi wasn’t the mayor of Calgary when the city cracked down on the earlier offenses, many of which involved the volume of the preacher’s amplification system.

It is also important to note that in some of this particular pastor’s previous tangles with the law, his Charter rights to free expression were violated. However, having established this in the courts – and presumably therefore now being free to preach his Gospel message out of doors at a legal decibel level – this individual took his message to a venue where he could be confident he would generate more publicity by again coming into conflict with the law.

Notwithstanding this qualification, Mr. Levant clearly went way over the top when he suggested Mayor Nenshi has been personally conducting a campaign against this group, or against Christians generally, or that when Christians turn up at City Hall the mayor “sends in the boys with the billy clubs.” In addition, the implication that Mr. Nenshi is doing this because he is not a Christian, which is a very reasonable interpretation of Mr. Levant’s argument, is outrageous, as is calling Mayor Nenshi a bigot.

Moreover, the author is taking a gratuitous cheap shot when he observes as an aside that the mayor once lived in his mother’s basement – something I would bet is true of most of us, even some of us who have now paid property taxes for decades. Indeed, even me.

It’s not at all clear whether “the boys with the billy clubs” had their billy clubs with them, or were all boys, since there appears from a cursory Google search to have been very little coverage of this event by legitimate news media. Although from that, it’s safe to conclude that if the boys did bring their billy clubs, they obviously didn’t use them.

On a personal note, I must tell readers that I covered Calgary City Hall for several years for the Calgary Herald. And while there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then, I think it is extremely unlikely that Mayor Nenshi called the police himself, or even knew the police had been called. In fact, I’d bet you a shiny new Twoonie that if Mr. Nenshi had known about it, he would have asked the city’s security staff to just let the preacher preach.

Be that as it may, if I had been the security supervisor on duty that night and a group of people intentionally created a disturbance inside the Civic Building, I would have called the police too.

This may lead someone like Mr. Levant to conclude that I’m a self-hating Christian, but as some readers of his columns may not be aware, there have actually been some fairly deep divisions within Christianity for a number of years that, thankfully, don’t seem to arouse quite as much passion nowadays as they once did. So it is possible to think another Christian is behaving inappropriately without hating yourself or questioning your faith – which, within the broad Christian tradition, can come in a lot of different variations.

Regardless, toward the end of his column, Mr. Levant comes to what I suspect is his real motive in writing this drivel: “Nenshi is a left-wing mayor. That’s not new — Calgary’s last four mayors have been Liberal, as are most of its city councillors.”

Well, not all of us would agree that Mr. Nenshi is particularly left wing, but he is obviously too left wing for Mr. Levant’s well-known right-wing tastes.

By the way, if we accept Mr. Levant’s claim about the last four mayors (Mr. Nenshi is identified with the Alberta Party, which is pretty liberal, and I can’t find any affiliation information about one of the four), and if we count Ralph Klein as a Liberal as well (the party he was identified with when he ran for mayor), then seven of the last 10 Calgary mayors were Liberals. So Mr. Levant is right about this at least: there is a clear pattern, though not necessarily a negative one from Calgary’s perspective.

But by going from his complaint about the tendency toward liberality of Calgary’s mayors and voters to his completely unsupportable conclusion that “the Muslim mayor thinks religious tolerance is a one-way street,” Mr. Levant risking inflaming religious prejudice that may exist within Calgary’s population to achieve his political goals.

Whatever this author’s intention was, that is clearly a danger here. If Sun Media’s editors pay attention to what their columnists write, they were irresponsible to run this particular piece. If they do not, they are doubly irresponsible, and need to start paying attention.

Regardless, Sun Media’s inappropriate obsession with Mayor Nenshi’s religion clearly needs to stop.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Harper Conservatives to use social media to woo Canadians: uh … really!

2012-01-02T00:05:00.009-07:00

Your blogger, above centre, ponders the Harper Conservatives’ plans to make a foray into social media. Below right, your blogger before he grew his beard, with Daveberta author Dave Cournoyer. Alberta political bloggers may not be exactly as illustrated. Below them: Prime Minister Stephen Harper, when he was still young enough to understand social media. Bottom: Typical young Tory use of social media.

Surely the federal political news story of 2012 is going to be the effort by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives to use social media to woo the Canadian public.

You may think the fact the federal Tories are considering this is a pretty strange claim, but I’m actually not making it up. I read it the other day in the Globe and Mail while I sat in a coffee shop.

“Ottawa cautiously dipping its toe in social-media pool,” the Globe said, while other coffee drinkers looked at me strangely and wondered what that big sheet of grey paper in my hands was. “Some kind of funky wrapping paper maybe? Cool!”

Well, your blogger may be old, but he’s got a Twitter account too, hooked right up to his iPhone. Really! More on that in a moment. But first, some more from the Globe on the Great Harper Conservative Social Media Experiment:

“Documents obtained this month by Ottawa-based researcher Ken Rubin under federal access-to-information laws … indicate a strong interest in sharing videos through Youtube and conversing with the public through Twitter and Facebook – but also a wariness of the potential for calamity when communicating through forums that cannot be tightly controlled.” (Emphasis added.)

As we say out here in the blogsphere, if you’ll pardon the expression, “no shit, Sherlock!”

Or, in the more sober language of the Good Gray Globe, a memo from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada that was among the documents obtained by Mr. Rubin “lists several pages of risks to promoting departmental services on the video-sharing site. They include, among other things, the possibility that some Canadians will think it is a waste of money, that people may try to create spoofing or mocking videos, and that there would be a perceived lack of transparency if users are not permitted to post comments.”

Oh, yes. Indeed. In fact – and I think Mr. Harper can count on this – if the federal government thoughtlessly fails to provide people with a place to respond, people who have no place to respond will create one of their own. No?

OK, so Problem No. 1 for the Harper federalistas is going to be how to respond quickly in a medium where it is generally considered necessary to answer fast, or not answer at all.

Here’s another Globe story: “PMO Staff to Grow to 20,000 Employees … Most Employed in Approval Process for Tweets.” The report goes on: “‘We have a slight problem,’ a spokesman for the PMO explained. ‘The Prime Minister insists on approving all the Tweets personally, and that’s proving to be a bit of a bottleneck.’”

Alright, I admit it, I just made that one up. You know, just like they make up facts for the actual Tory Rage Machine.

Or how about this report: “Representatives of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s staff traveled to Pyongyang this week seeking hints from North Korean President Kim Jong-Un’s social media management team on how to run Canada’s Twitter and Youtube accounts…”

OK, I made that one up too … maybe.

Let’s get back to the real article from the real Globe. And by the way, I’m sorry to quote so much of the Globe story that I’m practically violating their copyright, but, really people, you just can’t make stuff up that’s this good. To wit: “As for Twitter, the HRSDC has come up with a list of possible phrases that employees manning the site could Tweet. They include things like: ‘Thanks for the response. I’m not sure your facts are correct.’”

Actually, this is a very good idea and I intend to put it to use myself when opponents of the gun registry and other members of the Tory Rage Machine start to get up my nose about my blog posts. For example:

ACTUAL RECENT TORY RAGE MACHINE TWEET TO ME (in response to a post advocating saving the long-gun registry): “You can have them all (his guns, he means), right after every last one is red hot and empty, you fascist prick.”

FUTURE BLOGGER DAVE RESPONSE: “Thanks for the response. I’m not sure your facts are correct.”

Or…

ACTUAL RECENT TRM TWEET: “Haga are you a commie???”

FUTURE BLOGGER DAVE RESPONSE: “Thanks for the response. I’m not sure your political analysis is correct.”

Or…

ACTUAL RECENT TRM TWEET: “Ur tinfoil hat is cutting off circulation to ur brain.” (This last one from an actual Conservative candidate in the recent federal election. Really!)

FUTURE BLOGGER DAVE RESPONSE: “Thanks for the response, Mr. Hastman. I’m not sure your facts are correct.”

Anyway, I think you get my drift, readers.

Problem No. 2, from the Harperite perspective, is that the same bright young social-media savvy Tories that the government will ask to provide its responses to Canadian taxpayers (some of them practically senior citizens, like Yours Truly) will be these very same youthful contributors to the Tory Rage Machine.

And these young fellows, not to put too fine a point on it, are not really very nice people, and strike back instinctively.

Say, for example, the bereaved parent of a soldier killed in one of the government’s wars abroad criticized the prime minister.

IMAGINED TRM RESPONSE: “Note that this guy is an Iggy supporter.”

Oh, wait. That’s not imagined! That actually happened.

No need to go on. One just has the feeling this experiment with social media is going to end badly for Mr. Harper. And it’s going to happen some time this year, 2012.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Old Year assessment and New Year prediction: Alison Redford, Alberta Newsmaker o’ th’ Year, 2011 and 2012

2011-12-31T00:18:00.003-07:00

Alison Redford meets the media minutes after her election in a Conservative Party members-only vote was announced in the wee hours of Oct. 2, 2011. Below: The unexpected results displayed.

All politics end in tears, a wise man once observed, meaning that sooner or later, almost all political winners turn into losers.

