With at least one poll showing the Progressive Conservatives under Alberta Premier Alison Redford and the Wildrose Party under Danielle Smith in a dead heat for support among decided voters, one has to ask where Ed Stelmach is now that the Tories really need him.

I mean, really, could it be any worse for the Alberta Tories with the hapless former premier at the helm? Very unlikely. Indeed, it sounds as if Mr. Stelmach gave up far too easily.

Another question the shambling Tories must suddenly be asking themselves is if they would have been better off if they’d chosen Gary Mar, the smooth old political operator they sidelined at the final moment in last fall’s leadership race in favour of Ms. Redford’s flavour-of-the-moment candidacy.

The answer to the question about Mr. Mar is probably unknowable, based as it is on hypothetical assumptions and speculative fantasy. Not so speculation about Mr. Stelmach, however. We know that for all his seeming uncertainty, and his frequent fumbles, he enjoyed strong support among some sectors of Alberta’s population. Many non-Conservative Albertans saw him as an honourable if plodding man who operated from the best of intentions, and therefore extended to him a cautious level of goodwill.

This can’t be proved, of course, but it’s said here that Mr. Stelmach probably could have handily won another majority term in office, even if the size of the opposition grew a little.

Moreover, notwithstanding his difficulties with MLAs like the self-serving and ambitious neo-Con Ted Morton – the worst premier Alberta never had, and thank goodness for that – Mr. Stelmach enjoyed more support within his own caucus than does Premier Redford, who only had the support of one MLA in the leadership race and who couldn’t even get her own way on fixed election dates or the form a health inquiry ought to take.

But if the Ipsos poll released late Monday by Global TV is any guide, the suddenly fragile looking Tories under Ms. Redford could be in bigger trouble than even their most optimistic enemies had thought.

The poll, conducted between March 20 and 25 with the obvious plan it could be used as a news hit by Global to kick off its coverage of the campaign, surveyed 890 Albertans using a self-selecting on-line panel. It estimated support for both right-wing parties at 38 per cent each.

The Ipsos survey put the other parties much farther back, with committed support at 12 per cent for the NDP, 11 per cent for the Alberta Liberals and 2 per cent for all other parties.

Another poll released Monday for another broadcaster, this one done by ThinkHQ Public Affairs Inc. for CTV, also contains bad news for Ms. Redford’s Conservatives – although it is closer what might be called “the new normal” for recent Alberta polls of voter intentions.

The ThinkHQ poll of 1,320 respondents some time in March indicated Ms. Redford’s PCs are still in the lead with 36 per cent of committed voters, but barely, only a shade more than the survey’s margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 per cent. In other words, it too shows results perilously close to a statistical tie between the Tories and the Wildrose Party, which the survey said had 33 per cent support.

The other parties trailed the pack in this poll with levels of support similar to those recorded by Ipsos: NDP, 13 per cent support; Alberta Liberals, also 13 per cent; Alberta Party, 2 per cent; other parties, 3 per cent.

CTV’s reporting of this poll was truly pathetic, with no data at all on the methodology – which, based on ThinkHQ’s past efforts, was most likely also a self-selecting online panel – and little information on the dates when the pollster was in the field.

So neither of these polls appears to use the best available methodology. However, in combination with other polling done in the past few weeks they are highly suggestive that some kind of Wildrose breakout is in reality under way.

And don’t forget that yet another poll from a major pollster showing similar dead-heat results is rumoured to be ready for publication later this week.

There was some faint reassurance for the PCs in the ThinkHQ effort, which found Ms. Redford to be personally more popular with voters than the other leaders, including Ms. Smith. The results show her personally running well ahead of her party in support. Perhaps there is something there for her strategic brain trust to work with.

Premier Redford’s campaign will also certainly be going after worried Liberal voters in the Edmonton region who may be persuaded to vote PC in hopes of blocking the frightening prospect of a market-fundamentalist Wildrose government.

Unfortunately, however, for pretty obvious reasons no pollster is asking Alberta voters what they now think of Mr. Mar … or of Mr. Stelmach.

Nevertheless, at this juncture, that would be a very interesting thing to know.

Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if the person brought in to save the party from Ed Stelmach’s fumbling leadership ended up producing a worse result than Mr. Stelmach would have on his own!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Astonished to find itself with its back against a Wildrose wall, rejected by its traditional supporters, Alberta’s so-called Progressive Conservatives are putting the full-court press on New Democrats and Liberals to hold off a Wildrose Apocalypse by voting PC.

Polls suggest lots of voters are wavering. As a Conservative cabinet minister told me yesterday in Calgary Airport, many genuinely progressive voters in that town are seriously pondering holding their noses and voting Tory.

All I can say is “Don’t do it, people!”

At a time like this, in a place like this, there’s no way a vote for the NDP is a throwaway. Au contraire!

Yes, Albertans are fed up to the teeth the PC party and its arrogant ways. But remember, the Wildrose Party and the Conservative Party are the Same Party, Castor and Pollux, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum. This PC-Wildrose split? It’s a family feud. And it’s just not that nice a family!

We don’t need a far-right opposition in Alberta to oppose a far-right government. We need a real opposition that will fight for the values and principles a majority of Albertans still share, even if sufficient numbers of them are conned into voting for one or other of the Wildrose-PC doppelgangers.

So it’s time, people, that we had a serious conversation about “strategic voting.”

Maybe there’s a place for strategic voting, but this is not it.

If you’re like me, you’re horrified at the prospect of electing a party whose leader thinks it’s acceptable for a candidate to advocate bullying gay young people, even if he does sincerely think that doing so may prevent their eternal souls from going down, down, down in the Lake of Fire.

But ask yourself, if your stomach turns at the thought of being represented by the party of Pastor Allan Hunsperger, the candidate who wrote that “accepting people the way they are is cruel and not loving,” how do you feel about being represented by the party of Ted Morton?

You know, Perfesser Morton, the former serious Tory leadership candidate, sometime finance minister, market fundamentalist ideologue and publicly paid cornpone philosopher who bloviated on marriage back in the day as follows: “The gay-feminist project has become a social engineering project – to use the coercive power of the state to undermine the existing family and to reconstruct in its place their gender-equal utopias.”

Dr. Morton’s answer to the reluctance of governments to use the Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ Notwithstanding Clause to ban the marriage of same-sex partners? Hold a referendum! Sound familiar?

So how is voting against Allan Hunsperger and getting Ted Morton instead going to help make Alberta a better place, pray?

On the other hand if we elect even a couple more New Democrats – and there are six or eight ridings in this province where that could happen if progressive voters hold firm and vote with their heads and their hearts, we’ll be a hell of a lot better off than if we trade one Regressive Conservative party for another, which is where “strategic voting” will get us this time.

If you’re like me, you’re very concerned about the Wildrose Party doing whatever it can to privatize and commercialize our public health care system.

So how is voting for the Conservatives going to help? Their history of trying to do the same thing under Ralph Klein and Ed Stelmach is well known. Having failed to win public support for privatization schemes under those two premiers, they plotted to impose it secretly. A confidential document leaked in November 2010 laid out their scheme to de-list health services, allow private insurance and begin the privatization process.

But Premier Redford promised to protect public health services, you say? Well, so she did. But don’t forget she also promised to identify services to privatize within six months! And seriously, even if she meant it about health care no strings attached, how long do you think Ms. Redford is going to remain the premier of Alberta after this debacle in the unlikely event the Conservatives manage to hang on to power by their fingernails?

Give me a break! The knives are out already. And once she’s gone, it’ll be the same old gang with the same old plans.

If you’re like me, you’re also likely concerned about the plank in the Wildrose platform that says they’d like to introduce right-to-work laws that would effectively ban unions, just like a real cotton-belt state in Dixie.

So how is that different than the plank in Ms. Redford’s just-released party platform, inserted there by her pals from the anti-union half of the construction industry, which aims to cripple the ability of unions to lobby for their members and for their members to be represented by the unions they choose?

And so it goes, depressingly on. You can’t tell one from the other.

And what’s to keep that Conservative you elect to keep another group of conservatives out of power from switching sides if the seats don’t tally up quite the way he planned? Not much, since there’s so little difference between the parties anyway.

It’s not as if it hasn’t happened before. Who can forget David Emerson, “Stephen Harper’s worst nightmare,” being sworn in as a Conservative cabinet minister two weeks after being elected as a Liberal by NDP voters fooled into being “strategic.” Some strategy!

No thanks. Progressive voters need to vote for progressive parties. And NDP voters in Edmonton and Lethbridge in particular, where New Democrats have some momentum, need to stick with the NDP.

Even out here in “The Toenail,” that little crescent-shaped sliver of St. Albert snipped off and gerrymandered onto the Spruce Grove riding to suit some long-forgotten Conservative need, I think I’ll be voting for Rev. J.J. Trudeau.

She might not have much chance in this riding, but at least I’ll have the opportunity to say I voted for Trudeau in Alberta, and a New Democrat to boot! And if there is going to be a miracle, I reckon God in Her wisdom is more likely to smile on Rev. Trudeau than on Pastor Hunsperger. Just saying.

Regardless, we’ve all thought about strategic voting from time to time. But on Monday, go, and sin no more. Vote for the NDP.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

’Tis late and the CBC’s pancake makeup weighs heavy on your blogger’s face. As all the world must surely know by now, Alberta Premier Alison Redford’s hole card turned out to be an ace yesterday and Alberta’s 41-year Progressive Conservative dynasty will live a little longer, perhaps a lot longer.

So today there is no joy in Mudville – whether that place is located in the town of Okotoks, site of the world’s largest glacial erratic, or at 24 Sussex Drive – for the Mighty Flanagan has struck out. You can almost hear the disgruntled Wildrosers chanting 45 years is enough!

At least the good Dr. Tom Flanagan, hyperventilating neo-Con ideologue and author of the best-selling Harper’s Team, How I Created It All By Myself Without Any Help At All and Made That Little Twerp From Calgary West Into a Prime Minister, will have plenty of people to drown his sorrows with. They include the pollsters who intentionally or accidentally got it all so spectacularly wrong, the media pundits who spun their upstart Wildrose narrative for three years without reference to facts, to the blogosphere, which drank the media’s bathwater without so much as a gin chaser.

In these wee hours, though, we can merely hastily catalogue yesterday’s election losers and winners and leave the explanations and the more nuanced analysis to the morrow:

Loser No. 10: The Alberta Liberals
Winner No. 10: The Alberta New Democrats

Loser No. 9: Alberta Liberal Leader Raj Sherman
Winner No. 9: Alberta New Democrat Leader Brian Mason

Loser No. 8: Private health care company executives
Winner No. 8: Alberta Health Services executives

Loser No. 7: Preston Manning
Winner No. 7: Peter Lougheed

Loser No. 6: Wildrose Campaign Manager Tom Flanagan
Winner No. 6: Progressive Conservative Campaign Manager Stephen Carter

Loser No. 5: Harper Conservatives
Winner No. 5: Red Tories

Loser No. 4: Ted Morton, the worst premier Alberta never had
Winner No. 4: Doug Horner, the best opposition leader Alberta never had

Loser No. 3: The Wildrose Party
Winner No. 3: The Progressive Conservative Party

Loser No. 2: Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith
Winner No. 2: Alberta Premier Alison Redford

And the No. 1 loser and the No. 1 winner are…

Loser No. 1: Alberta’s professional pollsters
Winner No. 1: There is no winner in this category

NOTE TO READERS: I just shamelessly revised this this morning when I thought of a better line!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Wildrose phenomenon will disappear from the Alberta political scene almost as quickly as the party’s leader took a powder after her concession speech at the golf club in Okotoks on Tuesday night.

Sure, we’ve all heard the promises about what a great opposition the Wildrose Party is going to make, how well leader Danielle Smith did to build it out of nothing in jig time, and how they’ll be back in 2016 to really kick Tory ass. All talk, of course.

There are several reasons why the Wildrose is likely to quickly wither on the vine – an appropriate enough metaphor for such a delicate little flower in Alberta’s harsh climate. The principal one is simply this: Uniting the right has worked too long and too well for the people who bankroll right-wing governments to allow this to continue.
Oh, sure, they might think about letting Wildrose strategist Tom Flanagan have one more kick at the cat before he retires to Palm Springs – but he’ll be what in 2016, a hundred and two?

Seriously, people, if the Wildrose Party can’t make any inroads as the opposition, and that seems unlikely in the unforgiving new world of Alison Redford’s huge and smart Progressive Conservative majority, it’ll blow away on the Prairie wind for the simple reason its funds will dry up.

Corporate donors who benefit from a united right just aren’t going to pay to keep it divided. So if Wildrose donations were way up when it looked like they just might form a government, you can expect them to be way down hereafter.

