BT Calgary Blogs

That the “Reverend” Terry Jones is a bigoted crank is now self evident:  that the “Reverend” Terry Jones is a man of limited intelligence equally so:  that the “Reverend” Terry Jones got his parson’s certificate from a cereal box less so, although highly probable.

But the case about or against Jones doesn’t rest with the man himself, and his distorted view of American patriotism versus the devil’s cauldron, as he sees it, of Islam.  Jones, the preacher at that dinky little Florida church,  is in fact a dangerous loose cannon in the post 9-11 world, because he represents an alarming American drift toward extreme right wing attitudes and politics.  Whether he proceeds – or doesn’t - with his mad plot to burn perhaps 200 Muslim Holy Books to ashes, just as the World Trade Center disappeared in the flames of religious fanaticism nine years ago, Jones has already inflicted incalculable damage to his country.  The fires of religious counterattack have started burning with raging fury in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and in fact through most of the Islamic world.    

I’d guess that within the next 48 to 72 hours, the “Reverend” Terry Jones will be largely out of public eye and mind, although perhaps the U.S. media will embark on some internal reflection about granting a certified nutbar his moments on the international stage.  But the deep and very troubling problem he came to represent will linger on, and that’s where we find real cause for worry. 

Ever since 9-11, the United States of America has been like a heavyweight boxer, once a champion, but now reeling about from an unexpected and very  hard shot to the head, blinking and bewildered,  lumbering after imaginary opponents existing only in his addled brain, confused and frightened about a rapid descent from dominance to uncetainty about his  future in the ring. 

It’s an appropriate metaphor, I think, for what’s happened to the United States because ever since the World Trade Center went down, the country has been stumbling around, aimlessly lashing out at phantoms.  The foremost of those, of course, would be the mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, ghostly threats which cost 4,500 American lives and untold billions of dollars.  That kind of expenditure, with no return by way of investment (the classic military-industrial complex, with the industrial component entirely absent) was bound to raise economic difficulties and it did.  And recession was inevitable when the immense cost of waging a futile war was combined with careless, if not criminal neglect of financial regulation with the subsequent housing disaster, job losses, bank failures and corporate bailouts.  Pointless and expensive warfare;  economic mismanagement:  both have seriously damaged, if not destroyed  the protototypical American perception of itself:  a good job for everybody, comfort and ease, a standard of living far in excess of all other nations - all enveloped in the  serene presumption that good things are based on Truth, Justice, and the American Way.  And by majority, Christianity.

The historical U.S. response to uncertainty about itself in difficult circumstances, when demons seem to loom, has been to withdraw, primarily, to religion and faith.  ”In God We Trust” is a mantra found not only on American coinage, but also in the nation’s very heart and soul, and so it’s no great surprise to discover many Americans returning to the arms of their Lord and Saviour.  And it’s certainly no surprise that having done so, they would eschew or in the case of Pastor Jones, denounce all other Gods and especially He who represents Islam.  The 9-11 terrorists.  The infidels.  The Evil.

But the difference between Terry Jones and U.S. citizens  at large is that he spoke up, shouted from his little pulpit, articulated the widespread American uneasiness about Islam, and in fact did so with a religious wrecking ball.   I suspect a great many of his countrymen sympathize, but will not – at least not yet -  publicly endorse Jones and his rantings.  Americans do not wish to be seen as religious zealots and fanatics, and then too the inate sense of American decency, the wish to be tolerant, still prevails.  But it’s under very considerable stress.       

In other words, Terry Jones is the visible riptide, if you like,  of American angst which has been increasingly expressed, for example, by the emergence of the Tea Party, by the astonishing political durability of Sarah Palin, by the ability of a television talk show host named Glenn Beck to attract thousands of people to a Capitol Hill patriotic rally, by Arizona anti-immigration law, by a return in many states to guns in the holster, by incessant partisan fighting among politicians at the expense of sound governance.  The country is not that far removed these days from isolationism, which explains why – from our Canadian perspective - a lot of U.S. congressmen and senators  seem quite content to condemn “dirty oil” from Alberta while paying no attention to the disastrous consequences that would flow from a full-blown embargo. 

And so, nine years onward from Ground Zero, the genetic structure, the DNA of American society has become that of the heavyweight with the scrambled brain.   The nation blunders from one side of the international ring to the other, jabbing and windmilling  – but hitting nothing except its own sense of self-esteem. 

You can be sure of this.  Terry Jones, when he first posed the idea of burning Qu’rans, was intent on doing precisely that, because he is, after all,  a man clothed the the robes of Christian righteousness.   If in the 12th century the crusaders were going about right and proper business by consigning the Arab heathen to hell, then in the 21st he would do the same and allegorically send Muslims off to burn in hell, too.    It was only the intervention, in unison, of the entire brass section at the Pentagon, and President Barack Obama, that prevented him from doing so. 

You can also be sure of another thing.  The United States of America is deeply encased in an identity crisis, which has caused a great nation to lose direction, purpose, and in disturbing measure, common sense.   And if you wish to see the evidence for this, I would present the “Reverend” Terry Jones.  The American populace, by and large, may look upon him as something of a wingnut – but it hasn’t yet labelled him a pariah. 

That’s the problem.

The Alberta government, flailing and on the defensive for the past three years or so about alleged pollution from the oilsands industrial complex, has now taken the hardest blow, so far, against its environmental solar plexus.  Legitimate science, as opposed to mindless capering and stunting by the likes of Greenpeace, has examined the oilsands and found them wanting. 

Now, by citing “legitimate” science I don’t claim its conclusions are correct in whole or in part:  I have no qualifications for such judgement, but I do say Dr. David Schindler from the University of Alberta cannot merely be dismissed an academic crank with no concept of the “real” reasons toxins are burbling from the oilsands into the Athabasca River.  On the contrary:  Schindler and several colleagues have put together an exhaustive analysis which raises serious and worrisome questions about the standard government contention that pollutants flow from natural sources – and not from the industrial plants scattered around the vicinity. 

When Schindler’s research was published this past Monday, Alberta environment minister Rob Renner was dispatched to the public relations sandbags and barbed wire, in order to repel this unsubstantiated and careless musing from academia.  In so many words, Renner reiterated the conventional government wisdom that because the Athabasca flows through an area laden with natural contaminants, well of course there’d be some modest toxic intrusion.  And that wasn’t just his own view:  any number of competent and worthy environmental scientists in government employ said so, and ergo that must be the truth of the matter, and so there. 

Two days later, it became abruptly and abundantly clear that federal environment minister Jim Prentice was having none of “so there.”  He conceded there is now evidence, plain and simple, of scientific “controversy” about industrial pollution leaking into the Athabasca – even though his own federal experts have argued for years, in lockstep with the Alberta environment department, that contaminants such as lead and mercury are naturally occuring. 

Prentice is clearly worried that such soothing balm isn’t good enough.  Not any more.  And so he said, pointedly, that any federal conclusions about the oilsands from now on have to be backed up by better science. 