Here in Alberta, we tend to forget the immutable nature of this political law because its operations are heavily disguised by the fact that for 40 years at least the place has operated as a one-party state.

The Progressive Conservative dynasty will end in tears too, of course, but likely not just yet, thanks to the remarkable selection last October of Alison Redford as premier in a Tory party vote. In the mean time, so went the Getty Era, the Klein Era and the Stelmach Era, with not one of the successors of Peter Lougheed who lent their names to their spell in power particularly happy with the manner or the timing of their departure.

Whether the ascension of Ms. Redford shows that the Conservative party’s survival instincts are more profound and supple than many of us had imagined, able to react instinctively and rapidly to shifts within the psyche of the population, or just that Ms. Redford is more artifice than reality, remains to be seen. This blogger is open to both theories.

Regardless, the choice by Progressive Conservatives of Ms. Redford as their leader clearly ranks as the political story of the year in Alberta. And surely it says as much, or more, about the party’s will to live as of the undeniable talents of Ms. Redford and her political advisors.

The Redford team ran a smart and determined campaign that smoothly exploited both opportunities that emerged along the way and the man-ifest weaknesses of her challengers. It effectively used the re-emergence of health care as a major issue, promising to preserve health care when others blundered and mused about privatization. It surfed to a strong position on a single favourable poll. It made Ms. Redford look new and fresh and the others tired and sullied.

But it is said here that all things being equal that would not have been enough. What was really impressive was the ability of Alberta Conservatives themselves to grasp the unique nature of the challenge their party confronted and instinctively pinpoint the candidate best suited to face it.

The challenge confronting the Conservatives at the fag end of the bumbling but well-intentioned leadership of Ed Stelmach was unique. Albertans had made it clear in public opinion polling they wanted the party to emphasize the progressive part of its heritage over the conservative. At the same time, the new politician that most seemed to have engaged Albertans was an attractive and well spoken woman chanting the same old privatization mantra of the extreme right, Danielle Smith of the Wildrose Party.

Complicating that seeming strategic contradiction was the power structure of the party itself. The people with the most influence within Conservative ranks all seemed to support Gary Mar, a minister with several portfolios in the Ralph Klein government and a former MLA who had served four terms to Ms. Redford’s one. His well-organized and well-financed campaign appeared unstoppable.

So on the face of it, while it would have been be hard to imagine a better candidate than Ms. Redford for the peculiar circumstances the Alberta Tories faced, it was also hard to imagine her beating Mr. Mar.

Her pluses: Voters identified her as a Red Tory, liberal enough for majority tastes in a changing Alberta, yet conservative enough not to frighten the far right. Like Ms. Smith, she was an appealing and well-spoken woman. She was manifestly intelligent – no sin with voters fed up with the constant blunders of Mr. Stelmach (who in fact was no fool, just unlucky) and the embarrassing legacy of Ralph Klein.

Her biggest minus: Mr. Mar’s lead among committed supporters after the first ballot was so strong and his roots in the party establishment so deep, it simply seemed impossible to dispute the conventional wisdom he had it all sewn up.

After the dust had settled, a whine went up that Ms. Redford had been pushed over the top by such Tory-come-latelies as schoolteachers and health care union members. Other candidates muttered this accusation while the Wildrose Party said it aloud. But while there’s more than a little truth to it, the bigger truth is that the collective instincts of the party, including many party old boys, understood the meaning of the writing on the wall and acted accordingly.

There are sure to be many bends in the road before election day 2012, but Ms. Redford’s unique ability to appeal to progressive voters at the same time as she attracts former Danielle Smith supporters will likely to translate into a big election win.

As has been said in this space before, this is not really what Alberta needs. Indeed, we desperately need a new government, or at least an opposition big enough to shake up the Tory Dynasty and hold it to account.

Yet thanks to Ms. Redford’s natural political appeal and the skilful legerdemain that enables her to appeal to voters right across the political spectrum, that seems like what is most likely to happen.

My New Year’s Eve prediction for the outcome of the general election expected in the spring of 2012, therefore, is:

Progressive Conservatives: 78
New Democratic Party: 5
Wildrose Party: 3
Alberta Liberals: 1
Alberta Party: 0

If that or something like it turns out to be the case, there can be little doubt Ms. Redford will be Alberta Newsmaker of the Year for 2012 as well, and the inevitable Tory tears will be postponed again.

Happy New Year regardless!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Marxist Analysis of ‘the Wave’ in Sports Stadia

2011-12-30T00:27:00.013-07:00

Perfesser Dave at a Blue Jays game, photo courtesy a kindly Yankees fan. Below: Exhibition Stadium – the cheap seats are at left, directly behind centre field! Below that: Thomas Mulcair; Niki Ashton.

Maclean’s Magazine once said that the Toronto Maple Leafs – which should be called the Maple Leaves, but never mind – were “English Canada’s team.” This is hooey. Back in the days of the six-team NHL, English Canada’s team was the Montreal Canadiens. (This was true even if the coach didn’t speak English, by the way – but never mind that either.)

Leastways, where I grew up in B.C., we all loved the Habs and we all hated the Leafs. Maybe it had something to do with Toronto, but we didn’t think about it. It was just a law of nature – or, maybe, a matter of historical inevitability, something like that. Anyway, the only English-speaking Canadians who loved the Leafs in those days, it needs to be said, lived in Toronto.

So, as Perfesser Dave’s Questioner might ask, why do I like those Blue Jays? That’s a good question, if I do say so myself, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the demise of the unlamented Montreal Expos.

Rather, I just happened to be living in Toronto in 1977, during the Jays’ first season, and I used to go and sit in that old football stadium and watch their games for a red two-dollar bill (or maybe it was two red two-dollar bills, whatever) and the modest price of a wobbly plastic cup full of Labatt’s Blue beer. Heaven!

Je digresse, but a word of warning: if you’re a Blue Jays guy and you go see them in that new stadium (the one that’s 22 years old now) and you’re from out of town, they’ll sit you with the Yankees fans, or, worse, with the Red Sox fans. I’m not making this up. It happened to me! For god’s sake, hide your light blue cap!

So where was I? Oh yeah, it was back in 1977 when I came up with “the Marxist Analysis of ‘the Wave’ in Sports Stadia.”

Now, I have to digress again for a moment. I didn’t actually do very well in my university Marxism class, plus it was more than 40 years ago, so what little I understood I’ve forgotten. I never did get that dialectical materialism bit down right, but for the sense that with communism, the future may be certain but the past can be pretty dodgy.

Still, it’s great to have an opportunity to use words like “Karl Marx” and “Marxist” in a 21st Century blog post because it will just send the blogging Tories and their ideological ilk rangy-tang, or, as we used to say back in the days when there was still a self-identifying proletariat, “apeshit.”

Bring it on, fellas! I’m signed in to Twitter right now!

Also, I just said “stadia” instead of “stadiums” because I’m a smart-ass.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, this is about the Blue Jays, and “the Wave,” and the working class, and the rich toffs. And more, as you’ll see if you stick with me…

Because, see, this is really about the Edmonton mainstream media, and their extremely crappy coverage of the NDP leadership candidates when they come to town. Actually, it’s not right to call their coverage “crappy,” because they don’t provide any coverage at all. Their political reporters are too busy filling their steno pads with transcriptions of what our Conservative premier, and her Conservative finance minister and all the other little Conservatives have to say about what a wonderful and fulfilling year 2012 is going to be, if you happen to be a Conservative. Plus all the murders here in Edmonton, of course.

So it’s, like, a metaphor. But you’re going to have to wait for the metaphor part too because I have to finish talking about the Wave first.

See, the Wave always started out back in the furthest reaches of the cheap football seats at Exhibition Stadium – hard wooden benches so far to the northeast that you were actually looking at the distant backs of the fielders. This is where the working class sat.

So, a couple of little foul-mouthed proletarians would start the Wave way off in the corner and it would ripple down through the cheap seats into the middling seats and peter out when it got to the rich toffs who sat behind home plate and didn’t send text messages to each other because nobody sent text messages in those days

Everybody in the cheap seats would then boo, and yell entertaining things like “F**k you! You rich f**king l**yers! Too f**king important to do the f**king Wave, huh? …A**h**es!” (Why lawyers got all the abuse, I’ll never know. Surely there were deserving accountants and physicians and MBAs all sitting down there with them too.)

I think this was the first time I had ever heard extended, sustained, prolonged profanity in a public place and I was so shocked it took me a couple of ripples before I got into the spirit of the thing.

Anyway, the next ripple of the Wave would go a little farther (same response), and the one after that a little farther still (same response, only louder, and more profane), and finally a Wave would half-heartedly ripple through the best seats and be picked up on the other side.

At that point everyone in the cheap seats would laugh derisively at how we’d made the rich lawyers bend to our proletarian will (not in those words, exactly, of course) and go back to drinking our beer. (Of course, the joke was really on us among the 99 per cent, as the 1 per cent all drove home in their pre-ABS satnav-free BMWs, while we took the streetcar, but you’ve got to get your satisfaction where you can.)

Anyway, that’s what the Wave was all about – holding the well-shod feet of the wealthy to the fire when you had the rare chance, sort of like Occupy Exhibition Stadium – and if that’s not a Marxist analysis, I don’t know what the heck is!

