Alberta Conservatives surrender unconditionally to oil industry

International signal flags: Above, “I have developed a sound and competitive energy royalty policy.” Below, “Help me, I need assistance communicating.” Below that, “Warning! I am discharging really dumb political strategies.”

They’ll be laughing out loud in the oil industry’s towers in downtown Calgary this morning. At least, that’s if the oilmen haven’t already abandoned their offices to dash down 8th Avenue to the bank to arrange vault space for all the extra cash coming their way.

Getting Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach’s timorous Tories to scrap their short-lived and modest increases to Alberta’s energy royalties turned out to be hilariously easy for the deep-pocketed oil and gas industry.

The industry’s been throwing a full-blown tantrum since 2007, when Mr. Stelmach responded to public anger about Alberta’s paltry royalty rates by bumping up royalties enough to supposedly collect an extra $1.4 billion. “Albertans made it clear that examining the province’s royalty regime was a priority to ensure they are receiving their fair share from energy resource development,” Mr. Stelmach said at the time. (Emphasis added.)

Well, that was then, before the oil industry threw its epic hissy fit. It wasn’t long before Mr. Stelmach and his legislative caucus were in headlong retreat. Last Thursday, they surrendered unconditionally, abandoning the last of the changes they’d trumpeted back in 2007.

Usually in Alberta, it’s not necessary for the energy industry to do much more than ominously chant “National Energy Program” to get Conservative politicians into line. Never mind that most of the economic damage ascribed to the NEP was caused by the worldwide recession of the 1980s. Facts notwithstanding, Albertans are weaned on the notion the NEP was an economic catastrophe, not to mention a vicious scheme by those Eastern Bastards to stay warm in the dark at our expense. Just saying the dreaded initials aloud is sufficient to induce hyperventilating rage.

When recession coincidentally followed Mr. Stelmach’s modest royalty increases in 2008, Albertans were treated to a powerful sense of déjà vu all over again by oilpatch propagandists and their faithful media sidekicks.

Back in the day, the industry would have organized a capital strike and sent the oilrigs south to Oklahoma if the government dared to get shirty about Albertans’ fair share of their natural resources. But who wants to do that when there are hydrocarbons to be extracted and customers lined up to buy the stuff?

So this time they had a novel idea: Take a moribund loony-right fringe party, slap some lipstick on its tired mug, pour a few hundred thousand dollars into its advertising budget and place at its helm an articulate right-wing commentator whose congenial manner belies her scary market fundamentalist dogma.

Clearly, this scheme worked admirably for the industry. Even if Danielle Smith never becomes premier and her Wildrose Alliance Party fails to win power, the threat they pose to the government has achieved its principal goal.

As Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason put it, “fearing for its political life, the Stelmach government has folded like a cheap tent.” Indeed, the Liberal so-called Opposition folded too. Alberta’s brief attempt to get something a little closer to a fair return for the people who actually own the resource was gone like a puff of smoke in a breeze.

A delighted David Collyer, president of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, told an Edmonton newspaper that Stelmach’s capitulation “goes a long way toward repairing the province’s relationship with the oilpatch.”

Maybe. But what do you want to bet the industry goes right on supporting the Wildrose Alliance just the same. After all, why settle for most of what they want when they can have it all?

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Dude, the Wildrose Alliance is without question a far-right party

A reader takes me to task for resorting to the same perfidious tricks as the mainstream media in my ongoing critique of the Wildrose Alliance Party. To wit, she (or he) writes…

Dude, You are big on skewering the MSM for inaccuracy, yet seem content to perpetrate same to enhance the entertainment value of your own output. You continue to refer to the Wildrose Alliance as “far right.” Evidence, please. Anybody familiar with that party — and clearly you are not — knows it is mainly an aggregation of conventional conservative social democrats. Big S statists, if you will. Please, enlighten us all: cite chapter and verse — if you can — on the WAP’s “far righteyness.” Please define ‘right’ and then show how they differ in this regard from the AB PCs, or, for that matter, the MB NDP.

