Those of you who regularly drop in on this space will know I seldom agree with Alberta Liberal leader David Swann, never mind Brian Mason of the NDP. But their reaction to a freshly minted government report about health care in this province was right on the mark: lacking substance, airy-fairy, loaded with vague principles, more idle talk, wisps in the health care breeze.
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.