Nowadays, of course, proletarians can’t afford to go the Domed Stadium, or whatever the heck it’s called, but once or twice a decade, unless they’re selling hot dogs. If they ever do the Wave in there it’s sanitized, done in colourful shirts with Polo labels and washed down with Coors Lite. (Yuk!)

OK, so here comes the metaphor part: Not one single professional media reporter in Edmonton could be bothered to cover Brian Topp or Peggy Nash when they spoke to well attended public meetings in Edmonton.

Either one of those folks could be the next leader of Canada’s Official Opposition and it is not outside the realm of possibility one of them could be the next prime minister of our country.

But the Edmonton media couldn’t write three graphs about what they had to say, or even that they were going to say it, or send out a shabby guy with a camera to take a picture of one of them.

This is a disgrace. It’s worse than a disgrace, actually, but I can’t really describe it without resorting to the kind of language I used to hear at Exhibition Stadium, and I’m just too much of a gentleman for that.

Well, two more NDP leadership candidates are coming to Edmonton, and I think we need to do a version of the Exhibition Stadium Wave on our local media, especially the Edmonton Journal, which purports to be the region’s paper of record, if such a thing can be said to exist any more.

Journalists need to be reminded – by phone call, by email, by occasional derisive blog posts – that this is an important story and their few remaining readers (even some on the right, I’d wager) expect them to get off their sorry duffs and cover it. Some TV cameras would be nice, too.

Thomas Mulcair will be at the Strathcona Community Hall, 10139 – 87th Ave., on Friday Jan. 6, 2012, from 7:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Niki Ashton will be at the City Arts Centre, second floor drama room, 10943 – 84th Ave. on Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2012, from 7:15 to 9:15 p.m.

Be there or be square, Mr. and Ms. Media. You’ll be mocked either way. But it’s better to endure it and do the right thing.

And if you’re not there? Well, of course your dereliction of duty will be noted, and a few more of your readers will say, “Nuts to you!”

Oh, and nuts to the Leafs, too.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

With a record like his, how could Alberta Health Services Chair Ken Hughes not run for office?

2011-12-28T16:30:00.010-07:00

Ken Hughes on the night of Alison Redford’s victory. No idea what that passerby is looking at. Your blogger, perhaps. Behind her, former health minister Gene Zwozdesky tries to butter up Calgary Sun columnist Rick “Not The Dinger Any More” Bell.

Well, of course he’s running for office.

With a record like his, how could he not?

I refer, of course, to Ken Hughes, the first and so far the only chair of Alberta Health Services, the massive province-wide health board created in May 2008 to … well, it’s never really been all that clear just what AHS was supposed to do.

AHS has managed, one supposes, to realize a few economies of scale – especially among traditionally overpaid top health region executive positions – but at the cost of some pretty fantastic dis-economies of scale.

From the moment the Alberta Tories under then-premier Ed Stelmach and then-health-minister Ron Liepert announced their decision to roll Alberta’s nine regions plus the Alberta Cancer Board, the addictions commission and the mental health board into a single entity, saving money was said to be the reason. But, as far as anyone knows, precious little money has ever actually been saved as a result.

However, that’s the government’s story, and they’re stickin’ to it. As Premier Alison Redford’s current health minister, Fred Horne, said today in a carefully phrased news release announcing Mr. Hughes’s imminent departure as the chair of the health board, “Ken’s leadership helped AHS to deliver solid results, including over $660 million in administrative savings that has since been reinvested in patient care.”

The real reason for the creation of AHS was likely quite different from saving money. But since no one in a position to know has actually said, Albertans have been left to deduce that the desire to break the political power of the Calgary Health Region’s sometimes outspoken leadership, the need to be seen to be doing something, and the urge to mess up health care delivery just enough to open the door to privatization all played a role in creating the AHS fiasco.

Instead of savings we got a crisis in Emergency Room wait times, acute care beds full of patients who needed to be in continuing care, continued efforts to privatize long-term care and no respite from the shortage of health care professionals that dates back to policy errors committed under Mr. Stelmach’s predecessor as premier, Ralph Klein.

The main burden of responsibility, of course, must rest on the shoulders of Mr. Liepert and former premier Stelmach, but surely as their chief flunky at what was back in 2008 quaintly known as the “health superboard,” Mr. Hughes must shoulder some of the blame.

One waits with interest to hear what Stephen Duckett, the Australian PhD economist who was hired a year after Mr. Hughes to be chief executive officer under the chair’s supervision, will have to say about Mr. Hughes’s leadership. Dr. Duckett, of course, seems to have been hired in part because he was acerbic and undiplomatic, then in November 2010 was fired because he was acerbic and undiplomatic, and has now carved out a niche for himself as an acerbic commentator on Alberta health care matters.

Mr. Hughes must accept some of the blame for that unpopular decision as well, one presumes.

Regardless, we are now informed by the Edmonton Journal that Mr. Hughes will likely seek the PC nomination in Calgary-West, a piece of provincial real estate that occupies the same territory as notorious Conservative MP Rob Anders’s federal riding. It is also the Alberta electoral district now occupied by Mr. Liepert, who to everyone’s astonishment remains in Ms. Redford’s cabinet. However, Mr. Liepert has signalled his intention not to run again in 2012, or whenever Premier Redford decides to call an election under her recently passed unfixed-fixed-election-date law.

Mr. Hughes is not a stranger to politics. Before his career in health, he enjoyed an undistinguished career as a federal Conservative MP from southern Alberta, and before that as an insurance salesman.

This fall, Mr. Hughes took a leave of absence from the helm of AHS to serve on Premier Redford’s transition team. Given all that, it is likely that he hopes to become Ms. Redford’s health minister after what the government presumably assumes will be the triumph of the next election.

If so, or even if he just resides in cabinet in some other influential post, don’t expect to see meaningful change to fix the many problems with the single health board model.

It has been argued in this space that what Alberta really needs is a return to health regions, a structure that sensibly balances economies of scale with unique regional needs. This is because different blends of health services for different regional populations makes sense, delivering better service at a lower cost and responding more quickly to changing needs. This is why, of course, health regions remain the favoured way to deliver health services elsewhere in Canada.

A centralized province-wide board, by contrast, simply can’t respond as effectively as a region could. Emergency Room problems in Lethbridge, Grande Prairie or Red Deer don’t get addressed because we’re busy in Edmonton working on a provincial admissions policy. Even needed short-term solutions, such as opening more continuing care beds to ease the crunch in emergency departments, take longer when they must be solved by a bloated centralized bureaucracy like AHS.

Not so many years ago – before Mr. Stelmach, Mr. Liepert, Dr. Duckett and, of course, Mr. Hughes made their vision of a new health care model for Alberta a reality – we offered world-class medical services to residents of this province.

It will take something more than Mr. Hughes occupying a chair in Ms. Redford’s next cabinet to make that a reality again.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Your seasonal anti-social-media message: Have a Vy Mey Christmas!

2011-12-24T00:55:00.004-07:00

Pierre Trudeau: What? Fuddle-Duddle? Below: Justin Trudeau; Pat Martin.

O Sir, we quarrel in print…

I blame Twitter, one of the first examples of genuinely anti-social media online, for the recent decline in the already debased state of public discourse in Canada.

Leastways, Twitter certainly makes it easy to slam off a reproof valiant to treat the right-wing trolls who inhabit the back alleys of the Internet with the respect that they so profoundly deserve. And if their tender feelings are hurt? Well, so much the better! Or so it always f**ls at the time.

Back in the day, it seemed like it was only the pimply faced agents of the Tory Rage Machine who used the on-line comments sections of what’s left of the daily press to threaten and abuse the many, many people to whose views they took violent exception. Inevitably, they hid behind a long list of pseudonyms, usually tinged with the fake patriotism of the Harper Cons. (By the way, if you’re a Harper Con named Johnny Can**k who disagrees with my a**essment, you can just shut the h**k up!)

Their strategy is well understood, thanks in part to their own famous Craigslist ad: to “make up facts,” and use “sarcasm and personal insults” to “score points” and “stir outrage.”

It was inevitable, naturally, that some of those who were among the principal victims of this sort of thing would begin to use the Internet – and especially the convenient 140-character format of Twitter – to respond in kind. Actually, with only 140 characters available, responding in kind is about all you can do!

Everyone of us, I am sure, has a r***t-w**g sh**t-t**l relative or the equivalent who has the power to get us really, really t**ked off – usually at a family dinner – safe in the knowledge that our cooler-headed spouses, parents or siblings will restrain us before we have the opportunity to say or do what’s really called for.

Unfortunately, Twitter seems to have given us the opportunity to respond as we deem appropriate, short of actual fisticuffs (which can be hard when you’re in a different city, for example) without the hand of a more-responsible or better-tempered loved one to restrain us. In other words, intemperately and with only a minimum of thought.

Perhaps if we lived in an era where all of our retorts weren’t restricted to 140 characters, we’d be less restrained in our enthusiasm for quaint f**r-letter Anglo-Saxonisms that seem to sum up neo-C*n policies and opinions so efficiently and accurately.