The Wildrose Party was a clever gambit thought up by some of the uber-rightists surrounding Prime Minister Stephen Harper to repeat the trick of the neo-Con Reform Party’s hostile reverse takeover of the federal Progressive Conservatives. They got seed money from some junior oil companies, lined up the mostly compliant media and pollsters and were off to the races.

The only problems turned out to be that the population of Alberta was paying more attention than anyone gave it credit for, and the 41-year Tory dynasty – by which the right has done very nicely in this province over the years – had deep roots in the community and didn’t just roll over and surrender.

In other words, the plan didn’t work and the people who paid to work it will soon return to more effective strategies.

It’s said here that if the Wildrose flops in Opposition – which seems pretty likely given the shallow talent pool of its caucus and the fact it doesn’t really disagree with the government on most issues anyway – their bagmen will quickly fold up their empty bags and trudge home.

Big Business will go back to trying to get its favourite candidate elected to leader of the PCs, and the Wildrose is likely to become increasingly attractive only to the kinds of kooks whose “bozo eruptions” sealed its fate the week before the general election.

The fly in the ointment with the traditional approach is that Ms. Redford is likely to be around for quite a while now. So to make it work its corporate sponsors will need sufficient patience to play a long game.

What’s more, their most likely replacement candidate, Ted Morton, is almost as old as his pal Dr. Flanagan. Worse, Doctors Flanagan and Morton, along with that Harper guy, were the trio of neo-Con boobs from the University of Calgary who dreamed up many of the Wildrose policies Ms. Smith now says she must reconsider because they sent voters screaming for the exits. You know, like sending the Mounties packing and dropping the Canada Pension Plan. They also advocated completely opting out of the Canada Health Act.

Meanwhile, if you thought bozo eruptions were a problem for Ms. Smith when everyone figured she was about to form a government and have cabinet portfolios to hand out, just wait till she starts trying to control this gang on the wrong side of the Legislature!

Seriously, do you think the likes of Joe Anglin, the American-born ex-Green ex-Marine from Rimbey, is going to pay any attention to Ms. Smith when she tells him to button up? Good one! And heaven only knows what other surprises lurk in her caucus. Bitter people with extremist views who a week ago were imagining measuring the drapes for their cabinet offices.

Mark my words, before long we’ll be calling the Wildrose opposition the Tourette Party. Caucus members with an ounce of sense will be quietly petitioning to rejoin the Tories every one of them used to be a member of. And all the ambitious little Harper neo-Cons who helped out with the campaign will drift back to Ottawa.

No, it will soon be apparent that the real opposition in the Alberta is coming from the same place it always came from – the NDP and Liberal benches.

Just to make it perfectly clear how things work, Ms. Redford’s Natural Governing Party will likely subtly and deniably ensure that a few rural municipalities are firmly reminded of the foolish decision they made on election day.

What’s more, a certain governing federal party will be made to deeply regret its aid and comfort to Ms. Smith and the coup plotters. Indeed, the Redford Tories may very well conclude there’s nothing wrong at all with a strategy that’s worked well for Ontario and Quebec over the years – doing what it can to ensure a different party entirely thrives in Ottawa than sits on the government side of the provincial Legislature.

Well, maybe that’s too much to hope. But for all these reasons, the plucky little “upstart” Wildrose Party is not long for this world.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Cock of the walk: Everybody wanted to talk to Ted Morton on June 26, 2011. His message to then-premier Ed Stelmach: Balance the budget or else. (Calgary Herald photo.) Below: Alison Redford, Rob Anderson.

Can it be less than two years since Ted Morton, then Alberta’s steely-eyed finance minister and hard-right fiscal hawk, was poised to become premier himself?

Readers with long memories will recall how Dr. Morton had in January 2011 just stuck the knife into then-premier Ed Stelmach. Dr. Morton wanted a painfully instant balanced budget that Mr. Stelmach was too smart or too humane to accept. When he didn’t get his way, he quit – precipitating the crisis that led to Mr. Stelmach’s resignation.

Oh how the winds of change were blowing then! Dr. Morton was The Man, the cock of the walk, the tight-fisted front-runner in the then-nascent Progressive Conservative leadership race. He was the self-described leftists’ nightmare, an American-born “right-winger with a PhD” – his thesis dissertation in “political economy” assailing the U.S. Supreme Court for its “confused understanding of the relationship between sexual equality and the family.” He was the guy who as soon as he was in the top job would reunite the PCs and the Wildrose Party into a neo-Con monolith that would turn the screws on Alberta till the pips squeaked!

With Dr. Morton ensconced in Edmonton, and his fellow Firewall Manifesto signer Stephen Harper entrenched at 24 Sussex, well, things were gonna move so far to the right you wouldn’t recognize them all over again!

Now it’s June 2012. Alberta has a new premier, its budget is balanced (or, “essentially balanced” as the finance minister explained yesterday), and happy days are here again, just as Dr. Morton promised they would be.

The only thing is, the premier is Alison Redford – avatar of the Red Tory wing of the PC Party who back in January 2011 wasn’t even considered an also-ran by the provincial commentariat. Doug Horner, another leadership candidate whom those supportin’ Morton disparaged as even redder than Redford, is now the finance minister. And balancing the budget barely required a single howl of pain!

The annual financial statements published by the Redford Government yesterday show the province had only a $23-million (that’s million, with an M) deficit last year, way down from the $3.4 billion deficit predicted in the spring of 2011.

This just isn’t the way the narrative – carefully crafted by the skilful mythmakers of the right – was supposed to unfold. Who could have predicted this? (I mean, other than me.)

Once Dr. Morton was out of the leadership race, the storyline of the majority of pundits, pollsters, think-tankers, neo-Con federal politicians and even a few gullible bloggers quickly changed direction.

This time Danielle Smith’s right-fringe Wildrose Party – Dr. Morton has been accurately described as its “intellectual godfather” – was said with one voice to be poised to sweep Ms. Redford and her PCs from power. Once again, Albertans were about to hear the satisfactory sound of pips squeaking, and possibly some civil servants too.

But that didn’t happen either. And, oh, how the mighty have fallen! There was a little miracle on the Prairies, but not one the Fraser Institute can celebrate with any enthusiasm. On election night 2012, April 23, the Wildrose Party didn’t have as much to celebrate as it had hoped. But it did knock off Dr. Morton.

How could this have happened – other than Ms. Redford having turned out to be the sharpest knife in Mr. Stelmach’s kitchen cabinet, running a brilliant leadership campaign followed by an election campaign that was either brilliant too or the closest run thing since the Battle of Waterloo?

The way Mr. Horner explained it yesterday, the government managed to bring in $3.6 billion more revenue than it expected, mostly from the province’s booming natural resources sector.

This makes the Wildrose Party’s complaints last week that the province is in big, big trouble and really ought to be squeezing the juice out of the public service sound plain silly. Wildrosers have been reduced to complaining that the government’s predictions are too optimistic, which, face it, wouldn’t make voters lose much sleep even if there were an election any time soon. And there isn’t.

Seeing as accounting is more art than science, the only mystery about yesterday’s announcement is why the government reported a statistically meaningless $23-million deficit at all, instead of just declaring the budget balanced. This gave Wildrose Finance Critic Rob Anderson the opportunity to grump: “It shows that you can win the Lotto 6/49 and still not balance your budget.”

The answer, of course, is that Ms. Redford will hold off the glorious balanced budget announcement for a couple of years, when she does have the prospect of an election breathing down her neck again. Until then, as NDP leader Brian Mason expressed it yesterday, “the government’s got horseshoes in their pants.”

But if Ms. Redford and her colleagues have horseshoes in their pants, someone else doesn’t. That’d be Ted Morton.

There may be no place he’d rather call home than Alberta, but expect this far-right fiscal hawk to fly away greener pastures in the land of his birth, perhaps at some think tank where he can explain to his heart’s content why his new audience just can’t afford good public services until the budget has been balanced.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

It’s just one long summer vacation for Alberta’s Tory family. Premier Alison Redford, possibly not exactly as illustrated, can be seen in the front seat of the Edsel at left. Below: The Wildrose Party on their way to summer school at Chestermere Slough; Kelley Charlebois; Thomas Lukaszuk.

It’s summertime, and the livin’ is easy – especially if you’re Alberta Premier Alison Redford.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a more congenial political climate than the one Ms. Redford and her Progressive Conservative government now find themselves enjoying this summer.

Not quite three months have passed since Ms. Redford’s unexpected but decisive victory on April 23, and we are not yet embroiled in the minutiae of a fall session. So this is the perfect moment to assess the true strength of her Progressive Conservative government, now and possibly forevermore.

First of all, of course, the Redford Government is at the very start of what looks now like a long four-year run. Later, when less time is left, things will look a little different, of course. But right now, arriving at the Legislature in the morning must seem to the premier like the first day at a particularly pleasant holiday resort.

Moreover, none of the inevitable mistakes that plague any democratic government have taken place yet – unless, perhaps, you count the appointment of Kelley Charlebois last Friday the 13th as executive director of the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta or random social media messages left by Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk.

Mr. Charlebois, rather famously, was in 2004 paid more than $400,000 in “untendered consulting contracts, with scant records of what taxpayers got in exchange,” as the Calgary Herald put it, while serving as executive assistant to then health minister Gary Mar. But while plenty was wrong with the process, Mr. Mar deservedly took the pounding for it when he ran for the Tory leadership. It’s harder to fault Mr. Charlebois for taking the money – he was in business, after all, and they were dumb enough to pay him!

As for Mr. Lukaszuk, here’s the memo: Remember what happened to Stephen Carter. You’re forgiven … but get someone more diplomatic to run your Facebook and Twitter accounts! The only landslide you should say anything about is the one that sweeps Adrian Dix into power in B.C. next spring. And if you can’t say anything nice about Mr. Dix that evening, don’t say anything at all.

Other than that, the Tory backbenchers are still figuring out where the washrooms are located – loose tongues, MLAs dressing monochromatically in protest against this or that and similar nonsense is all at some indeterminate point in the future.

Even so, with a comfortable majority of 61 seats in an 87-seat Legislature, there will be plenty of wiggle room for Ms. Redford and her government as the clock runs down toward the next election. No need to listen too closely to bored and rebellious Tory MLAs, no need to fly into a panic over a death, a resignation, a floor crossing or the consignment of some naughty boy or girl to the rest of a term on the Independent benches.

Plenty of time, even, for Ms. Redford to play the Statesperson of Confederation and – who knows? – possibly even succeed at it!

Meanwhile, the premier enjoys almost the perfect Opposition in the Wildrose Party – doomed, paradoxically, to continue to present the caricature of a market-fundamentalist menace to Albertans and yet daily likely to grow weaker and more marginalized.

The Wildrose Opposition under Danielle Smith is big enough after its fluky bump in the polls in 2012, after all, to credibly claim to be a government in waiting – and thereby scare the bejeepers out of almost any sensible Albertan voter. At the same time, it is now the established home of the most annoying sub-group of the Redford Conservatives’ traditional power base – the social-conservative denomination of the loony right.

How convenient for Ms. Redford and her advisors that they no longer have to listen in caucus to this extremist faction and their tiresome calls for hard-right policies that are sure to alienate (and frighten, as we saw in April) the majority of middle-of-the-road Alberta voters.

The far-right’s standard bearer in the old PC cabinet, Ted Morton, is also conveniently gone – defeated, ironically enough, by a Wildroser in the Chestermere-Rocky View riding, where this week the Opposition  party was holding an appropriately named “summer school” for its rookie MLAs. With Dr. Morton and his ilk gone, the chances of the kind of rebellion that brought down former premier Ed Stelmach are considerably reduced.

What luxury, from the PC perspective, to be able to pursue a moderately conservative course without having to compromise with these extremists, while still being gently pushed by them to the moderate right – precisely where Ms. Redford’s instincts tell her to go.

After the April election, we heard lots of cries of “we’ll be back,” from disappointed Wildrosers. With the caveat that anything can happen in politics, it’s said here they won’t be, except as a convenient boogie-person to keep nervous Albertans strategically voting Progressive Conservative instead of NDP or Liberal at election time.

For one thing, as the influence of disaffected social conservatives within the Wildrose ranks continues to grow, as is inevitable with the PCs again holding the reins of power, the Wildrose Party will look and sound crazier as time goes on.

In addition, people who want power – and those who donate money to influence power – will drift back toward the PCs, as they always have in Alberta, for the obvious reason that that’s where the power is actually located.

At the same time, the talented political operators attracted to the Wildrose in 2011 and 2012 will disappear into the woodwork, uninterested in lending their talents to a lost cause that is increasingly the home of zany and self-righteous social conservatives.