If that isn’t condemnation of his own department, I don’t know what is.  Prentice didn’t name names but he did point a very large finger – and one of the first people to see it was Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach.  Within hours, Fast Eddie strode to the nearest thicket of microphones and allowed as how of course the provincial government values the conclusions reached by Dr. Schindler, takes them seriously, will evaulate them with the utmost diligence against those of his own environment department and should there be any cause for concern, will act with vigor and determination to correct matters.  You can be sure of that. 

Here’s the thing.  Simply by organizing his impromptu news conference, Stelmach was admitting there is in fact “cause for concern,” and that he also understands – even if well after the horse has galloped out of the environmental barn – that the serene reassurances about natural toxic invasion of the Athabasca no longer, in a manner of speaking, hold water.

One university scientist: one research paper: one federal environment minister.  Between them, they’ve forced the Alberta government into concessions it would not have dreamed were necessary, even last week.  The Stelmachians are now truly caught between oil and a hard place – and the latter is inflicting a great deal of public relations pain. 

Whether there’s an antidote which would permit the oilsands industry to continue basically as is, or even with minor adjustments, remains to be seen because scientific controversy by definition means - to pursue the analogy – there are no immediately available prescriptions. 

But the illness has been diagnosed, and I suspect Ed Stelmach is feeling decidedly unwell.

Now I’m not going to make a whole big deal of this, but the fact is I’m doing an exhilarating new gig down here at Breakfast Television, whose parameters have me out of bed at 3:15 AM, down at the station by 4:30 and then going pretty much full bore until around 10:00. 

It’s been a lifestyle adjustment that caused some dereliction of blog duty, which constant visitors will recall has happened heretofore.  No more:  I guarantee regular posts from this point forward, beginning with some thoughts about goings on around Alberta and the country. 

1.  The Alberta Competitiveness Review.

  I don’t recall that any other province has  conducted a formal, structured “competitiveness review” to figure out why economic activity was moving elsewhere, but it’s happening here because Fast Eddie Stelmach and his governing crowd screwed up, big time. 

  The trouble began, of course, with those changes three years ago to the Alberta Royalty Framework, by which Stelmach proposed to lift millions of dollars from the oil and gas industries.  The whole exercise was enveloped in a kind of ephemeral notion that Alberta residents deserved their “fair share” of resource revenue, but the difficulty was nobody – least of all the Premier – ever defined exactly what “fair share” should be.  So some guy from the lumber business was given the responsibility of figuring it out and came up with a plan which was incontestably the most ill-considered and destructive economic scheme in Alberta since the federal National Energy Program of 1982. 

  Back then, the oil patch nearly foundered – and so it was again in 2007.  The energy industry bailed at high speed to Saskatchewan and British Columbia, where it was welcomed with warmth, but more significantly, with much more flexible tax law and regulatory enclosures.  It was another year, though, before Eddie began to awaken from his imitation of Rip Van Winkle, and ordered his troops to get busy with revisions - to the royalty revisions.  There had been, he quoth, “unintended consequences.”  Those little oversights led to  incessant tinkering and fussing, which in due course brought the royalty structure in Alberta pretty much back to where it had been before the whole stupid business began. 

  But the damage, which was also inflicted in part by the global recession, had been done and so the province began to rack up enormous deficits where only surpluses had prevailed before.  And by last year, Fast Eddie had become fully aroused about the ancillary economic damage besetting Alberta, which in turn prompted him to undertake this  ”competitiveness review.” 

  It would have been entirely unnecessary were it not for that silly idea – culled, incidentally, from both Liberal and NDP policy – to fool around with royalties in the first place.  And it speaks to an issue about which I’ve delivered an observation or two, or three, in blogs past:  the sorry state of governance in Alberta.  It’s aimless and unfocused, directed by a bewildered Premier and cabinet wholly out of their depths, and based principally on the theories of governing they all absorbed when reeves or school board trustees in years gone by. 

  In the meantime we’re about to discover, an hour or so beyond the time of this posting, if things have improved.  Finance minister Ted Morton will sally forth in Edmonton with his projections for the coming fiscal year.  Experience instructs us we should fear the worst, but miracles do happen on occasion.  Let us pray. 

2.  The Long Form Census

  Enough, already.  Census regulation as it’s been until now would have Canadian citizens thrown into jail for refusing to abide?  The feds wished to know how often, and under what circumstances, I chose to mow the lawn, and tend the garden?  Wished to know in exquisite detail my financial and investment status?  (They get that every year with my tax filings, and those of my wife).   

  The Harper government is intent, still, on dumping this intrustion into the personal lives of Canadians, or at least getting rid of the requirement that filling out the long census is mandatory.  Do it, or else. 

  I don’t like being told what to do, “or else,” in matters that reek of Orwell and Big Brother.  Tax law is one thing:  I get that, but statistical busybodying is another.  I’m confident Harper will remain determined to henceforth spare us the pain. 

  By the way, in case Statistics Canada remains interested, my origins are Anglo-Saxon by way of Ireland, and I live in Alberta, but anything else about me is my business.  Not yours. 

  So proceed, Mr. Prime Minister, and consign the mandatory long form census to the trash can of dumb policies.   

  Thank you, Sir.

Canadian taxpayers were taught an important political lesson this past week, but it’s laden with irony because the instructor, the professor if you will, was those taxpayers themselves.

When an opinion poll reveals that 80 percent of the populace suspects or in fact believes  members of parliament and by extension senators, too, are guilty of claiming expenses which violate the rules, it’s no surprise that politicians would react very quickly.  Not to put too blunt a point on it, but the Decima poll, to summarize it another way, discovered that four of five Canadians figure their elected and appointed representatives may be petty thieves or crooks, or actually are.  To say the poll results attracted the undivided attention of MPs and senators would be understatement of the first order.

This all has to do, as you’re doubtless aware, with the insistence by parliamentarians, aided and abetted by Prime Minister Harper, Liberal leader Michael (Iffy) Ignatieff, and the unctuous Jack Layton of the NDP, that personal expenses are their business and auditor general Sheila Fraser need not worry herself about taking a look at the books.  All is well, they said:  we’re upstanding and worthy politicians, they said:  the Board of Internal Economy (BOIE) takes care of such matters, they said:  Ms. Fraser cannot be serious about delving into our trivial little spending habits, they said.

(It’s always been thus.  Back in the 1980s the Commons Sergeant at Arms, a fellow named Gus Cloutier, quietly set about establishing an exclusive restaurant on Parliament Hill with the tacit knowledge and consent of the BOIE but without leave from the house finance committee or for that matter anybody else in authority.   It was only when the speaker of the day, Jeanne Sauve, intervened that Cloutier’s culinary hideaway was exposed, and then shut down).

In any case, let it be noted that in the current controversy, the glee club of self-righteous protest and pleadings of honesty was in full voice on parliament hill……before the Decima poll results were released.  But now?  Well, my oh my:  how the tide has turned because we have a full-blown political Dunkerque underway in Ottawa, with our previously haughty politicians in stampeding retreat from their original positions of defense and denial.

