Alberta Diary

Canada's Conservative Party, a once-great national organization, is being overwhelmed by its own extremists

djclimenhaga — Fri, 17 Feb 2017 06:25:44 +0000

The refusal by Conservative MPs to agree to an anti-Islamophobia motion and their mockery of an Edmonton Liberal MP for having once worked as a bus driver are both additional evidence their once-great national party, like its Republican counterpart in the United States, is increasingly controlled by an extremist, offensive fringe.

Not that additional proof was really needed. The blowhards and bigots crowding the Conservative Party of Canada's interminable leadership race should be evidence enough.

What you should worry about when you worry about President Trump (Hint: not where Ivanka sits!)

djclimenhaga — Thu, 16 Feb 2017 07:02:19 +0000

It's actually pretty hard to know who to root for in the emerging war between U.S. President Donald Trump and the mainstream media.

I mean, seriously people, I find Mr. Trump as scary as the next sane person -- although apparently not for the same reasons as the MSM, which seems to think he hates Russia with insufficient fervor.

Appalled maybe, but no one should be surprised by the ugly threats against Rachel Notley

djclimenhaga — Wed, 15 Feb 2017 06:06:50 +0000

No one should be surprised that Alberta's NDP premier, Rachel Notley, has been subject to constant and often serious threats of violence.

New statistics from the Alberta Justice Department have revealed what everybody who's paying attention already knew: Premier Notley receives more threats of physical harm than any of her predecessors in Alberta's top political job.

She reacts with remarkable aplomb as many of the people who contribute to this problem shrug their shoulders and say, "Who? Me?"

Portrait unveiling stands in for the fond official farewell former premier Dave Hancock never had from his PCs

djclimenhaga — Tue, 14 Feb 2017 06:18:17 +0000

The unveiling of Dave Hancock's portrait in the Legislature yesterday may have been presided over by a New Democrat Speaker and featured a speech by an NDP premier, but it had the warm family quality one might have been expected from the official farewell the former premier never really got from his own Progressive Conservative Party.

Hancock was unexpectedly elevated the premiership by his caucus colleagues at the start of the summer of the Tories' discontent -- the date when he was sworn in was March 23, 2014, immediately after the PC caucus had for all intents and purposes fired his predecessor Alison Redford.

Leduc No. 1 and Alberta's unluckiest lucky day

djclimenhaga — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 05:32:15 +0000

February 13 is the 70th anniversary of the day Alberta simultaneously won the lottery and started to watch everything go to hell in a handcart. February 13...Alberta's unluckiest lucky day.

In other words, 70 years ago, with memories of the Great Depression and the Second World War still very fresh in the minds of the province's population of about 800,000 souls, Leduc No. 1, a few miles south of Edmonton, struck oil and the whole world changed.

Cars didn't have seat belts back in 1947, so no one thought to say: "Fasten your seat belts!" But by gosh, they should've!

Advocates of more choice in education unite to condemn school board chair's call for more choice in education

djclimenhaga — Sun, 12 Feb 2017 05:55:11 +0000

Conservative politicians, their vocal supporters, private school operators, separate school system officials, charter school advocates, administrators from such institutions, and parents of home schooled children have all been chanting the mantra of "competition is good" for so long most of us can hardly remember hearing anything else.

So the reaction to Edmonton Public School Board Chair Michael Janz's suggestion last week that the public system should offer its own Roman Catholic education specialty program has been interesting, to say the least.

They hate it!

It turns out that competition is always good … except when it isn't! Who knew?

Former Alberta premier Dave Hancock to be the subject of a hanging Monday afternoon at the Legislature

djclimenhaga — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 05:59:56 +0000

"You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit."
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

As predicted in this space three years ago, it was only a matter of time before we Albertans had added to our premier provincial collection new portraits of first ministers Alison Redford and Dave Hancock.

Brian Jean makes it clear, any new Alberta conservative party will be the Wildrose Party

djclimenhaga — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 05:57:07 +0000

In case you're still wondering how this unite-the-right thing is supposed to work, Wildrose Leader Brian Jean has clarified matters for you.

The party that emerges when the dust has settled will be the Wildrose Party, he told the world earlier this week. The Progressive Conservatives will be no more -- although, certainly, the "new" Wildrose party (which will not be new at all, of course) will soon try to rebrand itself "conservative."