More than likely, as a result of these fissures, a power struggle will emerge within the party with social conservative challenges to Ms. Smith’s pragmatic and reasonably sensible economy-centred approach growing steadily over the next four years. That is if Ms. Smith can sustain her own interest in what will surely increasingly will look even to her like a lost cause.

Meanwhile, from the perspective of the PCs, the parties of the left don’t look like much more than a nuisance to be swatted at half-heartedly. Here’s hoping the NDP can fulfill its traditional role of real opposition, or that a couple of Liberals can rediscover their forcefulness of yore. As for the Alberta Party, it will blow away in the next puff of wind like so many dandelion seeds – only, unlike those pretty yellow flowers, without their notorious regenerative power.

So where does this leave Premier Redford and her Tories? Exactly where any politician would wish to be! Firmly in control now, likely to remain that way well into the future, her power base purged of its most irritating component, with no opposition party anywhere in the political spectrum that can mount a meaningful challenge.

As the fall of 2012 drifts closer and we can begin to see the shape it will take, the biggest threat facing Ms. Redford is that a few of her backbenchers, their cabinet ambitions thwarted unlike Mr. Lukaszuk’s, will get bored and do or say something embarrassing.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Norwegian rats have their eyes on Alberta! It’s time to root them out, and their pipeline hating, royalty demanding, revolutionary pals! And where’s the AHS Plague Plan? And why does Norwegian crude cost so much? Below: More warnings, plus Verlyn Olson.

I don’t know about you, but a lot of Albertans are surely going to have trouble sleeping tonight when they realize their province is no longer rat free. Presumably a sales tax could be next!

This has been a lousy couple of summer weeks for Premier Alison Redford’s government, what with all the health executive pension plans and whatnot becoming public, but this rat report has got to be the topper. Well, look at the bright side: it’s a break from a steady drumbeat of health-care disasters – at least until someone asks Alberta Health Services if we have a Plague Plan!

After all, we’ve prided ourselves for a lot of years on the fact the only rats welcome in this province are, as former premier Ed Stelmach might have put it, the two-legged variety found in the vicinity of the provincial Legislature.

Mr. Stelmach, musing back in February 2011 about certain politicians who played a role in his decision to quit public life in disgust, observed that there are two things Albertans can be proud of: “We don’t have any four-legged rats and we don’t have a sales tax.” (Ted Morton! C’mon down!)

Now we’re down to only one such point of pride. (That’d be the sales tax, naturally, which we still don’t have. But how much longer can we stave that off if the price of non-Norwegian oil continues to languish below a hundred petro-loonies a barrel?)

As for the rats, Agriculture Minister Verlyn Olson told a news conference yesterday that 19 of ’em were discovered on Aug. 9 huddled down in – what else – a rat hole in a dump near Medicine Hat, which is also home to a lot of venomous snakes and has all hell for a basement, the location for which it serves as the trap door, but never mind any of that just now.

No word on whether any of these four-legged rats had a gold-plated Kalashnikov given to it by a certified Enemy of Alberta – you know, like the premier of British Columbia – but Mr. Olson (who is a guy, notwithstanding being named Verlyn by his mom and pop) said there may be more of them in the region and we’re going to have to send in special forces to root them out.

That may not be so easy, because we’re not just talking kangaroo rats (which, dirty little secret, have been living here for years). Nope, these invaders are, wait for it, Norwegian rats!

This is bad, really bad. First the Norwegians embarrass our fine Progressive Conservative government by charging embarrassingly high royalties for their oil, and then not just pissing the proceeds away on pricey buyouts for health care executives who move to other provinces like we do here in Alberta, but actually using it to fund social programs and putting the rest of it in a savings account. And their oil costs a fortune compared with ours – what’s with that?

Now their rats start turning up in significant numbers just inside our eastern frontier. And you think this is a coincidence? Surely not!

My advice? Well, first thing, just stay the heck from strangers with a funny accents offering you tasty Kjøttboller – which even the Wikipedia admits is “a rougher version of the Swedish meatballs” – without a contents label.

Traps and digital cameras with infrared spotlights have been set up around the dump, we were assured by Mr. Olsen, who is the MLA for Wetaskiwin-Camrose. (What were his parents thinking?) Meanwhile, we await the Wildrose press release weighing in with demands that we purchase Predator drones with little rodent-sized Ratfire missiles.

Over at the Ethical Oil Institute, I think you can rest assured they’ll be looking into the Rattus norvegicus-Christy Clark-Norwegian Brent Crude nexus.

Royalty-demanding rats to the east of us! Pipeline-hating revolutionaries to the west of us! Guilty looking former health care executives walking around among us! It’s just not easy being an Alberta Conservative these days.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alison Redford speaks to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees’ convention in Edmonton yesterday. (AUPE photo.) Below: Ms. Redford with AUPE President Guy Smith. Is she trying to build an alliance with public service unions?

It’s tempting to say Alberta Premier Alison Redford walked boldly into the lions’ den yesterday and emerged unscathed – whether or not what she found there resembled a room full of pussycats.

There are certainly those in some corners of the labour movement who will think Premier Redford’s welcome to the annual convention of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the 80,000-member public service workers’ union that is not affiliated to the Canadian Labour Congress, was entirely too congenial.

And it’s true it’s unlikely this was a performance Opposition Leader Danielle Smith could have managed before the same crowd, her evocative first name notwithstanding.

Premier Redford brought a warm message, and in return she was received warmly by the 1,000 or more people in the hall at Edmonton’s Shaw Conference Centre. Warmly enough, indeed, that some people there might have imagined they heard purring.

But there is something subtler and more intriguing going on, methinks, as Ms. Redford now appears to want to try to maintain the informal and in some ways unlikely alliance her Progressive Conservative government built in the final days of last spring’s provincial election campaign with unionized public service workers such as civil servants, health care workers and teachers.

The view of traditionally progressive political parties and many labour leaders after last spring’s election was that public employees were naïve to be wooed by Ms. Redford into voting strategically for her PCs, and that the premier’s still-conservative party would quickly revert to form once it had its majority safely in place. As much has been said in this space.

It was just, back in those scary days when the way-out market-fundamentalist Wildrose Party was riding high in the polls, that the PCs seemed like a safe, reliable and possible refuge to a lot of good rank-and-file Alberta trade union members.

But here it is October with the first snow of the season flying – as it does almost without fail during AUPE’s annual convention – and Premier Redford is still courting union votes, and indeed seems to be cozying up to public service union leaders like AUPE President Guy Smith as well.

Hers was the first time in history a sitting Alberta premier had ever come calling at an AUPE convention, and as far as anyone can remember, any union convention. Her staff phoned up and asked if she could speak.

So this is starting to smack of a real effort to put up some bridges to the union movement, especially public sector unions – structures that are built to last.

In this regard, Ms. Redford’s charm offensive is reminiscent of the coalition departing Ontario Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty built with the union movement back when he was still pursuing a strategy that worked for him.

It was also foreshadowed by things said by some of the brighter PC party leaders back in premier Ed Stelmach’s day, including Mr. Stelmach himself, who seemed to be trying to move the party closer to the centre, notwithstanding pressure from the right by the Wildrose Party and market-fundamentalist Tory insiders like Ted Morton, the worst premier Alberta never had.

All this said, it would be a mistake to read too much into this. Ms. Redford is not a social democrat. But she does seem now committed to preserving public services in sectors of the economy traditionally served by public employees. This is a change from her privatization talk during the Conservative leadership campaign in 2011.

Ms. Redford’s short speech to AUPE yesterday – frequently punctuated by applause – was pretty much boilerplate. But it was friendly boilerplate.

“This is an opportunity for me to personally thank your members for the work they do every day across the province … with integrity, dedication and compassion,” she began.

If you were waiting for tough news after this friendly start – and with the government staring at a deficit and the Wildrosers howling about it, that seemed like a possibility – it never came. Instead, she went on to say “the work you do is central to our government’s vision” and to express other similar sentiments.

“I remain committed to balancing the budget in 2013-2014,” Ms. Redford stated. But “at the end of the day, Albertans look to their government to provide first-rate public services, and we won’t let them down.”

Ms. Redford also made an effort to reassure provincial employees about the implications for their workplaces of the province’s “results-based budgeting” scheme – “this isn’t as simple as spending less to meet some arbitrary target.” Click here to read the full text of Ms. Redford’s speech, from which she barely deviated.

At an informal news conference after her speech, Ms. Redford reconfirmed her support for public services: “Absolutely, and I made that very clear during the election and I haven’t at all changed my position. It’s fundamental.”

Now, there are those in Alberta – not necessarily people hostile to Ms. Redford’s stated position on public services – who think this could be a dangerous strategy from her perspective. After all, they say, you can’t keep the loyalty of budget hawks and market fundamentalists, traditional supporters of the Alberta PCs, and also win the hearts of public employees.

Maybe so. But Ms. Redford’s apparent public service strategy suggests she has figured out the Alberta electorate had changed from the days the Conservatives came to power and that the smart place to move is indeed the centre, not the far right.

The right-wing rump in her own party may scream, and the Wildrose Opposition will fulminate. But if Ms. Redford really can build and maintain an alliance with public service labour unions, whose rank and file members show clear signs of understanding the issues and at least knowing who their friends aren’t, it could go work out quite nicely for her.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Pastor Allan Hunsperger in exile, as seen by the Wildrose Party’s leadership. Below: Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith (mean photo by Dave Cournoyer); the real Allan Hunsperger; party strategist Tom Flanagan; Wildrose House Leader Rob Anderson.

Despite an amusing Pierre Poutine moment before it started, the Wildrose Party’s one-day annual general meeting in Edmonton yesterday seems to have gone swimmingly for Leader Danielle Smith, whose key messages were transmitted uncritically by media and apparently accepted in a similar spirit by members.

Reading between the lines of the media coverage, Ms. Smith’s three main points to her right-wing supporters were as follows:

1. Bozo eruptions by bad candidates, not Wildrose policies, caused the party’s election loss on April 23
2. Nothing substantive in the Wildrose economic agenda needs to change, but the party may have to be sneakier about some of its members’ social conservative views
3. Albertans are gullible and stupid and were easily fooled by fear-mongering Tories into not voting Wildrose

OK. I admit it. I’m not a Wildrose supporter! I wonder what gave me away?

But really, people, how else are we to interpret Ms. Smith’s statements, as channeled to us by the Edmonton Journal?

It’s certainly apparent that poor old Pastor Allan Hunsperger, the Lake of Fire guy, is going to be made to to wear last spring’s election loss for all of eternity by the party brass.

It’s said here that most Albertans would have forgiven the party the pastor’s Bronze Age theological views – after all, he seemed sincerely concerned about the fate of certain voters’ eternal souls no matter how quaint his interpretation of how they were endangering them may have seemed to Albertans in this secular age – if they hadn’t so distrusted the party’s economic policies, particularly on health care.

But in the Wildrose worldview, the policies are fine, the problem with them is caused by fear-mongering, smear campaigns and Tory perfidy. Well, fair enough – Tories are pretty perfidious! It’s just that nowadays here in Alberta, they’re also sticking pretty close to the centre, and voters obviously liked the centre a whole lot better than the far right fringe.

Ms. Smith, at least, showed some recognition of this reality, calling for reassessment by party members of such contentious policies as “conscience rights” (code for allowing discrimination against gays and inconsistent application of reproductive rights), abolishing the Human Rights Commission (which smacked of encouraging bigotry to a lot of Albertans) and such nutty relics of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s independentiste Firewall Manifesto as replacing the Mounties with an Albertan-speaking provincial police force and heaving the Canada Pension Plan over the side.

This is progress of a sort, even if it doesn’t quite add up to the “fresh, innovative and forward-looking” policies Ms. Smith promised.

In addition, bozo eruptions by ill-prepared candidates will no longer be tolerated. While Ms. Smith won’t come right out and admit it was a mistake to stand by her men last April, she did note that “if the candidate created such a controversy that it’s going to bring down the entire party, that it’s going to affect our ability to form government, I hope they would have the respect for their colleagues and choose to fall on their sword.” And if they won’t, depend upon it that an able swordsman will be found.

As for the economic agenda, the Wildrose Party will continue to be sneaky about its plans for health care – describing the U.S.-style market system it wants to impose as “European” and emphasizing its own brand of fear-mongering about debt financing and fair taxes.

That’s OK too. There are lots of voters who support such views in Alberta just as, quite obviously, there are more who prefer a more centrist approach.

As for Point 3, well, here’s her argument and what she said: The whole party got smeared with Pastor Hunsperger’s bozo eruption – just as, you know, Wildrose supporters of Joan Crockatt’s federal campaign in Calgary Centre are trying to get supposedly anti-Alberta comments by Liberals Justin Trudeau and David McGuinty to stick to the Liberals’ popular candidate in that riding. (Psssst! This is called politics.)