Normally, as a question of principle, I do not respond to readers who comment on my blog. This isn’t a Sun Media publication, after all. Readers should have the right to their say without being sniped at. So we don’t do snotty replies to letters here. However, in this case, I thought I would make an exception, seeing as my correspondent has written this comment in the form of a challenge.

If I am guilty of the same thing as the mainstream media from time to time, consider where I was trained! Mud from a muddy spring, perhaps. Certainly I plead guilty to attempting to enhance the entertainment value of my writing. Indeed, if the mainstream media had more writers who did that, instead of producing the kind of drivel popular in those circles nowadays, they might have retained some of their readers. But never mind – that’s just the cracked voice of a bitter old former newspaper sluggo.

The commentator’s next point is the claim, standard in circles sympathetic to the Wildrose Alliance, that it is really merely a perfectly reasonable centre-right party, modest in its goals. It is “an aggregation of conventional conservative social democrats,” in the words of the writer. Why, she seems to suggest, if you were to elect them, you’d hardly notice a thing!

Wildrose Alliance Party Leader Danielle Smith – whom I hold in high regard for her vast political talents, by the way, notwithstanding my disagreement with many of the positions she takes – does this constantly, as do many of the party’s sympathizers. Indeed, Ms. Smith repeats the phrase “centre right” almost every time she opens her mouth in public.

But the Wildrose Alliance is not a party of the centre right. It is far to the right of the Canadian mainstream, by any reasonable definition. Evidence? Consider its current market fundamentalist policies chapter and verse, policies that are well to the right of even the Stelmach Tories, who are no slouches in that department either. Among them:

• Privatization of education, through the use of school “vouchers,” though for the moment in the context of public funding.
• Privatization of health-care services, though for the moment within the context of public funding.
• Legislated caps on public spending.
• Eliminating the Canadian Wheat Board.
• “Work for welfare” programs.
• Ever more tax breaks for the oil industry.
• Privatization of workers’ compensation insurance.
• “Right to work” union-busting legislation.
• Withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan.
• Withdrawal from the Canada Health Act and its insistence on one-tier health care, consistently delivered from coast to coast.
• Pulling out of redistributive national economic equalization programs.
• Constitutional reform to move Canada’s system of government toward a U.S.-style separation-of-powers model.
• Elimination of Crown corporations.
• A ban on strikes by teachers.

One suspects, given the histories and core beliefs of many of the movers and shakers in this party, that these policies – most currently listed in the Alliance’s on-line platform, others taken from recent statements by party officials – only partly reflect the depth of its leadership’s long-term policy goals. To wit: The privatization of virtually all public resources and activities.

Be that as it may, the Alliance also advocates positions not strictly right-wing in the economic sense, but correctly associated with the social conservative right, most notably:

• Legislation protecting the ‘conscience rights’ of healthcare professionals” – seen by many as code for restricting the right of women to abortions.
• Rendering Alberta human rights legislation ineffective, possibly as a way to ease restrictions on discrimination against homosexuals.

I should note that I do not believe Ms. Smith personally supports either of these two positions, both of which nevertheless remain in the party’s current policy statement.

Nor can the party hide behind its upcoming policy conference in these matters. Whatever results from that event, we can rightly assume that these positions truly define the party’s continued position in the political spectrum.

As for the writer’s distinction about the Alliance believing the state has some role in economic affairs – enforcing policies favourable to business and unfavourable to consumers and the environment, ensuring royalties for communally owned resources go into private pockets, institutionalized union busting and the like – well, so what?

Are these policies not right wing merely because they are not libertarian? The right can pick its own nits and debate how many CEOs can dance on the head of an unregulated pin. For the rest of us, these policies define the right.

Finally, my correspondent makes a good point by comparing the Wildrose Alliance to the Alberta Conservatives and the Manitoba New Democrats. Indeed, what are the differences among these parties?