But they’re reversing course not because of sudden pangs of conscience, or because of a belated comprehension that expense money is in fact taxpayer money.  They’re in precipitous abjuration because the Canadian public has delivered, by vast majority, a resounding vote of no confidence in their alleged spending habits.  We’ve said we don’t trust you lot, and we want answers provided not by your little BOIE, but by independent analysis from an independent examiner.

Clearly that manner of external financial review is not what we get from the BOIE, which is chaired by the house of commons speaker and which is populated entirely  —  you guessed it  —  by members of parliament and senators.  The foxes preside over the financial affairs of the parliamentary chicken coop.

The expense account imbroglio detonated a couple of weeks ago when Ms. Fraser suggested the operational costs of our two parliamentary institutions  —  commons and senate  —  should perhaps be subject to scrutiny.  After all, she said, the total bill is $533 million dollars a year (half a billion in short phrasing) and surely the politicians would have no quarrel with perusal of who’s been spending how much on what.

But Fraser’s subsequent and formal request that the ledgers be opened to audit was abruptly turned aside by the BOIE, which claimed it makes absolutely certain, pretty much guarantees actually, that personal MP expenses are placed under microscopic review with every nickel and dime accounted for, nothing amiss, no larking around with claims, you can bet your life on that.  And then there was the observation from the commons benches that there can’t possibly be financial  impropriety in a $4 cup of coffee here and there.  MPs do have to provide “refreshments” from time to time for visiting constituents and guests, you see.

(By way of context, members of parliament earn $157,731,00 annually.  Committee chairs, and there are a good many of them, are given a supplementary allowance which takes their yearly pay to $168,896.00, while cabinet ministers also earn an extra reward which delivers an annual salary of $233,247.00).

There aren’t all that many Canadians earning almost $158K a year, never mind $233K, and  it’s a sure bet the great majority of them, whatever the salary, buy their own coffee.  Perhaps with that in mind, Ms. Fraser’s rejoinder to the java reference was immediate and caustic.  “I’ve got better things to do than look for $4 cups of coffee.”  And furthermore, she said MPs and senators should not be afraid to have their expenses audited if it’s true the BOIE rules and regulations are as effective as everybody on the hill says they are.

In the two weeks since Ms. Fraser broached the notion of an audit, the issue has gained very firm traction, which of course is why our elected and appointed representatives are now running at flank speed for cover.  There’s little if any doubt an audit will proceed, and it’ll go well beyond morning lattes.  Tellingly, we’ve reached that point because of one single factor:  the Decmia poll, which clearly advised MPs and senators we don’t accept their cooing assurances about how the clandestine Board of Internal Economy has everything well in hand.

Here’s the broader instruction arising. Canadian citizens, Canadian taxpayers, have a great deal of political power   —  if they choose to exercise it and in the Decima poll, that’s precisely what they did.  For the first time in years hostile voter opinion has forced the sad sacks occupying commons and senate seats to completely and utterly reverse a previous position.

The lessons, two of them, are clear.  First, we have before us a significant victory for democratic process in Canada because the audit controversy has proven beyond question that when the electorate pipes up in protest, en masse, politicians actually do pay heed.  And second, the people of this country have now fashioned a template by which they might in future effect genuine change in Canadian politics with not a whole lot of effort.  In this case, all they had to do was answer the phone and tell a Decima researcher exactly what they think.  In the wider expanse, they need only take themselves into the voting booths the next time around, sharpen the pencils, and then in a manner of speaking stick them into the hides of incumbent politicians who would dare claim our money is well and usefully spent on coffee.

We can only hope, and while it may spring eternal I’m afraid in my case it’s faint.  Voter participation in the last federal election was at an historical nadir:  only 42 percent of Canadians bothered to turn out, and over the years one of the principal reasons cited for increasing electoral inattentiveness has been well, my one vote won’t make any difference, so what’s the use?

I’ve always thought it a feeble argument, a weak defense for abandonment of  democratic responsibility.   But the audit controversy has done one thing, if no other:  it has caused Canadian citizens to rebel against the arrogant hive who thought they’d get away with lurking in secrecy behind the financial self-appraisal of the BOIE.  I say again:  in so doing we taught ourselves a valuable lesson, but it’ll take permanent root only if we decide to go to class full time.

As for the $4 cup of coffee, perhaps we should wonder about how many all told?   Ten or 12, 10 or 12 thousand, 100 or 120 thousand?  Ms. Fraser, even if uninterested in a single mug, may be inclined in summation to tote up the aggregate.  Then we might really get mad as hell and not take it any more and teach a second, more permanent lesson to the parliament hill latte lifters.

I’ve received an agreeable and rewarding number of emails, comments, and phone calls over the past several weeks inquiring about the absence of material in this space.  I have no wish to whicker and drone about a work schedule here which changed to some degree  –  although it did.  And I’ll not dwell on a couple of other issues which in combination caused abandonment of the weekly blog  –  although they did.

None of that.  I shall instead merely proclaim…..I’m back.

Brian Mason describes himself as an eternal optimist.  If he weren’t, he says, he would long since have walked away from  his job as leader of the Alberta NDP Party,  and found something else to do.

But he soldiers on, one of two NDP members of the provincial legislature, one of a succession of leaders whose collective accomplishment over the years has been to maintain the virtual anonymity of the party in a province which has always voted toward the right or centre right of the political spectrum.  In all probability it’ll do so again as the Wildrose Alliance rapidly emerges from fringe to genuine contender against the floundering troupe posing as a government under Premier Ed Stelmach.

Mason and his lone colleague in the legislature, Rachel Notley, both hold ridings in Edmonton which is where the NDP has occasionally journeyed to actual election victory.  But as party leader, Mason is obliged every now and again to venture forth into territory which historically has shown no interest at all in the New Democrats, and so it was that he surfaced in Calgary the other day to deliver the word.

He attracted a couple of dozen or so ferociously loyal and dedicated seniors who listened attentively as the weary theorems of NDP paradise echoed around the room.  Put the blocks to big oil and make sure all of us Albertans  –  as true owners of  natural resources  –  get our fair share (whatever that is) of energy revenues.  Do not under any circumstances permit the slightest move toward private health care because that would inevitably lead to Americanization of medical services and we all know what that would mean.  (No matter that for at least ten years, the Alberta government and the feds, too, have strenuously insisted the American brand of health care isn’t the preferred model, and would therefore not be the consequence of modest private delivery.  Alberta and Canada would instead adopt the best practices of several European nations, primarily Austria, France, and Sweden to develop a system that would work, be affordable and above all provide immediate access, or very close to it, to both general and specialized care.  Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, in particular, is an advocate of the European experience and has compiled a good deal of research on it).

But Mason insists, as he always has, on raising the phantasma of thousands, if not millions of Canadians without health care insurance, ensnared in a system catering exclusively to the wealthy and utterly disinterested in the poor.  Oh dread and dire:  that’s a pathway we must not follow:  public health now, public health forever:  and  together with all  the other party slogans and verses, Mason offers up the left wing psalm extolling the joys of eternal peace, prosperity, and good socialist government for all.