“Frankly, I didn’t think Albertans would fall for it,” Ms. Smith said. “I was wrong. I thought people would understand that having a couple of candidates make controversial comments doesn’t cast a pall on all 87. I was mistaken.”

Sorry, as noted, it was Wildrose policy that caused voters, who it is said here were in a mood to punish the Tories by handing them a minority government, to stampede back to Ms. Redford when the polls made it look as if they were about to elect a far-right Wildrose majority.

Or, as Wildrose 2012 campaign manager Tom Flanagan accurately told the Globe and Mail, the strategy didn’t work in part because the party hadn’t expected to be as far ahead as it was by mid-campaign. “We thought our job was to scratch up to parity, not to defend a big lead.”

The party wheeled out (figuratively speaking) the ancient Dr. Flanagan, who has a well-known sideline drumming neoconservative nostrums into the heads of University of Calgary students, with a more believable assessment for the crowd of what went awry on April 23.

To wit, said Dr. Flanagan, 68, while the Tories were losing their most right-wing supporters to the Wildrose, the government’s pitch to those closer to the centre was working.

Plenty of folks on the left side of the political spectrum will agree with Dr. Flanagan’s prescription that, “we have to liberate those left-wing voters to go back and vote where they would actually vote.”

According to the Globe and Mail, Perfesser Flanagan also trotted out a suspect Abingdon Research opinion poll that supposedly shows the Wildrose Party firmly back in the hearts of Alberta voters. The word from the trenches of opinion research is that a poll replete with loaded push-questions about Daryl Katz’s political donations has been making the rounds, so supporters of Ms. Redford should probably wait for another survey before lining up to jump off Edmonton’s High Level Bridge.

In an interesting historical aside, the Globe revealed in its mini-interview that Dr. Flanagan said he himself wrote the infamous 2001 Firewall Manifesto, which then-premier Ralph Klein wisely tossed into the recycling bin. I wonder if the other noted western separatists who signed it, men (all men) like Prime Minister Harper, disgraced B.C. political advisor Ken Boessenkool and Ted Morton, the worst premier Alberta never had, remember the drafting process the same way?

OK, about that Pierre Poutine moment. Some naughty person – another perfidious PC, presumably – circulated an email to party members a couple of days before the AGM reading in part, “Rob Anderson needs our help if he’s going to become leader of Wildrose!” The email suggested that names candidates to support for party office to “be successful at forcing a post-AGM leadership review.”

It concluded: “With your help, we will make this a reality and elect Rob Anderson as Premier in 2016!” Mr. Anderson, a Mormon bishop who is party House leader and a particular favourite of the Wildrose social conservative wing, would no doubt love to be premier, but he really has pledged his fealty to Ms. Smith.

Anyway, the fun was soon spoiled by an email from Wildrose Chief Administrative Officer Jeffery Trynchy: “Please be advised that this email is fraudulent. We are currently taking steps to determine the identity of the sender.”

Darn!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The Dagny Taggarts, a synchronized skating team from Ottawa get ready to do their popular routine, “Where Is John Galt?” Defence Minister Joan Crockatt is in the front row, second from right. Below: Senator Tom Flanagan; U of C economics student Kim Jong-un, in full Calgary drag; Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk, ecstatic for his boss; and Nobel Prize winner Raj Sherman with the author. Actual events may not turn out exactly as predicted.

Why wait for 2013’s headlines when you can read them here on Alberta Dairy right now? In a spirit of transparency bordering on clairvoyance, Alberta Diary consulted the Red Top Institute of Political Commentary, headed by Perfesser Dave and made up of a cab driver from each of the communities in Alberta large enough to license insufficient numbers of taxis. Here are the Institute’s predictions of the major Alberta political news stories in each month of the coming year, made by an all-Albertan panel of the favoured sources of professional journalists throughout the world, which Perfesser Dave hopes will result is numerous grants from the bazillionaire American plutocrats who bankroll the Fraser Institute. Warning: Actual events may not turn out exactly as predicted, sort of like similarly scientific Fraser Institute studies in that regard.

January: Allaudin Merali returns to Alberta Health Services

Alberta Health Services CEO Dr. Chris Eagle announces that former Chief Financial Officer Alauddin Merali would be rejoining the province-wide health agency and resuming his duties as CFO. “When we looked at how much Mr. Merali’s lawsuit was going to cost us, seeing as we fired him in a big fat hurry after Fred Horne called us, and we don’t have a legal leg to stand on anyway, we thought we’d just say ‘to heck with it’ and ask him back,” Dr. Eagle said. “We would never have done this if the price of oil wasn’t collapsing,” he added, “but Doug Horner told us we had to.” Dr. Eagle added, “we’re putting him in the basement next to Lynn Redford’s office.” Premier Alison Redford was not available for comment, either about Mr. Merali or her sister, who also works is a senior executive position for AHS.

February: Finance Minister Doug Horner launches leadership bid as oil heads lower

With oil prices heading south of $50 per barrel, Legislative insiders say Finance Minister Doug Horner has established a committee to explore the possibility of another bid for the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party in the event Alberta Premier Alison Redford decides to step aside. He’s reported to have observed that his family has been in politics in Alberta longer than almost anyone else, and they might as well stick around and be the last ones in charge before the place shuts down. Petroleum markets have been hit by a glut of oil and gas supplies in the United States and a worldwide economic slowdown that has significantly reduced demand and prices. Ms. Redford was not available for comment, although her spokesperson, Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk, said he would be sending out a Tweet later urging Albertans not to move just yet to Saskatchewan and B.C., which he referred to as “mudslide country.”

March: Trio of Liberal MLAs cross floor to join NDP Legislative caucus

Alberta Liberal (Liberalberta) MLAs Laurie Blakeman, David Swann and Kent Hehr all cross the floor to join the Alberta New Democrats, increasing the NDP caucus to seven and making the New Democrats the third party by size in the Legislature. All three are thought likely to contest the NDP leadership, along with NDP MLAs David Eggen and Deron Bilous, when New Democrat Leader Brian Mason retires next year and moves to the United States to take up an important position with the New York City Transit Authority. “I’m finally going to get to run the train,” Mr. Mason said proudly. The remaining NDP MLA, Rachel Notley, continues to refuse to consider a leadership bid.

April: Defence Minister Joan Crockatt censured for misspelled Tweets

Conservative Party strategists ask Canadian Defence Minister Joan Crockatt to give up her Twitter account after a series of embarrassing late-night Tweets in which she spells Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair’s name five different ways and accuses him of willfully transmitting Dutch Disease to Canadians who weren’t told he had the condition. To pass the time previously spent Tweeting, Ms. Crockatt said she had joined the Dagny Taggarts, a synchronized skating team that acts out the stories of author Ayn Rand on the ice. She said she is also considering marketing a line of high-fashion clothing based on old Shriners’ uniforms. Conservative Party insiders said Prime Minister Harper considers Ms. Crockatt’s punishment the end of the matter, although he would think about demoting her to Minister of Winter Sports Clothing and making her move to Helena Guergis’s old office if there are any more Tweeting incidents.

May: Tom Flanagan appointed to Canadian Senate

Prime Minister Harper announces that his former aide and Calgary School professor Tom Flanagan has been appointed to the Canadian Senate. “As an American, Dr. Flanagan knows exactly what I have in mind for the Canadian Senate, which would be the American Senate,” the Prime Minister said. A special provision will suspend the normal requirement that Canadian senators not serve past the age of 75, the prime minister said. “I can’t tell you how delighted I am to be get to move back to Ottawa, where I was born and grew up,” said Dr. Flanagan, at a press conference on Parliament Hill, a remark that confused several members the Ottawa press gallery. “It sure has changed, though, since I was a lad there,” observed Dr. Flanagan, who is 106. “They even seem to have rerouted the Illinois River to the north side of town!” The PM and the professor have patched up their differences over Dr. Flanagan’s book on how he made Mr. Harper the prime minister and won the federal government for the Conservatives. “I explained to Stephen that it was just a misunderstanding,” Dr. Flanagan said. “The publisher forgot to say it was supposed to be a work of fiction.”

June: Jason Kenney weds Hungarian in secret ceremony

The marriage of Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to a woman he met at a street market in Hungary last summer stuns and shocks his friends and political associates. Little is known of the identity of the bride or the details of the ceremony, although one Ottawa insider is said to have cell-phone video of fellow Calgary MP Ron Anders sobbing throughout the service, which appears to have taken place outdoors at a campground. Sun News Network political commentator Ezra Levant turned down a request to serve as best man and refused to attend the rites. There is apparently some disagreement between Mr. Levant and Mr. Kenney about whether the European country is a safe destination for on-air political commentators. Alberta’s Mr. Lukaszuk, who serves as Premier Redford’s representative in matters involving European protocol, said he would not be sending a gift to Mr. Kenney and his bride.

July: Pope visits Fort McMurray, blesses Alberta oil sands

Accompanied by Prime Minster Stephen Harper, Pope Benedict XVI, flies into Fort McMurray, where the leader of 1.2 billion Roman Catholics worldwide blesses the Alberta oil sands, conducts services for a huge throng of worried Newfoundlanders and prays for an increase in petroleum prices. The Papal aircraft is accompanied by a flight of J-20 stealth fighters from the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, which the RCAF-FARC is said to be considering purchasing for the bargain-basement price of $35 billion. The Prime Minister is also said to have been persuaded by former British PM Tony Blair to become a Roman Catholic, since that would make it easier for him to get a great diplomatic gig after he retires from politics and because it’s been sort of a tradition with Canadian prime ministers, the better ones from Quebec, anyway.

August: Danielle Smith quits; Ted Morton to lead Wildrose Party

Saying that explaining the basic concepts of market doctrine MLAs from southeastern Alberta “is just too much work,” Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith announces she is leaving politics to move to Vancouver and join the Frasertarians, a New Age religion that worships Ayn Rand as the “Ascended Master and Mistress” and the late economist Milton Freedman as the “Missing Messiah.” After an emergency meeting of the party leadership at a retreat in the Rocky Mountain town of Cochrane, a press release is posted on the Wildrose website saying former Conservative finance minister Ted Morton has been asked to lead the party. Wildrose House Leader Rob Anderson is reported to be in the southern Alberta community of Cardston conferring with someone named Craig Chandler about plans to establish a new party, which will be even farther to the right than the Wildrose Party. Mr. Chandler will draft the Wild Rosehip Tea Party’s constitution, an area where he is said to have experience if not expertise.

September: On ‘sabbatical,’ Kim, Jong-un commences studies at U of C

Saying he on “on sabbatical” from his duties as leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Kim Jong-un commences studies in political science and economics at the University of Calgary. “I was very disappointed when I got here to learn that Professor Flanagan would no longer be teaching classes because of his duties in Ottawa,” said Mr. Kim. “My late father and I have both admired the professor and studied his advice for many years and I felt there were still some things I could learn from him.” However, Mr. Kim said, “I am looking forward to meeting and taking classes with other signatories of the Firewall Manifesto. As you know, it has been necessary from time to time to remind the American and Japanese imperialists of the DPRK’s own Firewall Doctrine, under which a Wall of Fire can be called down upon them at any time if they do not respect the territorial integrity of the DPRK. We were always encouraged by the existence of people who thought like us in the Canadian West.” Mr. Kim said he also hopes to make a “Gangnam Style” video with Justin Trudeau before returning to the Korean Peninsula in 2015. “Justin has enough star power to put a small satellite into orbit, although only for peaceful purposes!”

October: Raj Sherman quits, Darshan Kang to take over as Liberalberta leader

Liberalberta Leader Raj Sherman takes Albertans by surprise when he announces he will soon be stepping down as leader of the Liberalberta Party. “I’ve already achieved what I came here to do,” Dr. Sherman told an extremely small group of supporters. “You’ll know what I’m talking about very soon,” Dr. Sherman added mysteriously. Darshan Kang, the only remaining member of the Liberalberta Caucus, will become interim leader until a joint leadership convention is held with the Alberta Party in the spring of 2014. The Liberlbertans will publish advertisements in all Alberta community newspapers asking any Alberta Party members to come forward and identify themselves.

November: President Obama says cold fusion is product of ‘new Manhattan Project’

U.S. President Barack Obama announces in Washington that the work of a top-secret “new Manhattan Project” has resulted in the creation of a cold fusion reactor that will solve the world’s energy problems forever and end the threat of global warming using only water and peanut butter. Oil prices plunge to below $5 a barrel for sweet Saudi Arabian crude. Former PC leadership candidate Gary Mar is reported to have returned from Hong Kong to Calgary, where he is raising funds for another run at the Progressive Conservative Party leadership, should Premier Alison Redford decide to step down. “We all know that Alberta has a great future as a top producer of world-class beef and barley, and as the No. 1 holiday destination for Americans thanks to the steep decline in the value of the Loonie,” Mr. Mar said. Ms. Redford, who was reported to have been admitted for a period of rest at the Ralph Klein General Hospital on Third Way Trail in south Calgary, was not available for comment.