Truly, they are not all that great. But, to quote another writer concerned about the betrayal of liberal voters by their own party in another country, there may be only an inch of difference, “but real people in a real world live by that inch.”

Credible Environics poll puts Wildrose support in perspective

Premier Ed Stelmach, left, still leads Wildrose Alliance leader Danielle Smith by a nose. Alberta politicians may not be exactly as illustrated.

The release of a reputable Environics poll yesterday shows Ed Stelmach’s Alberta Conservatives are still ahead of the Wildrose Alliance party, if only by a nose.

Does this mean Alberta’s media – which loves a horserace, even at the expense of accuracy – will stop saying the far-right Alliance led by former journalist Danielle Smith “is leading the government in public opinion polls across the province”? After all, until yesterday there’d only been one poll that put the Wildrose Alliance is in the lead, and it was based on controversial methodology..

Don’t count on anything so sensible. The idea the brash new Wildrose Alliance led by an interesting new leader might soon topple Stelmach’s boring old government is just too compelling – too entertaining – for the media to let go. What’s more, it’s not a stretch to say election of the “upstart” Alliance would suit many of the people who own and influence media companies, always a powerful incentive to cover a story in a particular way.

Indeed, the Edmonton press played the poll’s results – which showed the Conservatives with a narrow four-point lead over the Alliance province-wide – as closer than they were. “Alberta Tories remain tied with Wildrose Alliance,” said the headline in the Edmonton Journal. Ah well, the results, at least, were close to the margin of error.

Environics’ numbers were far from the conclusions of the Angus Reid survey that caused Wildrose fever to break out in December 2009. That poll concluded that if an election had been held that day, the Alliance would have formed a majority. (Reid was back in the media yesterday, publishing a second poll just hours after Environics, claiming the Alliance now has the support of 42 per cent of Albertans.)

The trouble is, the Reid polls are on-line surveys based on interviews with a group of Albertans interested in politics who have selected themselves for the job. The advantage of these on-line panels is that they’re cheap to run. The disadvantage is their results can’t be called scientific and aren’t particularly credible. Moreover, Reid doesn’t have a good track record forecasting Alberta politics. A Reid poll in 2008 missed the election result by ten percentage points – well outside the claimed margin of error.

But never mind the facts, the December story was just too good for most journalists. It soon spawned a cottage industry generating reports that the Alliance was “leading in the polls.” Even Britain’s venerable Economist – the pretentious newsmagazine for people who wish they were rich – famously got into the act.

None of which is to denigrate the remarkable achievement of Smith and the Alliance. With a little help from the Calgary energy companies that bankroll it and some former Reform Party strategists who know their stuff, the party has made tremendous gains. A year ago it was the fringiest of fringe parties, polling in the single digits. Today it has elected an MLA in a by-election, attracted two Tory floor crossers and is a contender.

But it is not what the media says it is – not yet, anyway.

By contrast, the only trouble with the Environics poll was that the pollsters didn’t provide a breakdown by region of where party support in Alberta is strong. Where the parties find their support will be a significant factor that could determine how the next Alberta general election plays out.

If, as seems possible, the Wildrose Alliance is strong in Calgary, the Liberals and the NDP are strong around Edmonton, and the Conservatives maintain their grip on rural ridings, almost anyone could form a government! A minority government is a strong possibility.

Add the unknown effect of the Alberta Party – an unlikely alliance of Red Tories, Blue Liberals and environmentalists now in its formative stages – and an interesting situation becomes fascinating.

We Albertans should count our blessings. If nothing else, our politics are interesting again for the first time in a generation!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Canadians deserve an explanation of why Rahim Jaffer walked

Rahim Jaffer: Guilty only of careless driving. All snow may not be exactly as illustrated.