That said, there are a couple of things about Brian Mason which suggest he might surprise a few people when the next election is called  –  presumably in 2012.  NDP poll numbers are improving slightly, although one might argue twice nothing is still nothing, but there has been a discernable upward trend.  (I hasten to add the polls don’t forecast the remotest prospect of a  party breakthrough in Alberta, let alone outright victory.  Not in this province).

But Mason, whom I encounter rarely because he’s mostly in Edmonton and I’m down here in Calgary, demonstrates a not inconsiderable knack for on-the-spot, at-the-podium communication which cannot hurt when he gets into the electoral ruck and run against Stelmach, Liberal leader David Swann, and even Smith.  For openers, he uses a wireless microphone with which he strolls behind and to each side of the dais.  He’s comfortable and imparts an aura of confidence, even warmth, and when speaking to his sturdy elders the other day referred to no prepared speech, no notes, no talking points.  He was conversational and informal, seemed to be off the cuff, and for Mason that could well be an asset when locked in election combat versus Stelmach and Swann, both leaden and uninspiring performers on the stump.

More significantly, maybe, is evidence I’ve not heretofore seen that Mason has a fairly sharp sense of humour.  Somebody in the audience, lamenting what he described as the persistent lack of  coverage by the mainstream media  (we were in the back of the hall and apparently had gone unseen by the questioner) asked why the NDP and its leader aren’t embracing social media.

That, replied Mason, isn’t so:  he’s on Facebook, the party has a website, a number of provincial constituency offices have websites, they’re right into social media although……well, he’s not on Twitter, doesn’t tweet, doesn’t like little meaningless 140-character squirts signifying nothing and so twitter and tweet he does not.  But on the other hand maybe he should although then again he finds Twitter sort of disconcerting so maybe not.

So after the meeting I asked him:  “Why don’t you like Twitter?”

(Pause).  “Why don’t I like Twitter?  (Pause).  I don’t know.  It just….it’s just….it just doesn’t turn my crank.  (Pause).  Y’know, I like Facebook, I really do.  My staff is pushing me to get on Twitter but….ah….I’m just not comfortable with it.  But we’ll see.  We’ll see.  I’m gonna keep practicing.”

I put it to Mason that he was admitting to being a bit of a neanderthal with respect to social media.

“I know.  I know I am, but……oh well.”

The foregoing doesn’t read on paper or on a blog for that matter nearly as well as it sounded and looked on television delivery, because Mason had an amused glint in his eye and quite clearly enjoyed portraying himself as not quite out of the cave, just yet, in terms of social media.  He was self-deprecating and charming during his confession of electronic wariness and for my money his responses were ideally suited to questions which had been framed with the precise intention of revealing a flair for humour   –  not that I expected to discover one.

By comparison, I suspect Ed Stelmach would have said he prefers the old two piece phone (the box on the wall and the cradle ear piece that looks like an inverted candlestick) at the Lamont general store.  And I suspect David Swann would have embarked on a thesis about the performance evaluation matrix of various social media devices, relative to the ambient light available at any given time to the user.  But Mason caught the drift right off the bat, on a question he doubtless did not expect, and thereby revealed himself to be a man of appreciable wit and media agility.  Conventional media, that is.

Allow me to be clear, as in crystal.  God forbid that Mason and his tiny band of followers ever expand to the point of assuming governance in Alberta, or that they even reach legislature strength in numbers which would give them the balance of power.  But I will say this:  if politics in this province needs one thing, it needs some real people.  Brian Mason, I would suggest,  is one of them and it wouldn’t hurt to have a few more around.

Just so long as not too many are romping about the province waving NDP banners.  If that were the case, then I guess I’d have to ask Mason why he’s so blinkered and hidebound about the energy industry which after all is the principal economic driver of the province.  Mason often sounds a lot like a union leader in the desolate slag heaps of Wales oh, about 80 years ago, and you have to ponder sometimes whether he’s figured out what century it is.   He’s a throwback to other days and times, and in fact the  combined NDP headquarters and meeting hall in Calgary is adorned with portraits of Tommy Douglas and David Lewis and Frank Underhill and all the great warriors of a half century and more ago.  But it seems to me if those men are Brian Mason’s role models, he could do a lot worse  —  so even as he pursues  political dreams which are largely irrelevant in modern society, my sense of  Mason is that he’s nonetheless a pretty genuine and decent fellow.    

In the meantime, I expect to see him Twittering, and fairly soon, too.

The parallels between two governments, that of Alberta premier Ed Stelmach today and of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker almost a half century ago, differ by circumstance and dimension, and are accordingly inexact, but they’re intriguing nonetheless and worth brief examination.

By February of 1963, Diefenbaker   –  who just five years earlier had led the Progressive Conservative Party to the most triumphal parliamentary majority in Canadian history  –  was conning the rapidly sinking wreckage of a government riven by cabinet revolt and backbench disarray.

With the approach of February 2010, Ed Stelmach  –  who slightly less than two years ago led the Conservative party to its most triumphal majority, bar two others, in Alberta history  –  is conning the rapidly sinking wreckage of a government riven by disintegrating public favour, with resultant evidence of backbench restlessness and a palpable degree of uneasiness among party executives and backroom plotters.

Because of ferocious loyalty to Diefenbaker from rural Ontario, in part, but primarily from western Canada Diefenbaker held onto his leadership  –  but not his Prime Ministerial chair  –  for another four years before he was finally forced out.

Conventional wisdom has it that ferocious loyalty to the Tory brand (although perhaps not in the same measure to Stelmach himself) will assure his relatively easy survival as Alberta premier, and Conservative party leader.

It appears conventional wisdom is now disappearing out the door.   Stelmach’s popularity and more ominously that of his government is steadily ebbing not only in Calgary and southern Alberta, but also in Edmonton where opposition forces have historically had little more than a toehold, and in every rural sector of the province.  Stelmach’s own approval rating is the lowest of all Canadian premiers and territorial leaders and with that the internal revolt has now begun.

If it’s true that past lessons unlearned will cause history to repeat itself, then the Diefenbaker precedent (and that of Ralph Klein) is beginning to fill Stelmach’s rear view mirror.  That said, only a fool would claim the defections of two Conservative MLAs to the rapidly germinating Wildrose Alliance party are in themselves definitive evidence of insurrection in full flight, but wise observers would suggest the breach in the dike is now wholly exposed.  The question then is whether Stelmach, the Alberta version of Hans Brinker, has enough fingers to stem the flow.

Based on the lurching gait of his leadership thus far, I would think probably not.  It’s all very well for Stelmach to lay blame for his plight at the feet of a global recession which he could not have foreseen and over which his government had no control.  But the smooth suits in Calgary oil and gas towers aren’t buying that for a moment.  They’re still infuriated by the premier’s revised, ill-considered, and frequently amended royalty framework for oil and natural gas  –  and Tory bagmen wishing to ensure the party counting house remains full of cash are evidently finding a lot of energy executives unwilling to ante up.