The problem, or maybe it is an advantage (it certainly seems to be the cause of a certain amount of relief), is that a lot of us who are not operatives of the Tory Rage Machine tend to fire off these ripostes under our own names. This, no doubt, carries a risk that some of our comments could come back to bite our backward-facing extremities if we decide to stand for deacon of our local congregation or chair of the local chapter of D**ks Unlimited.

On this general topic, my late mother oft advised me, if I’d ever dashed off an angry letter (this was back in the days of s***l-mail) to let it cool on the kitchen table over night. If I still wanted to send it in the morning, fine, go ahead. Chances were, she thought, I’d reconsider. Nowadays, of course, we all just hit “S*ND.”

So it was inevitable that a lot of us would be mildly shocked, but at the same time grimly satisfied, when NDP MP Pat Martin, exasperated at the arbitrary and undemocratic jackb**t strategies adopted by the Harper C***********s, Tweeted his displeasure in such blunt terms.

From there, I suspect, we will all move along briskly and cathartically – with no great service to the cause of intelligent public discourse, and not just in anti-social media, but a certain degree of satisfaction notwithstanding.

Most of us, for example, have resorted to the use of strong words in the face of outrageous provocation, which may be why so many of us were not particularly offended when Liberal MP Justin Trudeau assigned an unparliamentary label to Environmental Degradation Minister Peter Kent.

It is a sign of the times, methinks, that while Mr. Trudeau’s late father felt the need to explain away his response in the face of Tory provocation in the same venue (it was merely “fuddle-duddle,” he suggested) the son quite freely owned up to what he’d said and apologized.

I’m sure there were a lot of us who thought that, notwithstanding his apology, Mr. Trudeau’s comment was a pretty apt a**e**ment of Mr. Kent’s efforts, if not Mr. K**t himself, and, by the way, also that Mr. Trudeau’s beard and moustache looked quite chic and directional, no matter what the great minds of the media had to say about them.

Alas, I suspect this sort of thing is bound to continue on all sides, which is not necessarily for the good. You know: “bickering,” voter suppression, typical Conservative election t**tics and all that.

That’s why I’d like to propose a compromise. We on the left should agree to give up all profanity in our Tw**ts if the Harper Cons and their supporters will agree to stop making up facts, and using personal insults to score points and stir up controversy.

And if they won’t, well, I guess they can just … get lost! For the rest of you, Merry [EXPLETIVE DELETED] Christmas, and for Mr. Trudeau in particular, Happy [EXPLETIVE DELETED] Birthday!

This post also appears on Ra**le.ca.

What Alison Redford really needs: a smaller caucus

2011-12-23T00:06:00.008-07:00

Members of former premier Ed Stelmach’s caucus discuss their differences in the Legislative Assembly. Is that Ron Liepert top right? Actual Conservative MLAs may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: Premier Alison Redford; Tory defector Rob Anderson, in black.

Alberta Premier Alison Redford needs to be praying hard that she wins fewer seats next year than Ed Stelmach did back in 2008.

Alert readers will recall that Mr. Stelmach, who had been chosen Progressive Conservative leader and premier of Alberta in 2006, saw his party win 72 of the 83 seats in the Alberta Legislature in the 2008 general election.

This was hailed as a historic victory at the time, and it was in a manner of speaking. But many of Mr. Stelmach’s subsequent troubles, it can be argued, flowed directly from the size of his majority.

If Ms. Redford wants to avoid many of those same pitfalls – which stemmed mostly from human nature, not some special political circumstance unique to Alberta – she would do well to hope for a comfortable majority, but not one as comfortable as that achieved by her unfortunate predecessor.

If an Alberta general election indeed takes place in 2012, as we have been promised, somewhere between 50 and 55 seats in the redistributed 87-seat Legislature would be a harbinger of Ms. Redford’s continued success, it seems to this observer.

Right off the hop – without really changing anything in terms of her ability to do whatever she pleases – the entitlement and arrogance associated with a party that can win back-to-back overwhelming majorities over the course of more than 40 years might be ameliorated a little.

That, in turn, would reduce the who-gives-a-hoot attitude of a lot of MLAs and ministers, which arguably led directly to many of the problems experienced by Mr. Stelmach that really did make it seem for a time as if the mighty Tory dynasty was on the ropes.

Indeed, it is said here that it was – it’s just that the party’s well-honed survival reflex was prompted, and the result was a new leader at the helm that presents a very different image. But while a new image may be enough to get the party through the next election, it won’t keep it healthy for long if old bad habits reassert themselves.

Back in Mr. Stelmach’s anti-heyday, while the arrogance of some well-placed Tories began to create serious problems for the premier, another symptom of a dangerously large majority began to assert itself. Let’s call this “Devil’s Workshop Syndrome.” (Let it be noted here that the use of the term DWS is not meant to imply that any members of the Progressive Conservative caucus have actual personal dealings with the Devil, except perhaps inadvertently.)

Regardless, we all know the expression: “Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop.” With 72 members in his caucus, virtually every one of them harbouring some degree of ambition, there simply weren’t enough cabinet posts and legislative committees to keep them all sufficiently busy.

Pretty soon MLAs were carping publicly about the premier’s lack of success, wearing black to the Legislature to protest the premier’s insufficient enthusiasm for really destructive economic policies (something akin to what Mr. Stelmach himself indulged in back in premier Ralph Klein’s day) or, worst of all, sharing discreet cups of vanilla latte with Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith in Starbucks cafes all over downtown Edmonton. (Rob Anderson, c’mon down!)

Next thing you knew there was talk of open rebellion and 10 more defectors crossing the floor of the legislature the then-Wildrose-Alliance’s benches. (One would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at the caucus meeting where the kybosh got put on that idea!) Not to mention Tory MLAs riding in the Pride Parade whilst sending out inappropriate Tweets about the other participants.

No, what Ms. Redford needs is a significantly smaller caucus as a percentage of total seats in the Legislature.

That would keep her troops focused on their jobs, and on behaving themselves. After all, the possibly of a humiliating defeat in the next election concentrates the political mind wonderfully.

Moreover, having 20 or more MLAs in the Opposition, especially if they come from all the parties that will be running candidates in the next election, will go a long way to allaying the cynicism and distrust that plagues Alberta democracy and could cause big social problems not so far down the road.

Who wants to bet, though, that Ms. Redford and her key advisers don’t see it that way. As we have already seen in the Conservative leadership campaign, they play to win – and they will only be perfectly content if they win it all, or very nearly so.

With most polls putting support for the Conservatives around 50 per cent following the leadership election, that could well happen. It is said here with no joy that, notwithstanding the recent Forum poll, the Conservatives could well again capture more than 70 seats in the Legislature, especially if voter turnout is low as historically has been the case in this province.

Nothing good will come from that – even for the Conservatives.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Despite Alison Redford’s rhetoric, not much has changed on seniors’ care

2011-12-22T00:04:00.008-07:00

Old folks at home: things are changing in Alberta, and not necessarily for the better. Below: Ed Stelmach, Guy Boutilier, Raj Sherman.

Does anybody remember the brouhaha in 2009 that was semi-officially designated The Trouble in Strathmore?

The trouble actually started a year earlier, in February 2008, when then premier Ed Stelmach and his Progressive Conservatives were running for election. The premier got up on his hind legs at a campaign meeting in the town half an hour east of Calgary and promised residents the government of Alberta would build 600 long-term care beds, 100 of them right there in Strathmore. There were 23 long-term care beds in the town at the time.

“We don’t need any more meetings,” Mr. Stelmach vowed. “It is a go.”

If Mr. Stelmach had kept that election promise, he might still be premier today.

At least, if “bed blockers,” who should be in long-term care beds but are stuck in acute care hospital beds, caused the Emergency Room wait time crisis that so deeply wounded Mr. Stelmach’s premiership, building the promised long-term care beds would have helped defuse the problem that continues to this day. Indeed, if the Tories had been serious about doing what they promised, Wildrose MLA Guy Boutilier and Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman would most likely still both be loyal Conservatives!

Instead, the strategic brain trust behind Mr. Stelmach’s ministry – including then-health minister and tireless seniors' care privatization advocate Ron Liepert – diverted their efforts down the cul-de-sac of privatization and misrepresentation.

A year after Mr. Stelmach made his promise, with the Conservatives safely back in office with a huge majority, Mr. Liepert announced that the health department was reviewing its capital plans, including the promised long-term care beds in Strathmore.

By then, the government was working on a deal with AgeCare, a private company founded in 1998 by two physicians named Hasmukh Patel and Kabir Jivraj. In 1996 and 1997, Dr. Jivraj was president of the Alberta Medical Association, and in 1999 and 2002 he was senior vice-president and chief medical officer of the Calgary Health Region. A few years later, according to the Sun newspapers, a numbered company he controlled would make generous contributions to both the Redford and Gary Mar Tory leadership campaigns.

Back in 2009, a story in the Calgary Herald said AgeCare confirmed it had won $4.3 million in provincial funding to build 60 designated assisted living units in Strathmore for seniors, plus $10 million to build 82 affordable housing units, about half of which will be set aside for independent seniors. Dr. Jivraj was quoted as saying he believed the projects had no connection with Mr. Stelmach’s unkept 2008 election pledge.