In subversive move, Edmonton school board chair calls for optional Catholic programs in public schools

djclimenhaga — Wed, 08 Feb 2017 05:42:39 +0000

In a brilliantly subversive move, Michael Janz, chair of the Edmonton Public School Board, has publicly wondered in a blog post if the board he leads should set up its own optional Catholic program.

After all, the Edmonton Public School Board has a pretty long and successful record of running faith-based programs under its auspices, Janz noted mischievously on Monday in the personal blog he publishes online. There's a Protestant Christian program, a Jewish program and a Muslim program, all operating under the board's auspices with proper attention to standards and curricula.

Alberta public employees, subject to constant Wildrose and media vilification, win national award for effective service

djclimenhaga — Tue, 07 Feb 2017 06:13:08 +0000

Just guessing, but you probably won't read much news coverage about the national award the Alberta Public Service received yesterday for its effective response to last spring's Fort McMurray fire.

Why Canadians are lucky Rona Ambrose was hanging around the Caribbean with a billionaire

djclimenhaga — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 06:03:02 +0000

Anyone can yacht. It takes a certain boldness, though, to excoriate someone for hanging around an island in the Caribbean with a billionaire while you're yachting around the Caribbean with another billionaire.

Well, it's nice to have assistants to send out the press releases and do your Tweeting for you, I guess, when you're soaking up the sun on deck at an undisclosed location somewhere in the Caribbean Sea.

I know, I know … Prime Minister Justin Trudeau broke a rule on his way to hanging around with the Aga Khan, who is also a family friend. Whereas Opposition Leader Rona Ambrose broke no rules on her way to hanging around with N. Murray Edwards, late of Calgary, who is also a family friend.

Wildrose reaction to proposed raise for front-line health workers illustrates the party's rightward shift

djclimenhaga — Sun, 05 Feb 2017 06:29:53 +0000

Unhappy Progressive Conservative traditionalists have termed the still theoretical united-right party PC leadership Jason Kenney hopes to create after he wins the party leadership in March, "Wildrose 2.0."

But surely this is incorrect. If the Danielle Smith led Opposition party ginned up by oilpatch operators unhappy with former PC premier Ed Stelmach's plan to get Albertans a slightly better return on the resources they own was Wildrose 1.0, surely the B-Team now headed by Brian Jean is already Wildrose 2.0!

That means that in the likely event Kenney succeeds in uniting the right on his radical social conservative terms, the new entity should be called Wildrose 3.0.

This feels like it's happened before … it's Groundhog Day and the Liberals have just broken a promise!

djclimenhaga — Thu, 02 Feb 2017 06:56:27 +0000

So long, electoral reform! Welcome back, first-past-the-post!

Elizabeth May, the leader of the Green Party, said yesterday that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's announcement that his clear promise of electoral reform back in the 2015 federal election campaign was going over the side left her feeling "more deeply shocked and betrayed by my government today than on any day of my adult life."

Those of us who are old New Democrats, or old Tories for that matter, may not feel quite so much shock.

It is Groundhog Day, after all, and we've seen this movie before -- over and over and over. Every time we're persuaded to vote Liberal for one reason or another, as a matter of fact.

For a mild-mannered guy, Stephen Khan's farewell to the PC leadership race was remarkably blunt

djclimenhaga — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 06:33:39 +0000

What's remarkable about Stephen Khan's farewell to the Progressive Conservative leadership race -- and almost certainly from the Progressive Conservative Party as well -- is the passion of his fierce critique of both the state of the party and fellow candidate Jason Kenney.

Khan is a Progressive Conservative and there will be no Progressive Conservative Party if Kenney wins the leadership race, he told me bluntly yesterday. "He has been clear. He doesn't want to be the leader of the PC Party. He wants to form a 'unity' party."

'I have as much interest in joining the Wildrose 2.0 Party as you do."

A Tale of Two Traitors: Or, does President Donald Trump even get this betrayal thing?

djclimenhaga — Tue, 31 Jan 2017 07:22:55 +0000

Harold Adrian Russell Philby, better known as "Kim," the British spymaster who turned out to have been working all along for the Soviet Union, denied that he had betrayed his country.