It’s also incomprehensible to thinking people in Alberta that deficit financing, after a decade of surpluses totalling more than $40 billion dollars would now be the financial order of the day, and more than likely for the next three years.  But it is, partly because the government, without blinking an eye, overturned legislation which prohibited deficit financing as a matter of law.  The Stelmachians said they had no choice:  the planetary recession, you see, and so we’ll have to go into the red by the billions.

In the broad scan of politics  energy patch ire and deficit financing, taken together, should at worst be a troublesome burr under Stelmach’s saddle  –  if there were visible signs of competence in other areas such as health care reform and education, and if Stelmach could articulate them with reasonable coherence.    Trouble is there aren’t and he can’t, so serious danger now brews in front of the Premier because the people who really count  –  Alberta voters  –  appear in larger and larger numbers to be losing confidence in him.  What’s happening brings to mind the ditty about how “if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it is a duck.”  In Stelmach’s case if he “walks like a stumbler and talks like a stumbler, then he is a stumbler.”

Even at that, though, a record of  trudging from one unpolished speech to another, and thence from one hamfisted policy (no more free soap, toiletries, or snacks for mentally ill patients) to another ($11 million dollars carved from funding for people with developmental disabilities) would heretofore have probably had no impact because the traditional Alberta opposition parties are altogether inconsequential.  The province has been a one-party playpen for the Tories for years, but that dynamic is now altering quickly and radically with the emergence of an opposition party which isn’t really a party yet, has no record of electoral success save a single MLA, is led by a woman with no political experience  –  and yet is taking Ed Stelmach to the opinion poll cleaners.

This would of course be the Wildrose Alliance and its leader, Danielle Smith.  She’s the beneficiary of those two Conservative defectors, Rob Anderson and former cabinet minister Heather Forsyth.  Their signatures on Alliance membership cards mean the party has gone from one seat in the legislature to three, which is one more than the NDP and only six fewer than the Liberals.  And it’s all  happened in slightly less than three months.

I’ve had the occasional chat about all this with Tory backroom types in Calgary, one of whom was publicly defiant about Stelmach just before the premier’s mandatory leadership review last November.   These chaps are undoubtedly out of favour with the Stelmachians and in fact are regarded as party pariahs, but their political dials are still finely turned to Tory frequencies.  Their view is unanimous:  Smith, notwithstanding her inexperience, is off to an impressive start and absolutely must be taken seriously because people are becoming convinced she’s everything Stelmach is not.  Such thinking may not be entirely accurate and it may not be fair, but it does generate that vital commodity known as momentum.  Smith has it,  Stelmach doesn’t, and every political novice in the country knows if a leader loses it, getting it back is next to impossible.

(In the long and agonizing fall of John Diefenbaker, he had without question lost momentum by 1963, but there was no one around to gather it up.  Lester Pearson, the Liberal leader of the day, had very little going for him except a reputation for astute diplomacy.  A politician he was not:  he was an insipid speaker with no ability to engage and hold an audience:  his television appearances, back in those single-channel days, had viewers turning off their sets from one end of the country to the other.   In every respect, Danielle Smith  –  so far at any rate  –  has been the exact opposite).

But for the moment, at least, Stelmach seems to be unaware of the gathering storm on his horizon, because his observations about Smith, the Alliance, and the two erstwhile Tories who now sit in opposition to their former colleagues have revealed no sense of urgency, no hint of foreboding.  Albertans must work together, he says, and the Tory party must work together too, with determination and unity.  And oh, by the way, the cabinet shuffle which was supposed to be the first block of the rebuilding has been put off for a while because of travel plans.

The premier nuzzles his soother and urges us to do the same.  The government is close to finishing its “competitiveness review,” which will set things right in the oil patch and the forthcoming budget, he says, will demonstrate to one and all that Stelmach and his cabinet have things all figured out and the province will pretty soon be strong and rich and equipped once again with the Alberta Advantage.

That would suggest a Premier somnolent in the land of Nod, because when the money stopped coming in and when the Tory establishment decided that John Diefenbaker  –  notwithstanding his undiminished communication skills  –  had to go, he went.

In Alberta, the money flow slackens, the party structure weakens, and Ed Stelmach  –  unlike the old Chief  –  cannot relate to the public.  Faced with perhaps the most serious challenge to his governance so far, and to nearly four decades of Tory supremacy in Alberta, the Premier issued a written statement by way of his office subalterns.  A note from his vacation hideaway.  It was from that we learned how everybody has to work together, how the Tories need to unite  –  while Smith and the Wildrose Alliance were in every newspaper headline and on every radio/television newscast in the province, non-stop.

(By the way, Stelmach got 77.4 percent of delegate support at that leadership review two months ago, which at the time appeared to be a reasonably solid endorsement.  Now, it looks as if it was actually another crack in the Hans Brinker dike, but there’s not much evidence yet that the premier has figured out he needs to get more than one finger into it, in a hurry).

It’s not too late, but nearly so, I think.  I’m mindful of political scientists, a good many of them actually, who say Stelmach does in fact have time on his side, and moreover he has the machinery of government at his beck and call to clear away the difficulties confronting his government’s reputation, and then get the message out that he’s done so.  But it may just be that very government machinery itself is under public suspicion, and if that’s the case, the Premier’s comeback will not leave the starting blocks.

Ed Stelmach, meet the ghost of John Diefenbaker.

“In politics nothing is contemptible.”

Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister (1874-1880)

  At the risk of declaring the obvious, one thing is for sure:  Disraeli wasn’t living in contemporary Ottawa.  But if he were, it’s likely he would alter his view because Canadian politics has in fact descended to the contemptible. 

  How else can one explain the appearance earlier this week of what was described as a cartoon challenge on the Liberal Party of Canada website?  Humourists near and far, neophyte and professional, were invited to submit amusing photo interpretations of Prime Minister Harper busily ignoring the dreary Copenhagen global warming summit, otherwise known as the global gong show.  (More ominously, the Copenhagen rhetoric has of late become a conniving con game, formulated by developing nations  in order to extract vast sums of money  –  reparations, the lesser nations now call them  —  from the wealthier countries, Canada among them).   

  Setting aside for the moment the bothersome little sidebar  –  for the Grits   –  that Harper is actually attending the Danish sham, and further that the Prime Minister is acutely aware this carnival has devolved into incessant bickering about how the third world ransom note should be composed, the mere facts of the Liberal presentation were (are) in themselves a denial of Disraeli’s assertion. 

  The cartoon chucklefest attracted a whole raft of submissions, all of which were reviewed by Grit deep thinkers bunkered in Ottawa, and some of which  –  the best of the best, we were advised   –  were then posted on the party website, with assurances a winner would in due course be declared.  In all, there were 75 finalists.

  One of them was based on a photograph taken in November, 1963, by Robert H. Jackson of the Dallas Times-Herald.   Jackson pressed his shutter at the precise moment a sallow Dallas club owner named Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald:  the picture caught Oswald’s face contorted in pain, as the bullet ripped into his abdomen and inflicted a mortal wound.   