According to the community’s newspaper, however, Strathmore-Brooks MLA Arno Doerksen told townspeople at about the same time that if the partnership with AgeCare became reality, the 100 long-term care beds would not be built.

Then something unusual happened, which suggests the people in Strathmore were paying more attention than most of us here in Alberta. They figured out the deceptive game the government of Alberta habitually plays with the terminology it uses to describe seniors’ care.

In the government’s lexicon, “long-term care” means properly regulated, appropriately staffed, publicly funded residential health care for seniors. “Designated assisted living” means privatized hotel-style residential care in which seniors have to pay for extra baths, feeding assistance or anything beyond the basics. Some designated services may be publicly funded, but they are likely to be delivered by a personal care assistant, not a Registered Nurse. “Continuing care,” means a combination of both – inevitably heavily weighted toward private, less regulated delivery.

The deception comes into it because the government assumes that most of us, unlike the citizens of Strathmore, don’t understand the differences and think we’re getting long-term care when they use our tax money to subsidize private corporations to build for-profit assisted living facilities.

This was what prompted The Trouble in Strathmore, when the good people of that community began to write angry letters to the editor (who in turn wrote critical and well-informed editorials), and took part in public demonstrations that made Mr. Stelmach look like a bumbler and revealed his government’s sharp practices.

As far as Mr. Stelmach is concerned, arguably, the rest is history.

One would hope the current Conservative government of Premier Alison Redford has learned from Mr. Stelmach’s errors. Alas, the evidence suggests they have not.

Earlier this week, the government slipped back into its deceptive ways with an announcement in Edmonton by Seniors Minister George VanderBurg that “seniors and persons with disabilities in six Alberta communities will benefit from more than 500 new affordable supportive living and long-term care spaces.”

If you read the fine print, though, you’ll learn that of the 541 new spaces, only 30 are actual long-term care beds – something that the Redford government, just like the Stelmach government, hopes you won’t notice.

The way the governm ent news release explained this was as follows: “These projects will help build 511 new affordable supportive living and 30 long-term care spaces in Calgary, Okotoks, Strathmore, Edmonton, Villeneuve and Olds, identified by Alberta Health Services as having the greatest need for additional spaces and services.” Actually, and quite interestingly, it turns out that all 30 of the actual long-term care beds are located in … wait for it … Strathmore! This proves, I guess, that even in Alberta, the squeaky wheel gets a little grease!

Among the private-sector recipients of the government funds of the latest $48.2 million in public money being spent on this project, according to the government’s news release? Age Care Health Services Inc. – including $7.6 million in Strathmore for the 30 long-term care plus another 70 assisted-living beds.

Meanwhile, the number of long-term care beds in the province, approximately 14,500, has not changed since 1992. While new facilities have opened over the years, the government shuts them down as quickly as they open. The ones that close are likely to be publicly funded, publicly operated facilities, while the new ones are likely to be private, for-profit operations.

So it would seem that under Premier Redford, at least as far as seniors’ care is concerned, very little has changed.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Will Stephen Harper’s War on Peace, Order and Good Government continue with an attack on handgun registration?

2011-12-21T00:00:00.004-07:00

Claresholm, Alberta, the site of this country’s latest murderous shooting rampage, not likely to be its last. Below: Prime Minister Stephen Harper in all his divisive faux cowboy glory.

Do not doubt for an instant the inevitability of a great howl of violent protest directed at anyone who dares to connect last week’s murderous shooting rampage near the Alberta town of Claresholm and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s war on gun registration.

But the murderer used a handgun, registration opponents will protest, and the registry was for long guns! Then the debate, if that’s the word, will quickly spin into the usual specious arguments about their property rights and the need for stiffer prison sentences – as if such concepts would make any difference to someone prepared to put the gun to his own and head pull the trigger once his bloody work was done.

In reality, though, the dots between these two points on the Conservative timeline for the Albertanization of Canada are quite close, and can be connected easily – which is why we should expect the Harper government to try to use a promise to end to the registration of handguns in the same way in the next federal election.

The most obvious dot-connector is the fact that, having seen the national rifle and shotgun registry work as an effective wedge issue in 2011, it is doubtful the Harper Conservatives will be able to resist the temptation to do the same thing again in 2015, or whenever they choose to call an election.

Of course, whatever issues they select as wedges will be driven to some degree by circumstance and public opinion at the time of the next vote. And, as much as it pains the gun nuts, it is well known that Canada’s short-gun registration rules and tough controls are popular with urban voters throughout Canada and almost everyone in Quebec.

But then, the Harperites knew that long-gun registration was popular in Canada’s cities, even out here in the feckless West where we vote Tory anyway and complain after the fact. And they certainly knew their plans to wreck the registry caused outright revulsion in Quebec, where the tragic act that led to the registry’s creation took place.

Yet none of this stood for a moment in the path of their compulsion to seek out the lowest common political denominator and drive in the wedge. Since it worked, and apparently unbridled by any ethical considerations, why would they do anything different the next time?

So, it is said here, no matter what denials you hear from your Conservative MP today, a wedge strategy to end the registration of handguns and thus encourage the further descent of Canadian cities into American-style violence (something we know about here in Edmonton, by God), followed by screeches for more ineffective and expensive prisons and more ineffective, expensive and cruel punishments, is even now sure to be percolating deep within the Harperite brain trust.

A second reason these bloody dots are not that far apart is that, as in the United States, despite being a tiny minority, the gun lobby is a powerful fund-raising auxiliary for parties of the far right like the Harper Conservatives.

The feeble radio ad campaign now being run by the Conservative Party won’t change anyone’s position on gun registration. Most of us will just tune it out, or be faintly bemused by the fact that it manages to tell three lies in 30 seconds, a rate of one every 10 seconds, which is unusual even by Harper Conservative standards.

The lies, for those of you who demand justification for such remarks, are:

“The Conservative government has been given a strong mandate from Canadians to scrap it.” No they weren’t. It was hardly on the radar for most voters. Let’s call this one the “Counter-cheque Quarrelsome.”
“Hunters and farmers won’t be treated as criminals anymore.” They never were. They were asked to register their weapons, as we are asked to register our cars. “The Lie Circumstantial.”
“Don’t forget the billions that were wasted on creating and maintaining the registry, money that could be put to better use…” Well, no it can’t, actually. It’s been spent. Let’s call this “the Lie Direct.”

Dishonest though they may be, the ads serve as an effective reminder to Canadian gun nuts that the northern chapter of the Tea Party still needs their contributions to keep looking after their anti-social special interests.

The third reason is that the property rights argument, in the minds of advocates for unregulated gun ownership, applies to handguns as nicely as firearms with longer barrels, and presumably to hand grenades and unexploded roadside bombs as well.

To believe this, you also have to think your fundamental property rights are impinged by regulation of such forms of property as automobiles, which must be registered and licensed by their law-abiding owners, and certain recreational drugs and activities that are banned outright.

This emphasis on property rights, one suspects, originates in the good fortune of Canadians not to have a Second Amendment or its equivalent anywhere in their Constitution, thereby invalidating the argument we have an unabridgeable right to keep and carry arms of any type wherever and whenever we please.

Lacking such a justification, those among the gun advocates who understand that the U.S. Constitution does not apply on this side of the Medicine Line sail toward the only port available in this storm. Mind you, there is nothing in our Canadian Constitution specifically guaranteeing us “property rights” either, but from their perspective at least there is a body of precedent and other law.

As for their call for long prison sentences or other severe punishments as an alternative to sensible regulation and control, this is another effective wedge issue for the Harperites, but it is unlikely to do much to prevent the use of firearms in violent domestic incidents, whether they play themselves out at home or on Alberta’s highways. People like the shooter in last week’s horrific murders are obviously not planning carefully when they snatch up a gun head out on a killing spree.

But at least registration and the controls associated with it, if they are implemented vigorously, might prevent weapons falling into the hands of such a person in the first place – and how did this shooter happen to get his hands on a 9mm handgun? And if they don’t, as is well known, they give the police some knowledge about what they might be dealing with.

Whatever those who insist on their imagined right to own anti-social property may assert, Mr. Harper’s compulsion to use wedge issues like the national shotgun and rifle registry, and his war on our actual Constitutional right to peace, order and good government, will continue until he is driven from office.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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

2011-12-20T00:02:00.006-07:00

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.

Alison Party of Alberta TV ads are not ready for prime time

2011-12-19T00:03:00.006-07:00

The second Alison Party of Alberta 30-second advertising spot, which, like the first, fails to properly identify the advertiser. Below: Ms. Redford as she appears in the second ad and the logo of the Television Bureau of Canada.

The Alison Party of Alberta’s two new TV ads are not ready for prime time, literally.

This may or may not come as a surprise to the party’s top officials.

The two 30-second spots, both of which have now been posted to the party’s Youtube channel, fail to mention anywhere in their visual images or soundtracks the name of the party that is sponsoring the ads, which the last time we checked was still legally known as the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta.