Canadians deserve to know what the unspecified “legal reasons” were that resulted in speeding, drug possession and drunken driving charges against former Edmonton Strathcona MP Rahim Jaffer being dropped today in an Ontario courtroom.

In the absence of a clear explanation that makes sense, the only reasonable conclusion is that under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, all of Canada is rapidly moving toward the Alberta model for the administration of justice, in which there is one law for friends of the government and another harsher one for the rest of us.

Anyone who has practiced labour relations in Alberta, or considered the application of environmental law now on trial in this province, understands the truth of this proposition.

So while the Harper government responds to the longest decline in crime rates in Canadian history with a push for harsher drug sentences, embarking on a wasteful U.S.-style prison-building spree to warehouse the expected surge of inmates, justice is convenient and painless when a friend of the government, married to a Conservative cabinet minister, experiences a brush with the law.

Back on Sept. 11, 2009, the Ontario Provincial Police charged Mr. Jaffer with drunk driving, possession of cocaine and speeding after they observed his SUV ripping through a 50-km/h zone at 93 km/h in the village of Palgrave, northwest of Toronto. Mr. Jaffer lives nearby with his wife, MP Helena Guergis, Conservative MP for Simcoe-Grey and Minister of State (Status of Women) in Mr. Harper’s Cabinet.

At the time, the OPP said that a breathalyzer test indicated there were more than 80 milligrams of alcohol in Mr. Jaffer’s blood. They also said they had found cocaine when they searched Mr. Jaffer’s SUV, although they never stated the amount.

Many people here in Western Canada – especially in the Edmonton area where Mr. Jaffer was once notorious as “Canada’s laziest MP” – experienced a powerful if unattractive sense of Schadenfreude at Mr. Jaffer’s difficulties with the law. After all, it was he who in the desperate dying days of the 2008 federal election had tried to beat back the successful challenge by New Democrat Linda Duncan with sleazy radio advertisements that falsely implied federal NDP Leader Jack Layton condoned the use of marijuana.

So, small of us though it may have been, more than one progressive Albertan saw in Mr. Jaffer’s legal troubles satisfying evidence that self-righteous social conservatives more often talk the talk than walk the walk when it comes to the “family values” they love to tout. Of course, in fairness, the radio ads attacking Mr. Layton called for getting tough on dealers who sell drugs to school kids, not to Conservative MPs. Just the same, it was hard to shake the sense that for a lot of social conservative politicians, the rules are for us, but not for them.

Well, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose… The rules still appear to be different for them and for us.

When the 38-year-old former Conservative and Reform Party politician finally got to court in Orangeville yesterday, the speeding, drunk driving and possession charges all conveniently disappeared. Instead, Mr. Jaffer got to plead guilty to driving carelessly and pay a painless $500 fine. No one even tried to bully him into an unfavourable plea bargain.

For once, all Canadians – even Conservative voters hell bent on incarcerating as many petty criminals as possible – can agree with Mr. Jaffer’s generous judge, who observed in sentencing, “I’m sure you can recognize a break when you see one.” Well, if Mr. Jaffer can’t, surely the rest of us will.

No doubt so will many other Canadians, who will plead for similar treatment by the courts in similar circumstances. When they don’t get it, it may lead some of them to conclude that such breaks are only available to Conservatives who were once promoted to important posts by the prime minister. This is the kind of thing that brings, as they say, the administration of justice into disrepute.

According to media reports, the explanation was that because of the aforementioned “legal reasons” there was no prospect of getting a conviction. But those same reports were vague about just what those reasons are, and why they might have prevented a conviction. All we got was this rambling explanation from Ontario Attorney General Chris Bentley: “Everybody has to be treated equally before the law and when the Crown makes an assessment of the case and determines that a particular resolution is appropriate, that resolution should be the one that’s obtained — whether the accused happens to be somebody who is known to the public or not known to the public.”

Well… precisely!

If justice is to be seen to have been done, we deserve an explanation. In the absence of exculpatory facts, we are entitled to our suspicions.