In My Silent War, the 1968 autobiography Philby may or may not have written himself during his residency in Moscow, with or without the assistance of a KGB minder, he made the point he did it, if not quite for England, for mankind then, because of what he called "my persisting faith in Communism."

Philby died in Moscow in 1988, where he was given a hero's funeral. He was awarded posthumous medals by the Soviets, and a nice grave marker was erected in his memory.

Ted Byfield is back, cyber-crusading for Jason Kenney's bid to lead Alberta back to the '50s!

djclimenhaga — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 06:56:14 +0000

Like the proverbial bad penny, Ted Byfield is back.

It should come as no surprise that Byfield, now 87 and still apparently furious the world has changed, is once again hoping to influence Alberta's political course.

PC leadership campaign rattles uncomfortably toward a seemingly inevitable Jason Kenney victory

djclimenhaga — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 06:57:15 +0000

This is how the Tory world ends, not with a bang exactly, but the sound of tears and serial shoes dropping.

If the ascension of former Harper government cabinet minister Jason Kenney to the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party seemed inevitable to most observers at the start of this week, the remaining doubters should be persuaded in the wake of yesterday's events.

In short order throughout the day, three shoes dropped in the room upstairs. That leaves only one more to go … at least if there's really a talking political horse up there.

Canadian newspaper industry advances on Ottawa, hands out, awash in red ink and democratic platitudes

djclimenhaga — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 05:12:19 +0000

What's black and white and red all over? The Canadian newspaper industry's balance sheets.

But as has been said here many times before, no industry had more warning of the extent and nature of the coming digital revolution than the Canadian newspaper industry, and it has turned the wrong direction at every step along the way to its current disastrous destination.

But that doesn't mean these newspapers' well-heeled owners won't demand tax-supported subsidies to support their badly run businesses if they're given any encouragement -- which is exactly what the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to have been doing.

Canada's right doubtless dismayed as The Economist boots the U.S.A. off its list of 'full democracies'

djclimenhaga — Thu, 26 Jan 2017 08:01:34 +0000

Hmmm… The venerable Economist magazine's research arm yesterday booted the United States off its list of "full democracies," demoting Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill" to a mere "flawed democracy."

This happened in the wake of the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. However, the impeccably right-wing British magazine's Economist Intelligence Unit generously concluded, it was not because of it.

That is to say, the researchers for the pretentious news magazine for people who wish they were rich didn't blame the decline in American democracy on Trump. They blamed Trump on the decline in American democracy.

Support by Rachel Notley for Donald Trump's Keystone XL Pipeline decision may be unnerving, but it's politics

djclimenhaga — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 06:06:06 +0000

Premier Notley just pledged to work with Trump administration on Keystone XL. WTF?
-- Environmentalist Mike Hudema, Tuesday afternoon on Facebook

It's hard not to feel Mike Hudema's pain.

Hudema is a Greenpeace Canada campaigner, well known for his anti-tar sands activism in Alberta. I suppose some people in the oilpatch don't like him very much, but he's generally viewed with respect. God knows, he's consistent.

Hudema ran for the Alberta NDP in the Edmonton-Meadowlark riding back in 2001. He was 25 at the time.

Others sure to suffer as Sudden Apocalyptic Deficit Syndrome strikes affluent, older, white males from Saskatchewan

djclimenhaga — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 06:30:34 +0000

Saskatchewan appears to be suffering from a serious economic malady.

Nobel Prize-winning economist and journalist Paul Krugman calls it "Austerity Fever."

Canadian economist and journalist Toby Sanger calls it Sudden Apocalyptic Deficit Syndrome (SADS).

Call it what you will, a new case has now been diagnosed in Manitoba, and conservatives here in Alberta appear to have been afflicted as well -- although, thankfully, not our social democratic NDP government.

As a result, for the time being at least, we will likely be spared the worst symptoms of this tragic condition, which Sanger noted in correspondence with your blogger is "mainly a disease of affluent older white males, in which the 'cure' is inflicted on others, and is far worse than the disease."

Is a Pink Revolution beginning in America? This genie will be hard to put back in its bottle!

djclimenhaga — Sun, 22 Jan 2017 07:21:40 +0000

Was it just my imagination, or was there a whiff of "colour revolution" in the air yesterday south of the Medicine Line?