The first one, which was posted to the Youtube channel on Dec. 14, ends with a portentous but nevertheless warm male voice that intones, “For a stronger Alberta… For a better quality of life… Premier Alison Redford… Making smart choices…” But there’s nary an indication anywhere in the whole 30 seconds that would suggest any of those smart choices involved voting for any entity called “Conservative,” or “Progressive Conservative.”

The second spot, posted to Youtube the next day, talks about education in Alberta and features only Ms. Redford’s voice explaining that “education is the main priority.” She promises that “if Albertans want to get an education, we’re going to give them an education.”

This spot shows signs of having been hurried into production to match the polished advertisement on education issues released a few hours before by the right-wing Wildrose Party. The Redford Tory ad weirdly juxtaposes Ms. Redford, her breath visible, high atop snowy Mount Olympus, Mount Sinai or maybe the terminus of the Banff Gondola, with students in shorts and T-shirts on a sunny University of Calgary campus.

Likewise, with this one, there’s no mention of who is behind the ad. Both end with an image that says only, “Premier alison REDFORD.” (Eccentric capitalization retained.)

There are also two 15-second ads on separate topics – sustainable communities and knowledge-based education – obviously designed for use on the Internet, that present the same information in the same way. These two also refrain from mentioning Premier Redford’s relationship to anyone or anything called “Conservative.”

However it’s the two 30-second spots – which have clearly been designed to be used on television – that are of interest, because they cannot be broadcast on TV in their present form. Either significant modifications will be required to make them acceptable or TV stations and networks will have to agree to bend their rules into the shape of a pretzel to suit the Alberta Tories.

This is because of a group called the Telecaster Committee of Canada, which in turn is operated by the Television Bureau of Canada. The former describes itself as “a voluntary, self-governing, commercial, infomercial and public service announcement clearance committee.” The 150-member TVB, in turn, describes itself as “a resource centre for our members – Canadian television stations, networks, specialty services and their sales representatives.”

The real purpose of Telecaster, it seems to me as someone who has purchased plenty of TV advertising over the years, is to ensure that their member stations reduce their legal and political liability for statements in advertisements that may become controversial, as well as to be a thorn in the side of advertisers through the medium of private-sector red tape.

Regardless of that opinion, a significant rule (and one that it seems to me is pretty hard to argue with) for issue and opinion advertising run on the majority of Canadian TV stations is that the advertiser must identify itself in one of two ways:

“The advertiser must be clearly identified in both the audio and video portions. The audio disclaimer and video super must be preceded by one of the following: ‘these are the opinions of,’ ‘opinions expressed are those of,’ ‘message brought to you by,’ ‘brought to you by,’ ‘sponsored by’ or a similar statement.”
“The advertiser must be clearly identified in video only. The super must be on screen for at least 3 seconds and must occupy 1/3 of the screen in size. The super must also be preceded by one of the following statements listed above.”

By the way, telecaster also insists that “the advertising must not appear to be intentionally deceptive, erroneous or misleading,” which could be a tall order for a lot of political advertising. But let’s put that question aside for the moment.

On the key practical issue of identification, the Wildrose Party TV ads discussed last week in this space clearly appear to meet the Telecaster requirements. The two Conservative ads – or, rather, the Alison Party spots – obviously do not.

Nor will they be particularly easy to edit to meet these requirements.

In other words, the apparently hurried Conservative ad spots – which have been presented to us as if they represent the beginnings of a major television advertising campaign – are far from ready for prime time.

And if you see them on TV as they appear on Youtube, you will know that rules have been bent for the Conservatives that are rigorously applied to everyone else.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

First impressions: NDP leadership candidate Peggy Nash in Edmonton

2011-12-17T00:34:00.005-07:00

NDP leadership candidate Peggy Nash at last night’s “kitchen-table talk” in Edmonton. Below: Marlin Schmidt.

There are only three or so of the nine candidates for the leadership of the federal New Democratic Party, and therefore for Leader of the Opposition, who are truly qualified to do the job and do it right now.

One of them is Peggy Nash, who spoke at a “kitchen-table talk” in Edmonton last night. Another is Brian Topp, who was at a similar event here Monday.

While Edmonton New Democrats won’t get a chance to see all the candidates in action debating one another – a situation that can be as distracting as it is enlightening – seeing these two strong candidates in the same meeting room a few days apart provided a worthwhile opportunity to compare their ability to engage a wider audience of Canadians.

Ms. Nash’s resume is superb – she earned the economic chops as finance critic under Jack Layton’s leadership to offer better polices than the Conservatives and make Canadians believe in them, she is fluent in both official languages and she has enormous experience building progressive alliances with Canada’s social movements, including labour where she has been a senior official with the Canadian Auto Workers Union.

Moreover, as she clearly demonstrated yesterday, Ms. Nash is a capable speaker who, as Duncan Cameron of Rabble.ca wrote in his endorsement of her candidacy and in other pieces, speaks with sympathy, humour and coolness under pressure.

Since we are talking about a top player in an elite political league here, though, all this is to be expected. Her performance yesterday demonstrated that she could do the job if New Democrats vote to choose her as leader on March 24.

But Ms. Nash is not merely running for the leadership of a perennial Parliamentary third party but to be Leader of the Opposition and the government-in-waiting of Canada at a crucial moment in our country’s history. As a candidate in that high-stakes league, she needed to show she could really engage and electrify her sympathetic audience of New Democrats, and that didn’t happen.

Now, this was one meeting, in a town that no doubt was at the end of a long and tiring road. But where Mr. Topp energized his audience Monday and turned up the temperature in the room, Ms. Nash was temperate and uninspiring. Her only passionate moment was in response to a question about the planned Conservative vandalism to the national rifle and shotgun registry.

The ability to really grab the attention of an audience and hang onto it is vitally important. As Ms. Nash put it last night in response to a question, “the first goal is to win the next federal election.” But to win the next federal election, the NDP leader is going to have to motivate and move more Canadians than just the familiar and sympathetic old New Democratic faces who dependably show up at meetings like this one and make them feel like church services.

Ms. Nash didn’t say anything with which this New Democrat disagreed, or anyone else in the room by the sound of it, and she made a couple of points I strongly support. As previously noted in this space, I’d be surprised if any of the candidates do anything differently. But unlike Mr. Topp, she didn’t do it in a way that I feel is likely to engage many voters outside NDP circles.

This showed in the responses of the audience. The meeting was chaired by Edmonton-Gold Bar provincial candidate Marlin Schmidt with the same good cheer and discipline he demonstrated Monday. But more questioners rambled on, instead of sticking to their points. It was hard to shake the feeling many of them weren’t really all that anxious to hear what Ms. Nash had to say because when they already knew her answer. It’s the passion that makes you want to listen and, last night at least, the passion was missing.

The audience ran out of steam 15 minutes early. No one could think of another question and Mr. Schmidt gently brought the formal meeting to an end. On Monday, hands were still waving when the time ran out, and the people waving them seemed genuinely upset they didn’t get their chance to query Mr. Topp.

The stakes could hardly be higher than they will be in the next federal election, in 2015 or whenever it takes place. New Democrats need a leader who can reach out and grab Canadian voters by the lapels and give them a good shake.

Based on their Edmonton performances, we know that Mr. Topp has that ability. Whether Ms. Nash does is not so clear. Other voices, of course, are yet to be heard from.

+ + +

It is an absolute disgrace that these well-attended meetings in the City Arts Centre at 84th Avenue and 109th Street in the midst of NDP MP Linda Duncan’s federal Edmonton-Strathcona riding are being ignored by local mainstream media. It’s embarrassing, really, making Edmonton look like a two-bit hick town unaware there’s a big world outside its civic boundaries.

Ms. Nash, Mr. Topp and the other candidates who will be visiting Edmonton are not campaigning for the leadership of some Alberta fringe party, but to be the Leader of the Opposition of the Parliament of Canada. As unlikely as this may seem to someone who has been imbibing nothing but Alberta political bathwater, Canadian leaders of the Opposition do become prime minister of the whole country now and then. What’s more, sometimes provinces with only one New Democrat MP suddenly take a notion to elect dozens of them.

I doubt the local media are missing these important stories because they’re actually plotting to ignore Canada’s social democratic opposition for sinister political reasons. But they have to be prepared for some of their dwindling numbers of readers and viewers to reach that conclusion anyway and make the effort to find their news elsewhere.

In the last provincial and federal general elections, Edmontonians elected two NDP MLAs and one NDP MP. They voted in significant numbers for the NDP in other ridings. Local media should make at least a half-hearted effort to serve this important part of our community.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

‘A pervasive culture of discriminatory bias’ – the justice model for Canada’s loony right

2011-12-16T01:02:00.007-07:00

One of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies leads a prisoner, arrested for his shaky command of the English language, toward the chain gang. Racist and abusive Arizona police may not be exactly as illustrated. Below: “America’s toughest sheriff” hisself.

Never forget that the Edmonton Sun, apparently a goodly portion of its readers, sundry Tory politicians from across the land and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation all think that what Canada needs is more systemic racism, abuse of power, retaliation against people who dare to exercise their right to criticize powerful officials and “unconstitutional policing.”