  Oswald, of course, was about to be formally charged with the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which if anything darkens the enclosure in which the Liberal party of Canada now cavorts.  The Grits found it amusing, apparently, that one of the cartoon entrants had superimposed Stephen Harper’s head over that of Lee Harvey Oswald.  I take it the effect of this was to produce gales of laughter among the Liberals serving as cartoon editors and gatekeepers, because against the background of a murdered United States president, and his alleged assassin subsequently shot and killed for all the world to see, the Grits went right ahead and published the doctored photograph on the party webpage.  

  Funny stuff, what?  Stephen Harper taking a slug to the gut.  For sure this one has to be in the running for best cartoon of all.  (Never mind a second image, also posted on the Liberal web page,  in which Harper was shown in what might best be described as an intimate moment with a dairy cow).   

  With apologies to Disraeli, these two cartoons taken together (but especially the Oswald effort on its own) precisely define the word “contemptible.”  And they further strengthen my view that the Liberal Party of Canada is spectacularly unqualified to govern this country, with this cartoon challenge as prima facie evidence.   Actually, there’s more to it than just this pair of grotesque parodies and I’ll get to that a bit further on in this essay. 

  To continue:  belatedly, the Liberals removed the two “cartoons” after being overrun with protest from the blogosphere, from the mainstream media, from the public, and by his studied silence, from Stephen Harper, too:  he would not, his spokesman said, dignify such rubbish with a comment. 

  But in the internet age, to remove images from an owned and operated website is to not remove them at all.  That’s another element of modern society the Liberals don’t seem to grasp:  that the web world is in many respects an anomaly of the old academia axiom that to survive in ivied halls you must “publish or perish.”    The Grits don’t seem to have figured out that if you publish stupid or distasteful or offensive or gross material on the internet these days you damn well will perish because there’s no going back, no retrieval, and the twitching corpse of Liberal public relations strategy in Ottawa is the latest evidence.   It’s incomprehensible that party factotums would in the first instance approve such ghastly samples of so-called humour, and would in the second post them  –  but they did, after no doubt vetting the material with quill pens scratching away by the glow of a guttering candle.  One suspects their communications stupor was hastened by several flagons of mead.   

  But even though the Oswald cartoon, which if nothing else was a clear incitement to violence against the Prime Minister of Canada, and the cow have been excised, the stench of  Liberal “humour” lingers on.  That’s because of the remaining final submissions still decorating the Liberal Party website, three of them  –  on the pretext of slagging Harper  –  are in fact denigrating Alberta and all of us who live here.  The images paint us as thick witted yokels and rubes, hillbillies, fat and happy in a bleak wasteland fouled by oilsands pollution, complacent and uncaring about the fetid mess we’re visiting upon the rest of the country, and therefore not especially good citizens of the greater and pristine Canada. 

  For my money, this anti-Alberta lampooning, vicious and with no basis in fact, is the real toxicity, the real bacteria of the Liberal web page.  For me, the Grits bring on political acid reflux, because while they endorse demeaning insults against Alberta, they also claim to  represent the entire nation, and presume in due course to once again become its government. 

  God spare us the thought, never mind the possibility, because in reality this is a party of slender and reckless thinking, uninterested in national unity except as it pertains to Quebec, and content to let wannabe cartoonists malign a major province which just so happens to be among the dominant propellants of the entire Canadian economy. 

  All of this is proof positive, in my estimation, that the Liberal Party of Canada is now populated by elitist parvenus wholly capable of behaviour which cannot, even by the most generous of interpretations, be described as anything but disgusting.

  With that in mind, I’m further drawn to the sagacity of Benjamin Disraeli, who while he may not have foreseen the dreadful wash of sewage we call democratic politics in present day Canada, was nonetheless right on the mark with another of his observations 135 or so years ago. 

“The hare-brained chatter of irresponsible frivolity.”

  They way I look at it, that’s a phrase which as far as it goes neatly sums up this entire cartoon caper.  But it doesn’t go quite far enough, which takes us back to that other entry  from the Disraeli political logbook. 

   Contemptible. 

  Once upon a very long time ago the editor of the Saskatoon Star Phoenix, a man named Eric Knowles, saw fit to hire a young and untried kid as a general reporter, and instructed the city editor to assign a string of minor local stories about a road getting paved here, a few trees added to a park there, and so forth.  For those and other tales, the kid was paid $32 dollars a week, which at the time was the minimum wage in Saskatchewan.

  After a couple of months or so, the city editor declared he’d observed some modest signs of progress, so the kid would henceforth be placed on the police beat.  And furthemore, the city editor suggested if there were continued evidence of emerging ability, then better things might well be in store:  city hall for example, or perhaps even an opportunity to cover the provincial legislature in Regina.  Expense account, hotel, exotic indeed. 

  But the police beat lasted a long time because the kid went for it like bees to the pollen, and forgot all about city halls and legislatures.  He learned to like and respect cops, learned to appreciate the sometimes difficult choices they had to make even in a smallish city of 50,000 or thereabouts, learned there was a seamy underbelly in Saskatoon which was largely unknown to the general public because as the founder of the Metropolitan London Police, Sir Robert Peel, once said “the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.”  The kid learned the cops were dealing with it, all right, every day and night. 

  I’ve never forgotten those times and never lost my appreciation for police officers, but I have to admit it’s under severe strain these days because what seems to have happened to the RCMP. 

  There was a time when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was considered one of the finest law enforcement agencies in the world.  Its recruitment and training standards were of the highest order, its public image was without stain or tarnish and its commanding officers were wholly removed from the distasteful realities of politics, and political expediency. 

  In recent years, though, the force leadership has deteriorated, in my view, to an artful and often conspiratorial cabal, with its primary motivation to no longer serve and protect, but seemingly to simply protect itself:  cover its tracks and butt.   

  For instance, the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport in October, 2007.  He was a man who had wanted to settle in Canada because, I’m thinking, of an assumption that among other things the federal police force here would be far removed from the sometimes ominous menace of the policja in Poland.  Mr. Dziekanski didn’t live long enough to find out if this was true, though, because after he’d spent ten hours sweating and confused in an airport holding room, he was tasered to death by four RCMP officers who made no effort, none at all, to speak to or reason with him, or to discover precisely what was going on. 

  They shot him less than 30 seconds after arriving in the holding room, with a weapon which had been conclusively shown in past episodes to be occasionally lethal.  But they just shot him and then got their heads together to tidy up and mesh the strands of testimony which they were to present to a subsequent inquiry. 

  The results of that inquiry by the RCMP Commissioner of Public Complaints, Paul Kennedy, are now before us and they should be of concern to us all.  Essentially, Kennedy says evidence from the four cops was simply not credible, particuarly when compared with bystander video which clearly showed they just walked in and opened up with the tasers.  Five times they shot Dziekanski, even as he writhed in agony on the floor and even as he began to go into the cardiac arrest which killed him. 

  Kennedy says the RCMP response to his findings will be a “defining moment” for the force, and in my opinion he’s correct because this was by no means an isolated case.  But so far, the RCMP has retreated to the bunkers, refused comment, said it would be inappropriate to speak about Dziekanski’s death before another inquiry has published its conclusions and recommendations.  That won’t happen until next year, which would suggest the RCMP hopes this forthcoming analysis will be less critical than Kennedy’s, and further that maybe the current public discomfort about Dziekanski will have abated. 