December: Raj Sherman awarded Nobel Prizes in Medicine, Economics

The Nobel Prize Committee in Stockholm, Sweden, announces that former Albertalberal Leader Raj Sherman had been awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Medicine. The Emergency Room physician and former politician will receive the prize for having come up with all the answers to the problems faced by Alberta Health Services in just 18 months, then offering them to Mankind, the committee said. He will be honoured at a dinner of fermented herring and köttbullar (Swedish meatballs) in Stockholm later this month. The committee also awarded Dr. Sherman the Nobel Prize for Economics, for the same reasons. Dr. Sherman is the first winner of two Nobel Prizes in a single year. Dr. Sherman will take up a teaching post at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, where he said he has really good contacts. “See,” he told reporters who met him at Arlanda Airport near the Swedish capital, “I really was the smartest man in Alberta!”

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

They kissed us once. Will they kiss us again? Alas, in Alberta right now, there’s no way to be cert- cert- certain. Alison Redford chats with a typical Alberta voter last spring – although, Alberta politicians and their supporters may not turn out to be exactly as illustrated. Below: The real Ms. Redford, Finance Minister Doug Horner.

Here in 14 words is the conundrum that faces the Progressive Conservative government of Alberta Premier Alison Redford: you can be progressive, or you can be conservative, but you can’t be both.

So which is it?

The problem that confronts Ms. Redford’s PCs is that they aren’t really sure themselves.

Progressive? Or Conservative? Great taste? Or less filling? Breath mint? Or candy mint?

This, it is said here, is the source of the real pain that shows through the Redford Government’s commentary about how we all need to reduce our expectations for the provincial budget scheduled for introduction on Thursday, March 7.

Yeah, I know, Alberta Tories have a long history of saying things are going to be terrible come budget time, then laughing at us behind their hands when we all heave a huge sigh of relief after things turn out not to be as quite as bad as forecast.

That’s a perfectly plausible explanation for much of the gloom and doom about declining petroleum revenues that is emanating from Ms. Redford’s inner circle nowadays.

It’s also true that Ms. Redford probably promised more than she could sensibly deliver in the desperate final days of the 2012 election campaign, when it looked very much as if the ultra-conservative Wildrose Party might actually win a majority. That was when she told Albertans that thanks to a heaping dosage of political Retsyn ™ her party could be a breath mint and a candy mint!

But neither of those cynical explanations account for the level of genuine angst apparent in the Red Tory Budget Blues that are playing continually in Alberta these days.

After her first 2013 meeting with her PC caucus, Ms. Redford warned that falling petroleum prices – which with metronomic regularity catch Alberta PC governments by complete surprise – mean tough choices, deep cuts, reduced expectations, haircuts all ’round, programs under the microscope, tighter belts, (insert spending-cut metaphor of choice here), yadda yadda.

Finance Minister Doug Horner has also joined this chorus of Gloomy Thursday, a tune so melancholy many listeners that hear it are immediately tempted to jump off a fiscal cliff!

But their real problem is that old habits die hard. The Alberta PCs have been a party of deep fiscal conservatism and knee-jerk austerity for so long that the instinct to cut in a crisis is bred in the bone.

Like a Civil War surgeon presented with a health care problem, the only thing they can think of is a hacksaw and a broom handle for the patient to bite down on while they cut. So they can’t help telling us that if you think that image is painful, just wait for the Budget Speech on March 7 – and they mean it!

After all, that strategy has worked for years for the Alberta Tories, at least once the quasi-NDP government of their founder, Peter Lougheed, came to an end in the mid-80s just as the neoconservative verities of Ronald Reagan, the Fraser Institute and General Augusto Pinochet began to really take root around the globe.

Many believers in that worldview remain influential in Tory ranks.

The trouble is, in the Alberta of the early 21st Century, that territory has been ceded to the Wildrose Party led by former Fraser Institute apparatchik Danielle Smith and abetted by the unprogressive federal Conservatives of Prime Minister Stephen Harper who campaigned tirelessly for the Wildrosers last spring.

And those voters, it now seems clear, are not coming back. To them, Ms. Redford is beyond the political pale, and nothing she says or does will assuage their bitterness at her defeat of former finance minister Ted Morton, the worst premier Alberta never had, and her rejection, however temporary, of their Paleolithic values.

Faced with the grim prospect of defeat at the hands of these unreconstituted market fundamentalists and social conservatives, Ms. Redford’s strategists did a clever and rather courageous thing – on very short notice they cobbled together a new coalition with small-l liberal supporters of the Alberta New Democrats, Liberals and Alberta Party who preferred a soft Tory government to a hard-edged Wildrose premier. If that meant fewer seats for the parties they traditionally supported, well, the Devil take the hindmost!

The Redford Tories built this instant coalition by promising things that were traditionally anathema to many of their party’s core supporters: public services, investment in health care and education, commitment to inclusive values.

Now, facing a temporary decline in resource revenues, their deepest instinct is to backslide – just when what the situation calls for is a modest tax increase, a recommitment to small-l liberal values, a willingness to live with deficits a little longer and the courage to stay the course on health, education and social spending.

If they respond to their the primitive instincts of their political lizard brain, they will likely lose the new and still fragile coalition that saved their bacon in 2012, but they won’t win back the right-wing rump they have already lost to the Wildrose Party.

So reason tells them to stay the course. But passion tells them to abandon it. The resulting pain they feel is real.

To paraphrase the breath mint ad of yore: They kissed us once. Will they kiss us again? Alas, in Alberta right now, there’s no way to be certain until March 7.

Right now, they don’t even know themselves!

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

The trading pit: Is this what Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson sees when he thinks of the Alberta Teachers Association? Actual Alberta schoolteachers may not be exactly as illustrated. Then again, these days … Below: Mr. Johnson and ATA President Carol Henderson.

OK, Alberta Education Minister Jeff Johnson’s bizarre attempt to bluff the province’s 35,000 unionized schoolteachers into signing a contract has failed. Now what?

One week ago, Mr. Johnson mailed the president of the Alberta Teachers Association and the Chair of the Alberta School Boards Association a rambling letter setting out the government’s latest bargaining demands in what’s turned out to be a rocky round of negotiations with the province’s teachers.

While not particularly generous, it could be argued the government’s parsimonious position wasn’t all that far from the ATA’s modest last offer – a four-year deal with no pay increase in the first three years and a 1-per-cent lump sum in the fourth versus a four-year-deal with no pay increase in the first two years and 1 per cent and 3 per cent in the final two years.

The two sides also have differences over workload issues and how to resolve them. Still, veteran labour negotiators have bridged far bigger gaps when everyone agrees to sit down and act like grownups.

However, Mr. Johnson – who according to his official Legislature biography has a background selling photocopying machines and as a “futures trading floor pit boss” – blew the idea of playing nice to smithereens when he included a threat in his letter to cut teachers’ salaries if they wouldn’t agree to his proposal by March 7, when the provincial budget is scheduled to be tabled in the Alberta Legislature.

He’d already publicly mused about using legislation to force the teachers to live with whatever sort of a deal he wants to impose on them.

Well, maybe that kind of thing works when you’re a pit boss on the notoriously chaotic futures trading arena. But in labour negotiations it’s like waving the proverbial red flag in the face of a big angry bull.

Teachers all across the province – key members of the unnatural coalition that unexpectedly re-elected Ms. Redford and her government last April – collectively blew a gasket.

Yesterday, ATA President Carol Henderson told Mr. Johnson he could drop dead, although not in quite as many words.

“Teachers do not respond well to ultimatums,” she advised a news conference where, surrounded by teachers from throughout the province, she said the ATA’s Executive Council has unanimously rejected the government’s demand.

So if Mr. Johnson and the government of Premier Alison Redford had imagined they could force a deal with teachers to be signed by the time the budget comes down in eight days, that idea’s now done like dinner.

It’s almost as if Mr. Johnson had the misapprehension teachers couldn’t add up simple sums – they teach arithmetic, for heaven’s sake – and figure out that whatever they agreed to now could have no possible impact on a budget that is already written, sent to the printers and has quite possibly already rolled off the press!

It’s hard to imagine the pandemonium of negotiations among the ATA and various school boards across the province, which is apparently what’s on the agenda now that Mr. Johnson’s bluff has been called, being anything except protracted, acrimonious and politically deeply embarrassing for the government.

And if the government steps in now and legislates any deal for the teachers, it’s almost certain to destroy the progressive coalition that came to Ms. Redford’s rescue on April 23.

So what could Mr. Johnson have been thinking when he drafted his ridiculous letter – which seems to have been specially designed to wreck one of the few areas where the Redford Government has been doing quite well, labour relations with public sector unions?

After all, the fiasco that now seems very likely is sure to make us all forget the five years of labour peace with teachers shrewdly negotiated by the government of former premier Ed Stelmach, Ms. Redford’s unlucky predecessor, who nowadays looks pretty good.

In an excellent blog post yesterday, Daveberta.ca author Dave Cournoyer suggests the whole strange episode goes back to the deep divisions within the Progressive Conservative caucus over Ms. Redford’s leadership.

Mr. Cournoyer suggests Tory caucus members who supported other leadership candidates – which would be pretty well all of them – blame teachers for joining the party and electing Ms. Redford as leader.

“The tension is said to have led to more than a few heated arguments behind the thick wooden doors of Tory caucus meetings,” he wrote, considerably understating widespread rumours of screaming matches between the education minister and the premier. Well, she can hardly fire Mr. Johnson – the third education minister in as many years – without suffering another black eye.

So now, according to this way of thinking, disgruntled supporters of candidates such as Gary Mar, Ted Morton and Finance Minister Doug Horner are out for revenge against Alberta’s teachers.

On the face of it, this interpretation is almost as bizarre as Mr. Johnson’s negotiating strategy. After all, while teachers may have voted for Ms. Redford’s leadership, they also voted for her government – saving many a Tory MLA’s job in April 2012.

What’s more, they would almost certainly have done so again, had Mr. Johnson not blundered into their negotiations.

Still, as Sherlock Holmes so famously observed, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

And it’s getting so that Albertans need the assistance of a famous “consulting detective,” and not a fictional one either, to figure out what this government is up to!

Conservative icon Tom Flanagan’s defining moment. Below: Dr. Flanagan in happier times; the six signatories of the Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto; Richard Nixon saying goodbye during his 1952 Checkers speech. Unlike Dr. Flanagan’s likely career trajectory, Mr. Nixon came back. 

Who could have predicted that yesterday would be the pope’s last day on the job?

I speak, of course, of Professor Tom Flanagan, spiritual leader of the neoconservative movement in Canada.

Well, Dr. Flanagan is the neocon pope no more, having uttered the astonishing opinion at a seminar the previous evening in the deep-south Alberta city of Lethbridge that child pornography is, if not exactly OK, more of a freedom of expression issue than an exploitation of children issue.

Not only that, but in response to a questioner at the University of Lethbridge seminar, Dr. Flanagan informed his audience he’d once been on the mailing list of the North American Man-Boy Love Association for two years. One can only hope this was in error, as he seemed to be implying.

I was driving the car when I heard that one, and that was the moment I spat Tim Horton’s coffee all over the dashboard and the windshield. It’s going to be a dickens of a job to clean up the mess this weekend!

Now, it’s been understood for a while that Dr. Flanagan – hitherto best known for his role as self-proclaimed godfather to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s political career, signatory to the Alberta separatist Firewall Manifesto, chief strategist of Alberta’s far-right Wildrose Party and advocate of the assassination of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange – has a small problem with knowing when not to use his outside voice.

But one would have thought that he would have realized by now in the age of the tiny phone-mounted digital camera that any voice one chooses to use – even a whisper – is in effect your outside voice.

Such recent examples as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney telling well-heeled donors that 47 per cent of Americans were lazy parasites and Pastor Allan Hunsperger of Dr. Flanagan’s own Wildrose campaign last spring advising gays in a blog they’d better repent or their fate would be an eternal hot bath in a lake of fire should have been fresh in his mind.

Perhaps the U of L’s classroom ambience made the American-born neocon icon forget he was not back in the loving embrace of the University of Calgary, where his odious economic views have been treated as infallible and inspired by generations of students and administrators since the late 1960s?