All of them, at any rate, up to now have seldom missed an opportunity to sing the praises of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, the 3.8-million-person Arizona jurisdiction that includes the city of Phoenix, for his notoriously thuggish practices.

As of yesterday, thanks to the U.S. Justice Department, we know what Sheriff Arpaio has really been up to: “a pervasive culture of discriminatory bias against Latinos” that “reaches the highest levels of the agency,” interference with the U.S. government’s three-year investigation into his illegal practices, fostering “a culture of bias,” abuse of prisoners, many of them completely innocent, including solitary confinement for those who fail to understand commands in English, inadequate investigations, and “a chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations,” among other things.

One of those other things included a sheriff’s deputy intentionally running down a Latino driver with his squad car during what I guess you’d call a “routine Arizona traffic stop.”

Remember, this isn’t some faint-hearted lawyer from the American Civil Liberties Union making these accusations – it’s the federal Justice Department that’s calling Sheriff Arpaio’s efforts the most egregious case of racial profiling in U.S. history.

Moreover, the New York Times reported yesterday that a separate investigation of Sheriff Arpaio’s office by a grand jury is focusing on the accusations of abuse of power in his department.

As a result of the Justice Department investigation of systemic racism and profiling by the sheriff’s deputies, the U.S. Government will no longer provide any information to the department about the immigration status of anyone it stops for a traffic offence, civil infraction or other minor matter. And it seems as if there is no shortage of Latinos stopped in Maricopa County (or, as the Sun would have it, Caricopa County) because the basis for their investigations are often such things as people not speaking English or reports of gatherings of people with “dark skin.”

That may be the worst thing that happens to the department, but one gets the sense that before long “America’s toughest sheriff” himself may be wearing a bubble-gum pink jump suit and chowing down on roach-infested baloney sandwiches in what was formerly his private Gulag. If only!

But back in the day, this kind of thing never seemed to fail to leave the great minds of the Canadian right giddy and a little weak-kneed with admiration. The mere thought of chain gangs filled by women or, even better, children had them breaking out in a light sweat and panting heavily.

Last August, for example, the Sun ran one of its unscientific little on-line opinion polls that asked, “Do you think Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s brand of ‘tough love’ justice would work in Canada?” Of course, “tough love” is a bit of a misnomer under the circumstances – “systemic hate injustice” would be more like it, but whatever. Either way, close to 80 per cent of the idiots who bothered to respond thought it would work just dandy.

Then there was Kevin Gaudet, Executive Director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation (which, it cannot be said too many times, consistently acts against the interests of Canadian taxpayers), who was found panting in the pages of the Sun back in 2010 about how Sheriff Arpaio “has the right ideas which Harper's government would do well to consider.”

Apparently Mr. Gaudet had his knickers in a twist because inmates in federal correctional institutions in Quebec were served ice cream, and because some notorious prisoners were still collecting their Canadian pensions. So from this he concluded, “what Canada’s justice system needs is less ice cream and pensions and more of what Sheriff Arpaio is serving up.”

You know, outright abuse of prisoners, who may be innocent, on the basis of their race, not to mention people just walking down the street. Well, this is what passes for wisdom at the “taxpayers federation,” which apparently hasn’t noticed how much Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s new prisons are going to cost us actual taxpayers. (Hint: more than the tents Sheriff Arpaio uses for jails.)

The CTF seems to like this story so much, they dash off a press release any time an inmate is served something with sugar in it. I don’t recall them getting similarly excited about the decision of some genius in Ralph Klein’s government to punish the inmates in Alberta jails by taking away their colour TVs and replacing them with black and white sets – which, because nobody makes black and white TVs any more, cost taxpayers extra!

Oh well, I guess this kind of right wing drivel makes as much sense as invading Iraq to get revenge for an attack on the United States by Saudi Arabians from Germany – leading to the insane nine-year war that was declared over the same day Sheriff Arpaio’s troubles hit the media.

And all this in an effort to make Canadian cities as safe as the more heavily populated free-fire zones in the U.S. Southwest.

Think about that the next time you’re tempted to pay attention to these people’s prescriptions for how to turn Canada into a better place. Just remember, they know almost as much about economics as they do about criminology!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alberta political TV ad battle: Round 1 to the Wildrose Party

2011-12-15T00:05:00.009-07:00

The Alison Redford Party’s first ad from the 2012 election season. Below: Hubby in the headlights. Maybe he’s just seen what’s on that to-do list. Or maybe he just feels strange wearing a sports coat in his kitchen at 7 in the morning.

Yesterday, Alberta’s mighty Tory dynasty released its first TV ad of the 2012 election season.

Whether or not it was intended as a riposte to the two 30-second TV spots released by the Wildrose Party last week, it is bound to be seen that way.

Put under that spotlight, it’s obvious the Wildrose Party got more bang for its advertising bucks than the Conservatives did.

Maybe this says that smaller is more flexible. Maybe it says, as Avis used to, that when you’re only No. 2 (or No. 3 if you go by the Citizen Society Research Lab poll’s assessment of the Wildrose position in voters’ hearts) you have to try harder. Maybe it just says the Wildrosers’ managed to hire a better ad agency.

Whatever, as with the first Wildrose ads, we can see the Progressive Conservative government’s initial election strategy emerging in this 30-second spot.

First, the party will emphasize the engaging and new Ms. Redford and downplay the tired and tiresome Alberta Tory brand associated with Ed Stelmach, Ron Liepert, Gary Mar, Ralph Klein, Steve West, Don Getty and all the rest of those old and well-off males stretching back in a cranky line to the Prophet Peter Lougheed wandering out of the wilderness just after the late Jurassic period.

It’s significant in this regard that the word Conservative (or for that matter, “progressive,” or “Tory”) never appears in this ad, either in the voice-over or images.

Second, and here’s a prediction, the Tories are going to go positive – at least as long as their polling numbers hold.

Right now in every serious poll the Conservatives under Ms. Redford hold a commanding lead. Their ads will remain relentlessly positive until that changes. If it does, of course, they’ll go negative with a vengeance, as any governing party would in this Americanized day and age.

But when a party goes negative, it has to understand that some of the smear rubs off on it too. There’s no need for the Tories to take that risk now when they’re polling in the vicinity of 60 per cent. Moreover, like the Wildrose strategy, don’t imagine that you’ll ever see a negative word pass Ms. Redford’s lips. As with Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith, the leader is for positive messages and another voice will be used for negativity.

It’s interesting that the two parties of the rampant oil industry and market fundamentalist doctrine have chosen in these ads the colours of the social democratic NDP (the Conservatives) and the environmentally sensitive Greens (the Wildrose). To me, this suggests that the parties of the right have figured out – even if the rest of us haven’t quite yet – that the time is upon us when progressive parties can push policies they actually believe in, like fair taxation and a tough line on the environment, instead of the same old far-right claptrap we get from the parties of the right.

Regardless, getting back to that Tory advert, I guess we have to give Ms. Redford points appearing in her own kitchen with her own family, although I’ve got to say her hubby looked a bit like a deer in the headlights wandering around his dinette at 7 in the morning wearing a nice blazer with his hair all combed.

It may be just me, but I also wondered if there was a sly little social conservative dig in this segment: “Hey, Ms. Smith! Why no kids in your kitchen!?” Probably not, though…

But the actual message – voiced by Ms. Redford herself – is sloppy at best, and at times bordering on plain weird. I know the Tories want to emphasize nothing, instead encouraging us to merely feel good about the future. (As opposed to the opposition, which wants to focus in like a laser on policies they know the public has been unhappy about.) But what’s with telling us – or asking us, whatever the case may be – that “the most important thing that I think about is every day when moms and dads wake up across this province, what are they thinking about on a daily basis?”

Say what?

Notice that Ms. Redford commits to nothing at all, unless you count “they wanna know they’re not going to have debt” as a promise. But then, that’s the logical thing to do when you’re campaigning from far in the front, I guess. That way you can do anything when you win, and no one can call you a flip-flopper.

Regardless, whatever it is that moms and dads all across this province wanna know when they wake up, it’s most likely nothing to do with provincial debt or government policy. More likely it’s, “Did I remember to buy enough freakin’ coffee?”

The kitchen scene is followed by images of Ms. Redford speaking earnestly with a variety of pleasant looking citizens. That’s when the portentous male voice speaks the message fragments the Conservatives really want us to take away: “For a stronger Alberta. For a better quality of life. Premier Alison Redford. Making smart choices.”

Now, I’ve bought a lot of advertising for my various employers over the years, and I can tell you with confidence that it is possible send an ad agency back to rewrite a sentence to ensure it makes sense.

That said, I’m sure both parties focus-grouped these ads within an inch of their lives. And I recognize that the job the Wildrose Party was trying to do is easier on its face. Nevertheless, the Wildrose education policy advertisement is a vastly superior piece of work, and that party’s negative ad avoids some of the blowback problem associated with attack advertising by using a light touch.

This first Tory ad is just not going to be as effective with its viewers.

Unfortunately, the bulk of the advertising in this election campaign is going to be done by these two right-wing parties for the simple reason that TV ads are expensive and they’re the ones with the big corporate bucks to spend.