Who says the federal Conservatives would never make Raj Pannu Lieutenant Governor?

C’mon, Mr. Harper, let’s make Raj Pannu the lieutenant governor of Alberta. And that guy in the picture with him? A Senate seat would be nice! Below: Gary Doer.

Who says the Prime Minister Stephen Harper won’t make Raj Pannu Lieutenant Governor of Alberta? He is the best choice, after all.

OK, it seems unlikely when there are so many undeserving old Alberta Tory retainers hanging around with their paws sticking out. But if you think Stephen Harper doesn’t have what it takes to name Raj Pannu the Queen’s representative in Alberta, maybe you should consider Canada’s new ambassador to Washington.

Sometimes a prime minister just needs to send a political message – either to wave a political carrot or shake a political stick in the general direction of whoever needs to be paying more attention.

One suspects that the appointment of Gary Doer as Canada’s ambassador to the United States – when just last year he was NDP premier of Manitoba – was an attempt by the market fundamentalist federal Conservatives to pour a little oil on troubled American waters now that a liberal Democrat, or a liberalish one, anyway, is in the White House. This would be the carrot.

With Lieutenant Governor Norman Kwong about to retire, the message from appointing a New Democrat – albeit a distinguished one with an unrivalled history of public service – would be more in the form of a stick. The recipients of the smacking: Ed Stelmach and his frequently misbehavin’ provincial Conservative caucus. The message: Stop embarrassing us or we’ll never get a majority. (And if we never get a majority, you’ll never get to “reform” public health care.)

As Charan Khehra, Mr. Pannu’s former legislative aide from back in the day when as NDP leader he was known as Raj Against the Machine, put it in a recent letter to the Edmonton Journal: “Pannu was born in India and immigrated to Canada in 1962. He and his wife taught in rural schools until 1964, when they moved to Edmonton. He earned his doctorate in sociology at the University of Alberta and taught there for 27 years. In 1997, he was elected to the Legislature to represent Edmonton-Strathcona and re-elected in 2001 and 2004. He led the Alberta NDP from 2000 to 2004. Pannu is an accomplished scholar, a respected political leader and a man of vision and compassion. He has touched the lives of many Albertans and continues to challenge, engage and inspire them. His warm personality, intellectual vigour and integrity will reflect and represent the new Alberta.”

All true. So why not make Mr. Pannu the vice-regal personage, reflecting the true 21st Century face of our modern, changing, diverse, compassionate and increasingly sophisticated province?

Because 1,322 people have now joined the Facebook group called Appoint Raj Pannu Alberta’s next Lieutenant Governor? Naw, that would never wash with Mr. Harper?

But because the crowd around Premier Stelmach might not like it? And because such an appointment would send a – let’s say interesting – message to voters in Edmonton Strathcona, the federal riding that shares territory with the undefeatable Mr. Pannu’s old provincial riding of the same name? You know, the neighbourhood that just happened to elect New Democrat Linda Duncan in the last federal election?

Short of providing covert aid to the Wildrose Alliance or rehabilitating Rahim Jaffer, that could be a reason that just might appeal to our prime minister.

LRT will only come here if St. Albert speaks up now

It’s time for the return of the Edmonton-St. Albert interurban streetcar, last seen in 1914.

This column appeared in today’s edition of the Saint City News.

Don’t bet on an LRT line reaching St. Albert by 2016.

Nothing would be better, or healthier, for our community. But many oxen stand to be gored by a clean, efficient and fast light-rail transit line from Edmonton to St. Albert. As a result, media reports to the contrary, construction of the line by 2016 is a long shot.

With an “estimated” (and that, inevitably, means under-estimated) price tag of $1.5 billion, a project of this magnitude cannot proceed on the backs and pocketbooks of municipal taxpayers alone. Never mind St. Albert. Even a city the size of Edmonton can’t afford to build an LRT line. This project proceeds with provincial cash, or not at all.