  Now if this had been a single case of RCMP wrongdoing or ineptitude, or even one of a sparse few, then the last thing you’d see would be a critical commentary in this space.  But consider the following, all within the last 15 years. 

• a federal police force unable to foresee or detect a Greenpeace invasion of Parliament Hill, or to then offer an explanation of how it happened: 
• cops unable to spot an intruder on the lawn and then right inside the hallways of 24 Sussex Drive, which just happens to be the residence of the Prime Minister of Canada.  The PM at the time, Jean Chretien, and his wife were inside and asleep when all this was going on. 
•   an RCMP commissioner forced to resign because of inaccurate testimony to a House of Commons committee.  That same commissioner, Guiliano Zaccardelli, had earlier been found responsible for a “fundamental breach of trust” in connection with misuse of RCMP pension funds. 

  On training and standards: 

• four comparatively inexperienced officers, one with barely a month in uniform, shot and killed by a mentally unbalanced farmer near Mayerthorpe, Alberta: 
• two young constables killed while on duty, isolated and alone with no backup in the far north: 
• two more killed by a shooter in Saskatchewan: 
• a 22-year-old prisoner in custody at the Houston, B.C. detachment office, shot in the back of the head during what was described as a struggle with a cop: 
• another man shot to death while in the holding cells in Pincher Creek, Alberta. 

  None of these events is reassuring and none of them point to a police service which decides on lethal force only as a last resort.  And certainly, not much in the recent history of the RCMP speaks to the slightest command concern about ensuring to the highest degree possible the safety of its officers, either by training them for situations such as Mayerthorpe or by redesigning policy for cops on remote postings where help is a very long way away. 

  I’ve known a lot of police officers in my time, I’ve hung out with them and had more than the occasional beer with them, and I can tell you this:  the RCMP veterans, the old pros now retired and watching their beloved force descend into politcal spin, obfuscation, coverup, denial, and above all what the complaints commissioner described as a “massively inert” bureaucracy, are in utter despair. 

  But they won’t say anything in public, or at least very few of them will, because they’ll tell you it’d be pointless and would cause the current leadership to say well, they’re just old geezers and they don’t understand what policing is all about nowadays, and they’re just aging old timers with nothing better to do than grouse and complain  about how they’d sure have done things better,  and besides you have to understand that police work has changed. 

  I’m not arguing with that and the veterans don’t argue with it either.  Theyre just saying, and I’m saying it hasn’t changed for the better. 

  I haven’t the slighest doubt that were he alive today, Robert Dziekanski would concur.  Unless of course he’d gone back to Poland, where perhaps  law enforcement isn’t so bad, after all.

  It was back around midsummer when Ed Stelmach squelched all the chatter among his cabinet ministers about the possibility, if not probability of tax increases to counter the worsening Alberta deficit.  Among the cabinet types who’d openly mused that raising taxes would indeed be a point of discussion, if only in a very preliminary manner, were finance minister Iris Evans and treasury board president Lloyd Snelgrove. 

  The premier strode into the government media room in Calgary, accompanied by his two errant ministers, and proceeded to deliver a monologue which put both of them in their place. 

  “There will be no new taxes, period,” quoth Stelmach, “so don’t talk about it.”  The ministerial duo, one on either side of the premier, stood mute and chastened and since that day have said not a word about taxes.  It was an abrupt and forceful and highly public dressing down by Stelmach, not only of Evans and Snelgrove, but anyone else in the Conservative cabinet and caucus who might dare to henceforth mutter about raising taxes. 

  And when fast Eddie had concluded his remarks, he walked purposefully from the room, with Evans and Snelgrove trailing along like waterbugs in his wake.  One suspects they were committing to memory the mantra of George Bush # 1:  “Read my lips:  no new taxes.”

  As it happens, George Bush #1 hastily abandoned his promise when conditions in the American economy were clearly spelled out for him, but here in Alberta Snelgrove and Evans, along with the entire Stelmach crew, have apparently absorbed the message from the boss and now spend their days devoting themselves to reduced spending. 

  So let us deliver credit where credit is due, even if a good many critics still contend the Stelmachians are too late to the table of restraint, and laying too little upon it.  Perhaps so, but Snelgrove and Evans recently appeared once again in the Calgary media hall, Evans to present the third quarter fiscal update for the current year, and Snelgrove to offer fresh evidence the government is responding to the unremitting gloom of its numbers. 

  Cue the confession.  “We were at the all-you-can-eat buffet for ten years,” said Snelgrove, “and Albertans were lined up with us.”  In other words, the government was pigging out on spending, urged on by cities and towns large and small whose governing officials wanted in on the feast.  “I don’t think,” continued Snelgrove, “the government did anything more than what Albertans were looking for.  When you were out on the election campaign, no one said ‘please leave my town out for a new school or road widening, or a new hospital’”

  And then Snelgrove admitted the government, confronted by those incessant demands to spend like sailors numbed by grog  ”could have been a bit more prudent.”  And he even agreed that Stelmach’s ministers, and before them the Ralph Klein ministers, had pretty much lost control of financial oversight to the bureaucrats. 

  But Snelgrove proclaimed those days are over.  The Stelmachians, under orders from the Premier himself, have already pared about $430 million dollars from spending by tidying up bits and pieces of administrative overlap, and they’re promising another $2 billion dollar spending reduction in the budget for next year. 

  That’s a fair whack of money, except when compared with deficit projections which still exceed $4 billion.  But they’re whittling and assure us they’re about to lop  –  which would suggest the buffet table has been pretty much cleared away and the menu is now prix fixe instead of a la carte.  Snelgrove and his colleagues have audibly exhaled, and relieved themselves, it seems, of their financial indigestion. 

  But here’s the thing.  Snelgrove insists, and there’s no reason to disbelieve him, that Ed Stelmach issued stern orders during his very first cabinet meeting, in December 2006, that his ministers were to get a grip on government finances.  Above all, they were to rid Alberta of the wild fiscal pendulum which would swing on the one hand toward prodigious spending during the good times, and axe-swinging cuts during the bad.

  I have several observations about all of this.  To begin with, I understand the politics of government spending, especially when every municipal reeve and small town mayor in Alberta (and the big city leaders, too) demands a share of  resource boom boodle.  I understand too how the bureaucracy can get control of government money, especially if cabinet ministers are distracted by leadership conventions, and elections, and other such sideshows.  

  But I also understand that competent, assured governance (Margaret Thatcher in the early years springs to mind) demands in turn that premiers and cabinet ministers must be resolutely disciplined.  They have to learn how to say “no,” to constituent pleadings for money, especially in boom or buffet times when their view of the future tends to compress to the electoral exigencies of the present.  Spread the cash around, buy re-election, and forget about the bust which will assuredly come.  And of course, come it has, and so we’ll now see if austerity is to be a question of government expediency dictated by the moment   —  or long term policy arising from hard lessons learned.