In our not-very-democratic system of democracy, parties like the NDP, which have a lot of supporters for its people-centred platform, don’t have the corporate funds to saturate the TV markets the way deep-pocketed Tories and Wildrosers can.

When the NDP and Liberal ads come – if they do at all – they’re going to have to be really good, because they’re going to be too expensive to replace or run for long.

By contrast, Conservative pockets are deep enough they can try again if this ad doesn’t work out. They should be thinking seriously about doing just that, and trying harder next time.

The first round of Alberta’s TV election-ad battle clearly goes to the Wildrose Party.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Rumoured Tory poll showing Alberta NDP surge: Orange Wave, or just orange hair dye?

2011-12-14T00:02:00.004-07:00

Orange Wave, or just orange dye? Below: Alberta Premier Alison Redford with her Chief of Staff, Stephen Carter (photo borrowed from Calgary Herald); NDP Leader Brian Mason.

What’s with the recent buzz there’s a private Conservative poll that shows NDP support surging in the Capital Region?

Is this a real Orange Wave, or is it just hair dye?

Specifically, is it orange hair dye selectively applied by professional creators of new political realities? Or is it evidence of a verifiable trend finally reaching critical mass? Or a little of both?

Here’s what is known and verifiable: At least eight political polls were conducted in Alberta in 2011, some of better quality than others. Together, they demonstrated the NDP to be on a gradual but steady upward trend in support province-wide. There are said to be a couple more private polls out there that show much the same thing.

The first of the eight, conducted by Trend Research Inc. just after New Year 2011, put NDP support at 8 per cent. The most recent poll, done by Environics Research Group between Nov. 4 and 8, put the New Democrats at 14 per cent. The best poll from the NDP perspective, done by the Citizen Society Research Lab on Oct. 1 and 2, showed the party with province-wide support at 16.3 per cent. The latter is the only one that placed the NDP ahead of the Wildrose Party, which it located at 16.1 per cent.

If it’s true that the NDP and the Wildrose Party are at about the same level of support, this works better for the New Democrats because of the way the votes split in the regions where both parties are strong.

If Calgary-area voters are roughly divided 60-40 in favour of Progressive Conservative Premier Alison Redford’s PCs over Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party, with the NDP and the Liberals hardly registering in the region, the Conservatives can sweep most ridings thereabouts.

If Edmonton support shows big fissures on the right between the Tories and the Wildrose, the NDP led by Brian Mason can do well in several of the area’s ridings where it has strong support. But NDP success depends on a strong Wildrose showing.

Now, we also know that days before the second Conservative leadership poll in early October, Premier Redford’s campaign effectively used an unexpected Calgary Herald-Environics poll that put her in second-place behind front-runner Gary Mar. This in effect created a new reality that motivated her supporters and gave her sufficient momentum to push her over the top.

The Sept. 13 poll was controversial because it was based on a list of 22,000 card-carrying PC Party members that probably ought not to have been given to the polling company. The next day, Conservative Party President Bill Smith issued a stinging rebuke on the party’s website of whoever allowed the “unauthorized and inappropriate use” of the party membership list. That commentary has since been removed from the Tory website, but may still be viewed here.

No one knows who gave the list to the Calgary Herald to pass on to Environics. Since Ms. Redford became premier, the party’s concern about the leak seems to have evanesced.

We also know that back in the fall 2010, the come-from-behind campaign of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi gained sudden momentum and credibility from an unexpected September Calgary Herald poll that put Mr. Nenshi in third place.

And for what it’s worth, we know that Stephen Carter, who today is Premier Redford’s chief of staff, played pivotal roles in both campaigns.

Can we conclude from this that the two campaigns created their own futures through polling? Not really. But it would be fair to say that both campaigns made effective use of unexpected poll results to springboard their candidates from behind.

This time, even if New Democrat poll numbers have increased startlingly, it would be pretty difficult for Mr. Carter or anyone else to portray the Alberta NDP as riding the crest of an Orange Wave so big it could threaten to dislodge the mighty Tory behemoth.

Still, good NDP numbers could motivate Conservative campaign workers to take the election effort seriously in the Capital Region without giving credibility to the Wildrose Party, which one suspects the Conservatives still view as their Main Enemy. If so, this might parallel the situation in last May’s federal election in which the federal Conservatives focused on the Liberals and ignored the surging NDP.

I asked Mr. Carter about the private Tory poll rumour, and he chose a Delphic response: “Ahh, polling. Yes. No. Absolutely. Sometimes.” File that under “would neither confirm nor deny.”

Conclusions? It’s too soon to tell.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

First impressions: Brian Topp comes to Alberta

2011-12-13T00:15:00.006-07:00

Federal NDP leadership candidate Brian Topp focuses on a questioner during his stopover in Edmonton last night.

Oddly enough, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Brian Topp on TV. Not so as I’d have noticed, anyway – him or any of the other candidates for the impossible job of filling Jack Layton’s giant shoes.

If I had, I bet, I would have thought he was really tall.

Mr. Topp is not particularly tall, as it happens, and if you passed him on the street, you probably wouldn’t give him a second look. Sort of an unprepossessing guy, at first glance. But when he turns it on – whatever it is – he can sure fill up the room!

Pierre Trudeau could do this, which is why a lot of Canadians who’d only seen him on television thought he was as big as his commanding presence. In reality, Mr. Trudeau was a pretty trim little guy – still, he could sure keep your attention when you heard him speak, as I did a couple of times.

Joe Clark, on the other hand, came across as a little guy for some reason. Canadians who meet Mr. Clark are often astounded at how tall he is – makes you do a double take every time. How could a guy so small be so tall?

I’m not comparing Mr. Topp to either of those two fellows, both of whom happened to be prime minister for a spell. I’m saying, though, that he has got something that makes you sit up and pay attention when he starts to speak. Whatever it is, it’s more than just the fact that he’s got a great answer for every question, and while he seems to stay pretty carefully in the NDP message box, it’s the biggest damn message box I’ve ever encountered.

When Mr. Topp passed briefly through Edmonton yesterday, he demonstrated a quality possessed by all good actors – the ability to make the audience suspend disbelief, so that an unprepossessing fellow with a bit of a pot belly actually turns before your eyes – snap! – into a much bigger presence on the stage.

I don’t see anything in his biography that says Mr. Topp himself was actually ever an actor – although as is well known he was the Executive Director of the Toronto Chapter of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists. Maybe he picked something up from hanging around with those guys.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Topp’s extemporaneous remarks and answers to the mostly friendly questions folks in the mostly NDP crowd threw at him had substance. I didn’t hear anything I particularly disagreed with – even on the few tough questions lobbed at him. But then, I doubt I’ll disagree with much of anything that any of the candidates for the federal NDP leadership have to say. Right now they’re preaching to a choir that I sing in.

The analysis I heard was bang on, and enjoyably pithy. On the Harper government’s preference for exporting our jobs down a pipeline to Texas: “We get the smoke, they get the jobs.” On Canada’s massive tax breaks for corporations and the ultra wealthy: “There’s no evidence all of that spending on that tax giveaway has created a single job.” On the PM’s scheme to prorogue Parliament when its members were about to vote non-confidence in his government: “The power to fire the House… a direct attack on responsible government at its root.”

We’ve been drilled for 30 years with the dogma that you can’t even think, let alone say such things aloud. All the while the goalposts kept moving to the right. Well, I think Mr. Topp has it right that Canadians are ready to embrace the idea of economic development in Canada for Canadians, fair taxation for the benefit of all and a sturdy defence of our democracy. Oh, and we should abolish the Senate, too.

That’s supposed to be the substantial stuff. Ditto the facts of his resume: Speaks both official languages well, is proud of his union connections, has worked for unions or the NDP all across the country, is a pretty good journalist, has never been elected as an MP. But I’m not so sure about that. The medium, you know, is said to be the message, which is a smart-aleck professor’s way of saying that sometimes it’s actually the style that’s the substance.

Look at Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a guy who’s got no style and whose substance is, in Mr. Topp’s words, “reckless, mindless, irresponsible.”

Could Mr. Topp best Mr. Harper in a one-on-one debate? Without any doubt. Could Mr. Topp beat the prime minister in a three- or four-way debate with a sly old scrapper like interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae – who also possesses that actor’s ability to make the rest of a room stand still? Quite possibly.

Can he and the NDP withstand a full-blown campaign by the Tory slime machine and their media auxiliary? Well, that is another matter entirely, but at least there’s evidence he can’t be ruled out.

Look, I always go to these things ready to be disappointed, and I usually am. I’m too old a dog for the alter-call ever to work again – in church or at an NDP meeting. But I was favourably impressed with Mr. Topp.

Am I ready to cast my ballot for him? Well, not quite yet. For one thing, I want to notice him and some of the other NDP candidates on the small screen first, and see what I think. Can he successfully bring his stage presence to the tube?

Moreover, since je suis condamné à parler la langue de Shakespeare, I want to know from someone who knows if he can do it all in French as well.

But whatever it is he’s got, Mr. Topp’s thoroughly professional political performance went a long way toward making a believer out of me during his short stopover in Edmonton last night.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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