And there is no way the province will fund a project like this if municipalities that stand to benefit from it feud over it. Remember, this is a delicate time for our provincial government’s leaders. They’ve suffered some troubling opinion polls. A political challenger is making gains. They’re not going to do anything – no matter how beneficial in the long run – that costs them votes in the next general election.

Yet many voters, in St. Albert and Edmonton, are bound to be cranky about an LRT line if they get the idea it’s going to have an impact on their municipal taxes, which are widely perceived as far too high.

Worse, more than one municipality around Edmonton seems to view their independent transit system – even if it can’t match Edmonton Transit for efficiency or reach – as a bulwark against municipal amalgamation.

So what happens to St. Albert Transit if an LRT line to Edmonton starts operating next door to a park ’n’ ride lot on our city’s south side? Probably something like 75 per cent of St. Albert Transit’s annual revenues come from commuters who take the bus to NAIT, the University of Alberta or downtown Edmonton. It seems unlikely St. Albert Transit is viable without commuter service.

As a result, we can expect a chorus of voices, all with vested interests in keeping things as they are, to start finding a long list of reasons why the best transit idea to come along in a generation is no good.

We’ve seen this already in Edmonton, where merchants in Jasper Place want a planned line kept away from their marginal and failing businesses. That is, they want no part of a project that would raise property values, increase business and make the streets of their troubled neighbourhood safer. Crazy, but that sort of thing happens when potential change affects vested interests.

It would be a bit like saying St. Albert doesn’t want an easy-to-use, inexpensive transit line in order to save a local service we can’t afford to run properly. But who would bet against this being exactly what’s going to happen?

The solution? A regional transit system, operated by member municipalities acting as partners for everyone’s benefit. The system could combine service now provided independently by St. Albert, Edmonton, Strathcona County and others more efficiently and at less cost to commuters.

Yes, this would mean giving up some autonomy. But regional co-operation at this level would actually make municipal amalgamation less likely if the province can be persuaded amalgamating municipalities isn’t the only way to make them get together and play nice.

None of this will happen if citizens of St. Albert don’t tell their politicians an LRT connection is a priority and that the region’s municipalities need to work together to build a system no one can afford alone.

Whether you are motivated by the desire for a cleaner environment or an easier commute, an LRT line won’t reach St. Albert by 2016 if you don’t speak up.

On those unlucky ducks – again

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach stands watch to scare migratory birds from oily ponds – Conservative politicians may not be exactly as illustrated.

JASPER

Can it be two years since those unlucky ducks set down on Syncrude’s tailings pond? We had almost forgotten – which is, of course, the provincial government’s strategy in this sorry matter.

Now we have been reminded, thanks to the Alberta New Democrats’ continuing battle to ensure that the Alberta public gets to see the truth about the destruction wrought in April 2008 when hundreds of ducks landed in the filthy tailings pond near Fort McMurray.

The Stelmach government fights on with equal vigour to protect the tar sands industry’s wretched environmental protection efforts and, in effect, to preserve our province’s international reputation as an environmental villain. After all, if owning up to the truth is the first step to redemption, there will be none of that for our Conservatives.

To mark the reappearance of this story today, here, suitably annotated, is the poem first published in this space on May 6, 2008:


On those unlucky ducks

When Greenpeace crashed Ed Stelmach’s fete

And from a dangling climbers’ line

Proceeded boldly to debate

His claim the countryside’s just fine

With giant shovels ripping, and

Plans for atomic power soon,

To boil the oil from the sand

And leave the parkland like the moon,

The Tory shock was deep, profound.

One dangling hippie was, you see,

Not only working for the Crown

But also for the NDP!

Nothing then but damned bad luck

(The protest’s end a memory, fond)

When five hundred hapless ducks

Set down on Syncrude’s tailings pond

To do what no one else could do

And prove the protest’s premise true.