Alas for Dr. Flanagan, he is also known for controversial and unsympathetic views about First Nations rights, which inspired Idle No More activists to attend his lecture. One of them, a young man from the nearby Blood Tribe named Levi Little Moustache, brought a digital camera and asked an unsympathetic question – although he, like many others in the room and out of it, gasped with shock when Prof. Flanagan uttered his career-ending opinion.

Within hours Dr. Flanagan discovered that even for a pal of the prime minister and comfortable senior Conservative party ideologue known as the Karl Rove of Canadian politics, there are limits to what may be said aloud without consequences – especially when it’s posted on Youtube.

In the hours after the video of Dr. Flanagan’s remarks went viral, spokesthingies for conservative groups and political parties, previously obsequious media organizations and once-sympathetic employers were practically knocking over the furniture in their haste to be the first to tack their former neoconservative idol to the wall.

The University of Calgary announced Dr. Flanagan has already promised to retire, and he wouldn’t ever be coming back, thank you very much. The CBC immediately canned him as a commentator. The prime minister’s spokeperson and Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith both forcefully denied him. The Wildrose Party vowed he’d never come near one of its campaigns again. Even the Manning Centre chopped him as a featured speaker at its upcoming national conservative scheming session in Ottawa next week.

Dr. Flanagan, sounding stunned at the rapid reversal of his fortunes, issued a meek apology, but it was too late. His career was already covered in ignominy.

Only his old “Calgary School” buddy Barry Cooper stood by him, explaining to the Calgary Herald that Dr. Flanagan’s swift fall from grace was actually because Canadians are stupid – although not, Dr. Cooper hastened to add, such paragons of Canadian virtue as the Wildrose Party and the Manning Centre.

It is said here this is a defining moment in Canada’s conservative movement, if only because one of its most influential figures will no longer be around – at least where anyone can see or hear him. (Count on it that Dr. Flanagan’s strategic advice, which has been proved to be effective, will continue to be sought.)

As the late Richard Nixon said of himself, we won’t have Dr. Flanagan to kick around any more – “thank you, gentlemen, and good day.” And I, for one, will miss kicking the always-deserving Dr. Flanagan.

Indeed, it has not been a good couple of years for the six signatories of the independantiste Firewall Manifesto – former Alberta finance minister Ted Morton has been kicked out of office by angry voters, Ken Boessenkool has been removed as B.C. Premier Christy Clark’s chief of staff after a murky incident in a bar involving a woman and too much alcohol, and now Dr. Flanagan has been consigned to utter darkness for his views on child porn. Mr. Harper, of course, continues for the moment as prime minister.

Neoconservative admirers of Dr. Flanagan such as his former colleague Dr. Cooper can take comfort in the knowledge that the professor, a lifelong advocate of brutal market fundamentalist nostrums and an opponent of fair treatment of public employees, will have a very nice University of Calgary pension to fall back on.

Meanwhile, in Rome, the other pope, the one who leads the planet’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, also departed from office yesterday. A successor for Pope Benedict XVI is expected to be elected within a few weeks.

It is not known when adherents of the Canadian neocon faith will elect their new spiritual leader – although it’s likely Preston Manning will be available for the job after the conservative conclave in Ottawa next week.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Your blogger with CBC investigative reporter Charles Rusnell. Below: Edmonton-Manning MLA Peter Sandhu; Mr. Sandhu with Alison Redford in a Tory Party photo grabbed from the Daveberta.ca blog. The photo-bomber is Calgary-Fort MLA Wayne Cao.

It was Mr. Rusnell who broke stories on, among other things, former Tory leadership candidate and senior minister Ted Morton’s bogus government email account; a host of illegal political donations, including the one from Athabasca University; Tobaccogate, wherein a law firm that had the premier’s ex-husband for a partner got picked for years of highly lucrative legal work; former Alberta Health Services CFO Allaudin Merali and his wonderful expense account; Alison Redford’s sister’s iffy political donations; and the disturbing tale of the whistleblower at Transcanada Pipelines.

The latest Conservative caucus calamity (C3) uncovered by Mr. Rusnell is the troubling case of Peter Sandhu, the Tory MLA for Edmonton-Manning, who since his election in 2008 has generally been assessed as a legislative under-performer but not much more.

A low performance rating is no barrier to re-election around here, however, as long as the MLA in question has official permission to put his or her face on a blue-and-orange PC lawn sign, something Mr. Sandhu proved in April 2012.

Nevertheless, Mr. Sandhu is performing well beyond specifications in the press clippings department right now – indeed, to such a degree that he’s at least temporarily no longer a member of Premier Alison Redford’s PC caucus.

On Tuesday, the Edmonton investigative staff of the CBC was reporting that Mr. Sandhu’s house-building company, NewView Homes, not only has a history of chronic debt and faces dozens lawsuits for unpaid bills, but a goodly portion of its liabilities weren’t properly disclosed as required of an MLA under the province’s Conflicts of Interest Act.

Worse, Mr. Rusnell revealed, his investigation “uncovered a false statement made by the MLA in a sworn affidavit filed in a civil court case involving a dispute over an alleged debt.” The CBC says it can show Mr. Sandhu was in Canada at a time he swore he was in India.

Yikes! Now the opposition parties of the left and right are screaming for Mr. Sandhu’s head and demanding that the RCMP step in and lay charges.

The Redford Government would really rather do nothing at all, thank you very much. Premier Redford and Human Services Minister Dave Hancock – who is also the Government House Leader and as readers of this blog will recall, according to the Edmonton Journal the moral compass of the Tory caucus – lamely tried to praise Mr. Sandhu for doing “the honourable thing” and jumping before he was pushed.

So, is Mr. Rusnell on a crusade against the Progressive Conservatives?

No doubt it seems that way deep inside the Redford cabinet bunker, but it’s said here that it wouldn’t really matter which party was in power, Mr. Rusnell would be going after bad behaviour with the same pit-bull fervour.

Charles Rusnell is just one of those guys who can’t stand hypocrisy, special dealing, rule breaking, insider trading and the idea that the law is for everyone else – just the sort of things you’d expect to be rampant in a province that has been run by the same party for 42 years and essentially the same crowd for almost twice that long. Really, probably the only way to get him off your case is to behave yourself.

If Mr. Rusnell were a police officer, he’d be the kind of cop who’d ticket the chief’s car at a funeral. Instead, he’s a former print reporter with a lot of knowhow about filing Freedom of Information requests.

Years ago, Mr. Rusnell worked for the Edmonton Journal, but they pushed him over the side along with many other skilled senior reporters who cost too much and knew too much for the beancounters in Ontario who run the paper.

So nowadays, while the investigation-free daily timorously ducks behind its leaky new paywall, Mr. Rusnell wins awards and breaks scandals one after the other for the national public broadcaster, which is hated by Conservatives everywhere for doing just this kind of thing.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised Mr. Rusnell will be breaking another C3 very soon.

Meanwhile, in other news, Mr. Merali, the former AHS CFO, is back in the news, demanding the payment of the $580,000 severance package he was denied when he was made to walk the plank for embarrassing the government when his sometimes lavish expenses turned up in one of Mr. Rusnell’s most famous reports.

And reading between the lines of the news coverage Wednesday, it sounds very much as if the people who run AHS recognize they’re going to have to pay him – which will be yet one more serious embarrassment for the Redford Government.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Alison Redford announces her resignation moments after 6 p.m. yesterday while Deputy Premier Dave Hancock looks on grimly in the background. Below: Mr. Hancock, the man thought most likely to become the PC Party’s interim leader and premier, as the crisis played out last week.

Alberta Premier Alison Redford, who resigned moments after 6 p.m. yesterday, fell victim to her own hubris and that of the party she led.

In the next few days and weeks, we are certain to hear two competing narratives emerge to explain what happened to Ms. Redford’s short, unhappy premiership, which began when she was sworn in on Oct. 7, 2011, and ended suddenly yesterday evening in the palace coup, dignified resignation or whatever it was that happened.

The first narrative will be that Ms. Redford was an arrogant and headstrong leader, chosen almost by accident through the maneuverings of a Machiavellian political operator, and that she was principally the victim of her own excess.

The second will be that that Ms. Redford was the victim of the structural flaws of a party that is a generation beyond its best-before date and the scheming of that party’s network of “old boys,” and thus the entire party must be swept away to fix the problems Albertans now see their province as facing.

The first benefits Ms. Redford’s Progressive Conservative Party, as it tries to find a way to reinvent itself yet again, when it thought it had managed to do just that with the selection of Ms. Redford as party leader in October 2011 and the general election that followed on April 2012.

The second benefits the Opposition parties, and in particular the Wildrose Party led by Danielle Smith, which hoped and still hopes the conditions are finally in place for the replacement of the Progressive Conservatives, who have now ruled Alberta for 43 years.

In truth, there are elements of truth to both stories, and it is nonsense to believe one to the complete exclusion of the other.

Ms. Redford was an arrogant and inconsistent leader, perpetually persuaded she was the smartest person in the room, harsh in her treatment of subordinates, certain she deserved to travel first class, convinced she could casually betray people on the left and the right with whom she had built alliances without consequences for herself or her government.

Who now doubts that either a smooth old charmer like Gary Mar, the seemingly practical Doug Horner or even an ideological zealot like Ted Morton, the other front-runners in the 2011 leadership race, couldn’t have done a better job keeping the PC Party together, wooing back disgruntled defectors to the Wildrose and reinventing the Tory party so that it could survive yet another electoral test and last a half a century?

But it is also true that the party is truly past its prime, a coalition of self-interested individuals like the governments of other one-party states that stayed too long in power and forgot why they exist. I rule, therefore I am.

With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we can see now that Ms. Redford was exactly the wrong leader to take up the reins of a party that assumed it ruled by divine right, and which otherwise had forgotten what it was there to do.

It is a party, moreover, that had already split in two with the defection of the more ideological Wildrose faction, and which threatened to split in two again when the controversy over Ms. Redford’s high-handed and entitled style refused to go away.

What is clear is that the rebels were plentiful enough, and their threats believable enough, that Ms. Redford bowed to the inevitable and departed gracefully.

When the end came yesterday, it was sudden. My local paper turned up in my mailbox yesterday afternoon bearing a story that declared, “Premier Alison Redford isn’t going anywhere and is committed to changing her leadership style for the better.” Within a couple of hours my smartphone was carolling the hour of her news conference.

Attention will now turn to what the PC party will try to do to remain in power, and whom it will choose to lead it out of the wilderness it has found itself in, however it got there.

Elected Tory representatives and party officials were tight-lipped yesterday about who will take over as premier when Ms. Redford formally steps aside on Sunday, but the prevailing wisdom – with which I concur – is that Deputy Premier Dave Hancock will be chosen as interim leader while the party holds a leadership contest it can ill afford.

Mr. Hancock is the most likely interim premier simply because he is the least likely to want to stick around in that role, and hence will be agreeable to most.

After that, certainly some former candidates will take a serious look at taking another run at the leadership – others may conclude it’s now too late to aspire to being captain of what’s been revealed as a leaky and quite possibly sinking vessel.

Aspirants may include Mr. Mar and Dr. Morton, as well as former Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk and former Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel. There may be some surprises too. Very possibly the quality of the field will be a weathervane for the party’s chances of survival.

Today is the first day of another season, both in politics and the calendar. That is the only certainty.

Alison, we hardly knew ye! But I guess we knew ye well enough.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Tory leadership non-candidate Jim Dinning with your blogger, back in the day. Below: Former premier Ed Stelmach and non-candidates Ted Morton and Gary Mar.

If we were to speak for former Alberta premier Alison Redford today, here is what we would say: “Apres moi le deluge!”

There is plenty of fight left in the Alberta PC Party. The trouble is, it is all directed inwardly, at other Tories.

On everything except the policies that must be changed to save the party, Alberta’s crumbling 43-year-old Progressive Conservatives dynasty is disunited, playing out its increasingly bitter rivalries in public.

Given that, who could be found in possession of both an ounce of sense and $50,000 in spare change to step forward to be the party’s saviour? Count on it, the list of leadership contenders that actually joins the race will be both shorter and less impressive than the catalogue of candidates now being touted by pundits and the media. The numbers of ten- and even two-minute Tories persuaded to sign up and vote for them will hit historic lows as well.

Every day the list of promising leadership prospects no longer interested in the job gets longer.

The Opposition Wildrose Party – really just another faction of the same “conservative” family – is truly a “government in waiting now,” impatiently tapping its metaphorical toes and drumming its metaphorical fingers as it awaits the opportunity to beat the hapless Tories like the family mule and install Danielle Smith as premier.

Consider what the voices from the Tory crypt now making themselves heard are saying.

Yesterday in Regina, former premier Ed Stelmach, the one whose underachieving leadership now looks stellar compared with that of the catastrophic Ms. Redford, told an audience of Junior Achievers that “now’s a time for a leader with modesty (and) humility.”