  The critical chapter in the tale, however, is this:  Ed Stelmach has said repeatedly he thinks his financial policies are sound, his prescription for economic restoration correct, but everything’s been fouled up because the government hasn’t been able to communicate effectively.  And furthermore, accurate communication isn’t easy, no sir not easy at all, “with the type of media we have here.”

  Dammit.  Just when I acknowledge there’s been one step forward, it appears I’m mistaken and there are two back.  It’s all our fault.  The Wildrose Alliance and Danielle Smith are mere figments of media imagination:  the polls are a dreadful case of manipulation by radio, TV, and newspapers:  the Calgary-Glenmore byelection disaster would have actually been triumph were it not for the wretched fourth estate. 

  I need to be clear.  The media is not without issues, it’s not pristine, and most of its population is ill-acquainted with politics and economics.  But it doesn’t cook the message, and that’s something Stelmach has to figure out, while at the same time schooling himself to become far more relaxed and confident in dealing with us.  

  In that context, permit me to pose the following question to Mr. Stelmach.  If, as your loyal and sturdy treasury board president says, you delivered instructions at your first cabinet meeting to get a handle on government finances, why has it taken almost three years for your administration let the public know about that order,  in plain language? 

  Seems to me there’s a communications issue, all right, but I promise you it doesn’t reside with the media.  On the contrary, the premier should examine his own shop, because that’’s where he’ll find the problem.

  It was late August when I noticed one of the major big box stores in town had started to get the Christmas stuff out.  Repeat after me:  late August. 

  A day or two later a news item appeared about the gift wrap and ribbons and toys, books, games, doodads, gadgets now filling the shelves, and of course artificial trees, lots of them, right up there in plain view, towering above the display area where everybody could see them, which would of course draw shoppers right to those shelves with all the Christmas inducements loaded on and in.   

  Whereupon the chant from the business community started right up.  There’s a recession on, y’know, and sales haven’t been all that good and Christmas, y’know, is our biggest time of the year and so we’re just tryin’ to get ahead of lost ground here, and besides we haven’t got our store Santa sitting in his little North Pole-Elf-Reindeer kingdom just yet so we’re not really overdoin’ this bit, no sir. 

  Now it’s November and Santas by the dozen have most assuredly appeared, perched on their chairs, all dressed up with pillows tucked in their tummies and beards that look like untilled cotton fields.  Lineups of little kids with lists in hand, getting set to go begging for lots of boodle under the tree, which of course mum and dad will buy from that big display up there atop the shelves. 

  I say they are  overdoing it, have been for decades, and it gets worse very year.  I find the whole miserable, grasping commercial rack-up-the-credit card don’t let ’em walk without buying scene disheartening and annoying, especially since I have a story about how my Santa Claus really and truly did come to our house one Christmas Eve a very long time ago.   

  I was just a little gaffer, four years old probably, or maybe five, which would take us back to the first year or two following the Second World War.  My father was on the faculty at the University of Saskatchewan and while he provided well for us, you have to remember that 60 odd years ago salaries at Universities and at most other places for that matter weren’t so hot.  In fact, there was still rationing of some products and merchandising was basically confined to goods needed, not wanted.  So my parents budgeted carefully every month, but they were especially cautious in December because they would be buying small gifts for one another, and perhaps a few friends, and for little Mike one good present, one only, from Santa Claus. 

  Now keep in mind this would be the guy coming down the chimney, and I knew it because that’s how they told it in “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”   That marvellous classic by Clement Clarke Moore was the core of my Christmas fantasy, and back then nothing got in the way of it.  There was hardly any advertising, and there was no television, period, to deliver a subconscious imprint that maybe Santa lived in a cash register, and so I should lobby for lots and lots of presents instead of just one.  

  Nor was Santa a retail mannequin, with a travel schedule which allowed him to come down from the North Pole for most of November and December and sit around in a whole bunch of department stores on the same day at the same time, instead of making that one toy I knew would be mine.   

  It was the magic, the breathless excitement of a fantasy world that did it for me, and I believed so hard.  But one day when I was out cavorting around in the snow an older neighbourhood kid named Bobby Fisher upped and told me there was no Santa Claus, and I shouldn’t be so dumb as to fall for that silly old poem about “T’was the night,” and get over it. 

  I advised my parents of this news, and inquired if it might be true.  They said no it would not be true and Santa Claus would for sure arrive at the very moment I fell asleep on Christmas Eve, but not a second before so I mustn’t try to stay awake.   And he would be pleased, they said, to find the cookies and milk which I would provide. 

  But I brooded.  Bobby Fisher was a really big kid, probably seven or eight years old, and could it be he might just know something, might be right about how there’s no Santa Claus?  So I went back to my parents, and with the desperation borne of a four or five-year-old’s longing that Santa remain real and alive and about to come to see me, reasoned with them.  If, I said, Santa and his reindeer land on the roof of our house, the sleigh will leave tracks in the snow up there, and the hooves little holes, won’t they?  Yes, my parents agreed, they will. 

  My mother told me the story years later.  About 2:00 AM, after several notches of rye, my father got his coat and boots and gloves on and went out into perishing cold (mother remembered it was around 30 below), pulled the ladder out of the shed, propped it up against the eaves, then got a broom and wobbled up the rungs and stroked a couple of sleigh tracks right into the snow on the roof.  For good measure he sort of troweled out a few holes for the hooves, and then clambered down and more than likely had another dram of rye to warm up. 

  I don’t remember the one present, but I do remember this: I waited quite a while before venturing outside much later on Christmas morning, because I couldn’t help being hesitant and uncertain about whether the proof of Santa’s existence really would be there.  And I remember looking up,  and then bounding through the snow back to the house because anybody could see, even stupid old Bobby Fisher could see exactly where Santa had come with the sleigh and reindeer, right there on the roof.    

  My father had made sure the enchantment would endure, just for another year or two, because now I knew for certain my single present had indeed come from that wonderful he-only-comes-but-once- a- year-man who quick as a flash flew down the chimney.  It said so right on the little card:  “To Michael, from Santa.”  The glass of milk, by the way, was empty, and just a few crumbs lay scattered on the cookie plate.

  As my parents saw it, a little boy should not under any circumstances be denied the excitement and trembling anticipation of knowing, with utter certainty and conviction, that “St. Nicholas soon would be there,” and so I was left with the unrestrained joy of a Child’s Christmas in Saskatoon for just a little while longer.   

  As I mentioned, I’ve frequently told this story of how a father, in a powerful affirmation of love for a son,  restored a little boy’s faith in magic and perhaps a little bit of sorcery  After all these years that Christmas is indelible in my memory. 

  For small children these days, I’m pretty certain the retailers and the advertisers, starting in August, have removed all the mystery, the freedom of a child’s imagination, the spell, the pure unadulerated joy of Christmas.  I’ll bet you this:  I’ll bet any small boy or girl who’s seen one department store Santa after another after another and then another doesn’t remember a single one of them. 

  I remember my Santa, as if he came to our house just yesterday.