Well, as the Bard said and Mr. Stelmach went a way to proving while in office, “nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility.”

Mr. Stelmach told the young Achievers that, in his opinion, it wasn’t Ms. Redford’s policies that got her in trouble, “it was just poor judgment.” Well, yeah, but it’s possible, isn’t it, that one flowed from the other?

Later today, presumably, interim Tory leader and Premier pro tempore Dave Hancock will be in the news lambasting Mr. Stelmach and taking the rest of Mr. Shakespeare’s advice: “…but when the blast of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger; stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard-favor’d rage.”

Yesterday, as it happens, Mr. Hancock was busy responding to another former leadership contender who has been telling tales from the crypt: Jim Dinning, the front-runner in the 2006 contest who unexpectedly lost to the aforementioned Mr. Stelmach, who in turn became Alberta’s unlucky Premier No. 13.

Mr. Dinning had taken to the pages of the Calgary Herald on Wednesday, saying that any new PC leader would have to deal with a dysfunctional and entitled party – and advising everyone that he wasn’t going to be the one who saved the unsalvageable Tories. His message in a nutshell: “This party needs someone like me. Too bad it can’t have me!”

Whoever leads the party, Mr. Dinning said, needs to be an outsider. He went on to take a hard shot at Finance Minister Doug Horner, who is probably the most credible candidate still remaining inside the battered PC caucus and cabinet.

“Let’s return to the simple and clear accounting rules used to get our government back in the black,” Mr. Dinning said, a reference to Mr. Horner’s confusing new-math accounting that appears to have been invented to conjure up a desperate pre-election budget “surplus.”

He went on: “The budget is one of the most important things the government does, because it drives almost everything else. Albertans sacrificed a lot to have a debt-free future. We don’t want that hard work put at risk, and we should be able to understand the government’s books.”

By the end of the day, this had Premier Hancock on the defensive, sniffing that Mr. Dinning, a former finance minister under Ralph Klein, is entitled to his opinion, but that Mr. Horner’s scheme is a “very good and simple accounting process.”

“I sure don’t like that word entitlement,” Premier Hancock huffed. “I do not know anybody on any side of the house in any party who ran for personal gain and is there for personal gain.” (Eye rolls all ‘round.)

With the Herald now the go-to site for disgruntled former would-be Tory leaders, the previous Monday its pages were graced by another former finance minister and sometime leadership front-runner, Ted Morton, who is still the worst premier Alberta never had.

The PCs’ former chief party ideologue and separatist Firewall Manifesto signatory is now working as a teacher in the University of Calgary’s cult-like School of Public Policy. He was considerably harsher and more explicit in his judgments of the current PC leadership as he too ruled himself out of joining the 2014 lemming run.

Dr. Morton, who hails from California and Wyoming, ripped the latest former PC premier for relying on political advisors from Ontario as her political brain trust.

And he hammered Ms. Redford and Mr. Horner alike for the new accounting rules that Mr. Dinning also assailed. “You can’t say that you’ve balanced the budget when you are borrowing billions and only saving millions,” he complained. “The math doesn’t work.”

“For many PC faithful – I was one – this was our hallmark, the PC brand,” Dr. Morton went on. “We may agree to disagree on social issues, but when it comes to paying our way and telling Albertans the truth about how much we are spending, and how much, if any, we owe the banks – that’s untouchable.”

Ms. Redford and Mr. Horner, he grumbled, “threw that brand overboard.”

Dr. Morton’s pitch, in turn, can be summed up as: “You were stupid not to choose me, so nuts to you.” Nevertheless, it will resonate with the many former PCs who are now making their way to the Wildrose Party.

Gary Mar, the front-runner from 2011, had earlier ruled himself out of the race too, although with considerably more grace. Likely, though, Mr. Mar is thinking many of the same things as he wonders where his career will take him when he leaves his lavish exile in Hong Kong, which is bound to happen soon.

But this is only the beginning of what is certain to be long series of denunciations of the Redford-Hancock-Whoever Government.

Even unmemorable leadership aspirants entrusted with minor cabinet portfolios by Ms. Redford are turning on her, grasping for an ethical fig leaf by reciting insincere samokritika about the need “to re-earn the moral authority to govern” and the like. Sheesh!

Alison Redford opened the can and let loose the first wave of snakes. It’s only going to go downhill from here as the decision on who will lead the final PC government in Alberta history nears. The end is nigh.

Retiring Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason with your blogger’s introduction-to-journalism class in 2011: he was witty, passionate and persuasive, a big part of why the Alberta NDP continues to draw young supporters in significant numbers. Below: Mr. Mason with Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who has also retired from politics; in a typical pose at a party social; and in another typical pose, proving Alberta’s weather was never too cold for a speech from Brian Mason.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. — Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

About all you need to do is change the first line of A Tale of Two Cities to the best of exits, the worst of exits, and Charles Dickens could almost have been comparing the first steps on the short road to a graceful departure from Alberta politics taken yesterday by NDP Leader Brian Mason, and the clamorous retreat from public life last month by former premier Alison Redford.

Well, maybe the season of Darkness is going a little far. What’s happening in Alberta would only seem like the French Revolution if you’re a die-hard Progressive Conservative Party loyalist like Premier pro tempore Dave Hancock, who stood in as premier when the Tory caucus gave Ms. Redford the bum’s rush after it started to seem as if her repeated embarrassments were becoming too much of a habit for even Alberta’s Dynastic Conservatives to put up with.

Still, say what you will about Mr. Mason, and there were New Democrats who certainly didn’t agree with the direction he took on every policy, including this one, he sure as hell never embarrassed his party.

As Edmonton Journal political columnist Graham Thomson accurately wrote in his column yesterday, “there were many days in the past 14 years when Mason was arguably the most able MLA in the assembly, punching far above his weight as he held the government to account.” For this, he is widely respected by opponents and allies alike.

The Calgary-born Mr. Mason was a political science student, Edmonton bus driver, trade union activist and Edmonton city councillor for 11 years before he was first elected to the Legislature in 2000. He famously lost a constitutional challenge in 1989 against a provincial law that banned employees from running for municipal office – then ran anyway and won. The law was eventually repealed.

At 60, Mr. Mason will have outlasted four Tory premiers when he formally steps aside as leader this fall. The NDP leadership vote will take place less than a month after the PCs pour their sacred Tory anointing oil atop the head of banker Jim Prentice.

Mr. Mason surprised almost everyone with his announcement yesterday morning. It’s reliably reported by party insiders that he only told his three caucus mates yesterday was the day 20 minutes or so before he informed the public. Any one of Rachel Notley, David Eggen and Deron Bilous would make an effective leader.

But Mr. Mason’s judgment was probably right even if his timing was abrupt. After 14 years in the Legislature and a decade as leader, it is time for a change – and so Albertans will have a political leadership race that really matters, if only because the new social democratic leader is likely to be around for a while.

It is fair to say Mr. Mason’s record was mixed. He probably saved the NDP from being wiped out more than once. But even after a good election for the party, the NDP caucus could never quite break free from numbers low enough for a meeting in a phone booth – a far cry from the 16 seats the party held in 1986.

Still, Mr. Mason proved to be a determined and effective leader – and in party circles had a reputation as a difficult boss. Well, such things often go together, and may be necessary.

When he announced his plan to step aside yesterday, he said the party is “ready for prime time” – but that it needs the excitement of a leadership contest to bring it to the attention of the public beyond the Edmonton area, the only part of Alberta where an Orange Wave is ever likely to be a factor.

He boasted rightly that under his leadership, the party has grown its membership among young people, many of whom will be effective standard bearers in the future.

But then, Mr. Mason was never better than when he was with young people. When he spoke to a class of my journalism students at a fairly conservative Christian college in Edmonton, he held them in the palm of his hand – witty, engaging, passionate. So it wasn’t that much of a surprise when several turned into committed New Democrats.

As leader, Mr. Mason was something of a bon vivant, seldom unwilling to give back a little to his party. I once saw him pay more than $600 for an “I’m Supportin’ Morton” button at a party fund-raising auction. (Conservative hard-liner and two-time leadership candidate Ted Morton used the slogan for both his leadership runs – and I want the NDP to know that Mr. Mason’s generous bid inspired me to acquire a pristine I’m Supportin’ Morton T-shirt, size XL, for sale at any post-leadership NDP fund-raising event attended by Mr. Mason.)

Presumably this quality is something Mr. Mason will take with him to his retirement home in British Columbia’s Okanagan wine growing region.

Yeah, yeah, the outgoing NDP leader said he was thinking of sticking around for a while as an MLA, but I suspect that’s a diplomatic way of keeping a scrap over his Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood seat from erupting until after the party has had a chance to choose its next leader.

Certainly there will be leadership candidates from outside the caucus, and more than one may be eyeing Highlands, which under Mr. Mason at least has remained a safe seat for the NDP.

Ms. Redford’s noisome exit, meanwhile, continues to reverberate from Zama City in the province’s north to the southern Calgary suburb of Palm Springs, California, a lesson in how not to leave politics.

But when Mr. Mason goes, taking his famous one-liners with him to his Okanagan redoubt, the silence around here will be deafening, and more’s the pity.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

Don’t worry: you have absolutely nothing to do with the apocalypse. You might as well mine more bitumen while you wait for it. Below: Barry Cooper; another version of the Friends of Science billboard; yet another great billboard supporting democracy and the people. Billboard photos found on the Internet.

Alberta’s “Friends of Science” are friends of science like North Korea is a democratic people’s republic.

But to give credit where credit is due, both the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Friends of Science do great billboards.

One such is causing a buzz in Calgary right now, demonstrating the scientific principle that money used to buy outdoor advertising is usually well spent, as long as the print’s big enough for an old geezer like me to read while driving by at a 110 kilometres per hour or faster while fumbling to put on his glasses.

The Friends of Science billboard, which seems to have popped up at a couple of locations in Calgary, makes the claim that anything we do on this planet has little to do with climate change because the Sun is a lot bigger than the Earth.

In fact, the words “Earth to scale” are so small that I can’t read ’em without slowing down, and then all the petroleum-guzzling drivers in their giant pickup trucks honk at me and give me the bird as they swerve around my self-righteous little car. But the message is pretty clear: we can dig up those Bitumen Sands just as fast as we like and not lose any sleep about it – and anyone who says otherwise is a … celebrity.

This argument, as an alert commentator on the Internet pointed out, is a little like saying there’s less poverty in India than in Canada because rupees weigh less than Loonies. But, whatever, we can leave the science stuff to the real scientists, most of whom by the sound of it are not Friends of Science.

Actually, as an aside, we should always be careful with messages that come from groups labeled “friends of…” and the like. More often than not they are not friends of what they say they are, although I say this with apologies and with the knowledge that the Friends of Medicare are friends of medicare. For a case in point, just consider all the things advocated by the Friends of the Workingman at the so-called “Fairness For Workers” anti-union lobby.

Moving to the realm of political science, the Friends of Science turn out to be an interesting group, another part of the extensive, intricate and well-funded network of loony-right front groups, which inevitably seem, like the cabal around our prime minister, to be linked back to the Friends of Scholarship at the University of Calgary’s so-called “Calgary School.”

Lots of credible information about the Friends of Science is only a Google search away on the Internet. Like the fact it was founded by a bunch of retired oil industry types and while, like many such groups, it claims to be funded from small donations by citizens it seems in fact to be generously and secretively bankrolled by flow-through donor-directed “research funds” like those once connected to a right-wing political scientist at the University of Calgary.

“The ‘research’ funds were set up at the university in 2004 by Barry Cooper, a political science professor, in partnership with an anti-Kyoto Protocol group calling itself the Friends of Science,” wrote Ottawa environmental journalist Mike De Souza in 2011. They were used, he reported, in “a sophisticated international marketing and lobbying effort to discredit scientific evidence linking human activity to climate change.”

The so-called Science Education Fund accepted monies from Alberta oil and gas companies, foundations and individuals and then passed it on to groups like Friends of Science.

The hard-working Mr. De Souza, who has since been laid off by Postmedia News in a cost-cutting measure, reported that Dr. Cooper’s effort also involved public relations firms like APCO Worldwide, Morten Paulsen Consulting and Fleishman-Hillard Canada.

Through his charter membership in the Calgary School, Dr. Cooper is closely associated with other far right ideologues and political figures such as Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff, Ted Morton, David Bercuson and, of course, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

The publicly supported Calgary School is the “Inner Station” at the head of the vast river of Astroturf, spin and often-fabricated research that flows from Calgary through myriad groups like the Fraser Institute to the Prime Minister’s Office and on out into Canadian public discourse.

In other words, it is the inspiration of and source for an immense stream of bogus science done in the cause of making rich people richer, undermining democracy and electing ultra-right-wing political parties. Plus great billboards.

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets. All the money’s on Jim Prentice – but is it the smart money? Below: Ric McIver, Jim Prentice, Jim Dinning and Gary Mar.

CALGARY

Could Ric McIver actually win the Alberta Progressive Conservative leadership race?

Or, to put that another way, could Jim Prentice lose?

Maybe that seems like a theme for a political science fiction story to you. After all, Mr. Prentice – the former banker, corporate lobbyist and federal cabinet minister – is the choice of the PC establishment.

What’s more, he’s now backed by 49 of 59 PC Members of the Legislative Assembly. All the political oddsmakers say he’s a sure bet to win. He acts like a guy who’s on a holiday cruise to victory.

But if he astonished everyone by losing, he wouldn’t be the first front-runner preferred by the mighty PC establishment to drop the ball on voting night, would he?

As a matter of fact, he’d be the third in less than a decade! The fourth in a row if you want to count Ralph Klein’s victory over Nancy Betkowski in 1992, although that one seemed like more of a real contest at the time.

Alert readers will recall that in 2006 Jim Dinning’s ascension to the throne of Peter Lougheed appeared to be all but a certainty. The smart money was all on his candidacy. The PC establishment wanted the former Alberta provincial treasurer in the job – 38 caucus members supported him, compared with 13 for the next most popular candidate. The polls showed him leading by a mile. And all the hot Alberta political strategists were supposedly in his corner.

For his part, Mr. Dinning acted like a man on his way to an easy victory, and an easy general election after that.

Turned out Mr. Dinning was running a terrific general election campaign, visiting every riding in the province, reaching out to all kinds of Albertans. Alas for him, though, a leadership campaign is not a general election. The number of memberships you sell counts more than the number of ridings you visit.

Perhaps Mr. Dinning paid insufficient attention to the riding associations with the votes. Perhaps he didn’t concentrate on what die-hard Tories wanted, or where their loyalties actually lay. Whatever it was, when the dust had settled, a guy named Ed Stelmach was the premier. As we all asked at the time: Ed Who?

Then in 2011, after Mr. Stelmach said to heck with the abuse that automatically goes with the job of being premier, and after a short interregnum during which the party took a look at candidates like Ted Morton and Doug Horner, the smart money settled on Gary Mar.

Mr. Mar was a former minister under Mr. Klein, and tout le monde political Alberta reached the conclusion all at once that he was the front-runner, favoured by the Tory establishment and backed by some of the same hot political strategists who had worked for Mr. Dinning.

I don’t think that Mr. Mar’s ascension to the throne was ever seen as quite the sure thing Mr. Dinning’s appeared to be. Just the same, he had the most backing in caucus – 27 members compared with 14 for Mr. Horner and 11 for Dr. Morton. The smart money settled on him early and stayed there until the night in October on which the party selected … Alison Redford.

If you like, you can blame teachers and other public employees who bought party memberships to support Ms. Redford – whom they’d mistakenly decided was some kind of progressive. But, in their defence, buying memberships is what the PC Party asked them to do. What? It wasn’t supposed to make any difference?

As for the party establishment, Ms. Redford was backed by only one caucus member other than herself, and none of the party’s big movers and shakers.

Now, here it is 2014, Ms. Redford has been fired by her own caucus, Dave Hancock is premier pro tem, and Mr. Prentice is assumed by all the same people to be the front-runner with such a massive lead that no one could possibly catch him.

Mr. McIver, who seemed like he might have had a slight chance at the start, apparently shot himself in both feet by joining something called the March for Jesus last month. Remember that? When it turned out the organizers behind the march had some astonishingly homophobic views, the punditocracy reached the conclusion he was done like dinner. After all, the whole thing smacked of the Lake of Fire debacle, the discovery in 2012 of the undiplomatic blog post by an evangelical Wildrose candidate that appears to have sunk the Wildrose Party in the 2012 general election.

But are you sure? Don’t forget that Mr. McIver, the MLA for Calgary-Hayes, was well known in Calgary before his career in provincial politics as an alderman universally known as Dr. No – for his habit of saying no to spending proposals backed by other city councillors. I’m just saying, but it seldom hurts to have a nickname in politics.

In 2010, Mr. McIver ran for mayor of Calgary – and was favoured to win, so he knows what that’s like – and did well, even if he lost to a more liberal guy named Naheed Nenshi. The next year, he ran for the Legislature and got elected.

People all over Alberta – and especially in Calgary and the south – know who he is and what he stands for. A lot of them like that Dr. No stuff, and a fair number may even not have cared about – or noticed – the story about the March for Jesus.

Name recognition alone might not be enough to float his boat, but in the meantime, Mr. Prentice is campaigning a lot like … Jim Dinning.

He’s running a good general election campaign designed to persuade Alberta voters that he’s not scary and, even after the flip-flops and entitled behaviour of Alison Redford, he can be trusted.

That may work with the masses in Edmonton, where a lot of voters at the moment plan to vote NDP, and in Calgary, which seems to be leaning the Wildrose way nowadays. But how will it play in Ponoka? More importantly, how will it play inside the PC Party – where most activists are still plenty to the right of the general populace?

I don’t know about you, but at this point in the contest, it feels to me like Mr. Prentice’s support is a mile wide and an inch deep – and that he may have forgotten that in a party leadership race, memberships sold count for more than where they were sold.

Meanwhile, Albertans know who Ric McIver is, and a fair number of them may very well like what they see. Mr. McIver is capable of selling thousands of memberships in his south Calgary powerbase, not to mention to supporters of the March for Jesus.

Jim Prentice, the same people may ask … who’s he?

And you’ve got to admit, the whole PC leadership campaign sure hasn’t caught on fire – just yet, anyway. Blogger Dave Cournoyer called it the world’s most boring political leadership race, and I’d say he just about nailed it.

So could Ric McIver actually win?

It’s unlikely, I suppose. The Tory establishment isn’t going to make it easy for him. For one thing, there’s no way it wants to lose for a third time in a row … or a fourth if you count Mr. Klein, although that one worked out better for them.

And maybe I’m just a political blogger pipe dreaming about a race that’s actually interesting.

But the answer is yes, Mr. McIver could still win – notwithstanding the self-inflicted holes in both of his feet.

Could he go on to beat the Wildrose Party? That’s a story for another day.

And could Thomas Lukaszuk, the MLA for Edmonton-Castle Downs and once Ms. Redford’s Deputy Premier and the owner of the best hair in Alberta politics, also pull off another “miracle on the prairies” and eke out a victory?

The answer to that one is easier: No.

Alberta civil servants: do you get the feeling someone may have their eye on you? Below: Agents of change Richard Dicerni, Ian Brodie, Oryssia Lennie and Steve West.

Premier Jim Prentice says he intends to “reform” Alberta’s public service, fix its low morale, reverse its “shocking” turnover and deal with its other “very significant problems.”

He’s appointed a former senior federal civil servant and well-connected business professor to be his “agent of change,” along with a couple of right-hand persons to assist with this change agentry. Their work will start immediately.

Sounds way better, huh, than former premier Alison Redford’s heavy-handed war on the Alberta civil service?

Well, if you think that, I’m sorry to have to inform you this is probably bad news for those who work in public service in Alberta.

I don’t think Mr. Prentice has anything different in mind for you or your jobs than Ms. Redford did. It’s just that the way he goes about it is likely to be a lot smoother.

Just for starters, anyone who believes in the value of public services should be wary when the term “reform” pops up.

“Reform” is the original neoliberal code word for “destroy.” Alberta civil servants will remember Steve West, the Vermilion veterinarian who was premier Ralph Klein’s agent of change for the provincial civil service. Dr. West – known in those days as Dr. Death – was a “reformer” too.

There will be lots of talk about how the reforms implemented by Mr. Prentice’s team of change agents are going to make things better for public employees and the public generally, but if they were planning to actually improve things, they’d use that word.

Now that’s just suspicion based on bitter past experience, of course. For the rest, all we have to go on for the moment is very limited information available about Mr. Prentice’s three amigos – Richard Dicerni, his new top civil servant, whose official title is deputy minister of Executive Council; Oryssia Lennie, another veteran senior civil servant; and Ian Brodie, the best known of the trio, who was once Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s chief of staff.

I spent enough time working as a civil servant many years ago in another province to know Mr. Dicerni’s type. He’s part of that itinerant class of top bureaucrats known as the Mandarinate who flit from job to job, civil service to civil service, and public sector to private sector to academe, often under the patronage of an influential politician like Mr. Prentice. According to the Edmonton Journal, he “oversaw a public service overhaul” in Ottawa too. We all know how that’s working out, don’t we?

These types often speak multiple languages, have multiple advanced degrees and command extremely high salaries – as a rule they are not, however, friends of front-line civil servants or the public services they deliver. They see the world through the eyes of the politicians they work for, and nowadays the prevailing ideology among those politicians is neoliberalism, and all the wreckage that entails.

We know Mr. Dicerni was until not long ago deputy minister at Industry Canada, where he worked with Mr. Prentice in his former federal incarnation. He has also held similar senior positions in the Ontario government and the private sector, where he has been associated with such entities as Ontario Power Generation, Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. and Mercer Delta, a management consulting firm.

He’s an adjunct professor at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business, which like any corporate-sponsored business school is not exactly a hotbed of social democracy, and on the board of the Public Policy Forum, a think tank dedicated to getting the public and private sectors to work more closely together.

Ms. Lennie is cut from the same piece of cloth. She too has floated between senior bureaucratic positions in the federal and Alberta governments. She was Deputy Minister of Western Economic Diversification Canada, the highly politicized federal pork-distribution agency.

Her resume includes a many senior civil service jobs that place her on the political fringe of the civil service – intergovernmental affairs, international trade agreements, head of Alberta’s delegation on the failed Meech Lake Accord and the province’s Senate Reform Task Force, which pushed for the so-called Triple-E Senate scheme to Americanize and bog down Canada’s parliamentary system.

She took a secondment away from the civil service from 1973 to 1975 to set up and lead premier Peter Lougheed’s correspondence unit. She is a member of the board of the Canada West Foundation, another promoter of the Triple-E Senate nostrum.

Then there’s Ian Brodie, who mainstream media did kindly inform us was Mr. Harper’s first chief of staff, though little else.

Here we find a character who is at the very centre of the disproportionately influential nexus of neoliberalism that nowadays runs Canada.

He is research director of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, which as author Donald Gutstein points out in Harperism, How Stephen Harper and His Think Tank Colleagues Have Transformed Canada, functions as “a neoliberal think tank embedded within a university.”

Dr. Brodie has a PhD in political science from the U of C. He studied there under former Alberta finance minister Ted Morton, a well-known neoliberal hard-liner and the worst premier Alberta never had.

Typical of the far-right university types who make up the faculty of the so-called Calgary School, of which the School of Public Policy and the U of C Political Science Department are both integral cogs, Dr. Brodie once boasted of his success exploiting Canadian voters’ distrust of academics.

During a talk on federal Conservative strategy at McGill University in Montreal soon after he left Mr. Harper’s service, quoted by Dr. Gutstein, he bragged: “Every time we proposed amendments to the Criminal Code, sociologists, criminologists, defence lawyers and Liberals attacked us for proposing measures that the evidence apparently showed did not work. That was a good thing for us politically, in that sociologists, criminologists, and defence lawyers were and are held in lower repute than Conservative politicians by the voting public. Politically, it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition of university types.”

We can expect the same approach to evidence-based policy making in Mr. Prentice’s upcoming campaign to “reform” the Alberta public service.

With the Wildrose Party seemingly on the ropes, and therefore no alternative to the PCs that Alberta voters are likely to support, Mr. Prentice and his three amigos can get right down to their plans for the civil service.

No wonder Ms. Redford’s unconstitutional Bill 45, which attacks the free speech rights of all Albertans if they dare to talk about public service labour relations, remains on the books under Mr. Prentice!

So watch out, the fight to save public services, fair pensions for the people who deliver them, not to mention the very idea of a public sector, is far from over in Alberta.

Keep your powder dry!

+ + +

Too many chiefs (of staff); not enough bureaucrats?

Well, some ministers just generate a lot of work, I guess.

The government of Alberta has updated its online employee directory and … guess what? … Health Minister Stephen Mandel has two … two … two chiefs of staff!

It’s not entirely clear which of Chief of Staff Jennifer Pougnet or Chief of Staff Christel Hyshka, who back in the day was a Liberal caucus staffer and later Mr. Mandel’s by-election campaign manager, is the chief chief of staff.

Whatever. Maybe they split their duties supervising the staff of seven in the minister’s office. Or maybe one of them just supervises Mr. Mandel.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.