Yesterday was the first full day of Donald J. Trump's first term as President of the United States, and he was promptly and perhaps prudently off to visit the offices of the Central Intelligence Agency, thought by some to be our planet's No. 1 fomenter and organizer of so-called colour revolutions.

Trump’s first presidential stopover in Langley, Va., may show "marks of foresight, beginnings of wit,” as the great Canadian poet Milton Acorn described such inklings, or merely that the newly sworn-in blowhard still confidently believes he can fool anyone.

Alberta Tories on the brink of dumping Jason Kenney? Not a chance.

djclimenhaga — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 18:48:14 +0000

"Faced with the end of their party, PCs ponder kicking out Jason Kenney," the Calgary Herald blared yesterday.

The author of this scoop -- and if his story is right, it's undeniably a major scoop -- is Don Braid, the Herald's political columnist for many years.

Braid's claim in a nutshell is that now with it looking increasingly as if Kenney will win the race to lead the Alberta Tories with relative ease -- thanks to what the columnist called "his organization, money and bloodthirsty will to prevail" -- Tory insiders on the party's board may give him the bum's rush for planning to destroy the party.

Athabasca U's future seems brighter as Saskatchewan prof named to conduct sustainability review

djclimenhaga — Fri, 20 Jan 2017 05:18:16 +0000

Two things are abundantly clear after this morning's news conference in Athabasca University's Edmonton offices:

1. Alberta's NDP government is determined the perennially financially troubled distance education university will survive as a viable post-secondary institution
2. Athabasca University’s headquarters and the bulk of its operations will remain in the Town of Athabasca, about 130 kilometres north of Alberta’s capital city

Just how all this is to be done remains to be seen. Likewise, while it appears quite clear AU's mandate as a distance-education and open-learning institution will remain similar to what it is today, that too will have to wait for the outcome of the sustainability review that was the official reason for this morning's announcement.

'Real leader' Brad Wall's government feeds the fluctuations of a boom-bust economy as Alberta stays the course

djclimenhaga — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 02:55:07 +0000

What a pleasure it is here in the nation's capital to be the one from the only province on the Prairies where grownups are still in charge!

I speak, of course, of Alberta -- but I speak of my home province in the context of the goings on in Saskatchewan earlier today, where the premier according to the best-known candidate to lead Alberta's Progressive Conservative Party is "the real leader of Western Canada."

Alberta Liberals launch leadership race as Tory contest takes an acrimonious turn

djclimenhaga — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 03:07:41 +0000

Optimistically billing themselves "the common sense centre," Alberta's provincial Liberal Party launched its contest yesterday to find a permanent replacement for interim Leader David Swann, the party's sole MLA.

The slogan for the Alberta Liberal leadership race -- which will run from today until March 31 -- is definitely better than anything the Alberta Progressive Conservatives have come up for their effort to replace their interim Leader, Ric McIver, which alert readers will recall is also under way.

As an aside, it must be noted that the governing New Democratic Party does not have a leadership race under way at the moment, seeing as its leader, Premier Rachel Notley, cannot be accused of having botched the last Alberta provincial election on May 5, 2015.

Oilsands phase-out freak-out explained: Conservatives think road back to Ottawa runs through Edmonton

djclimenhaga — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 05:16:01 +0000

OTTAWA

"Funny," Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan observed in a tweet yesterday: "I don't remember Kenney or Jean hyperventilating when their boss agreed to decarbonization by 2100."

McGowan was referring to the nearly complete meltdown on the right in Alberta after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's remark last Friday in Peterborough, Ont., that "we can't shut down the oilsands tomorrow. We need to phase them out."

The Jason Syndrome: Conservative candidate melts down over Hollywood star in bid to derail NDP strategy that's working

djclimenhaga — Fri, 13 Jan 2017 06:46:04 +0000

Albert Einstein's purported definition of insanity -- doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result -- has become a political cliché: Consider Jason Kenney, a man who believes so fervently in a failed strategy for developing Alberta's resources that he bitterly rejects all other approaches as heresy -- especially ones that work!

Kenney is like the guy who says the earth is flat, but always has an instant scientific explanation for why that ship just sailed over the horizon.

This would be amusing were Kenney not the front-running candidate to lead Alberta's conservatives (and therefore, unfortunately, quite possibly the rest of us as well) to market-fundamentalist nirvana. He is, so it matters.

Five things you need to know about Alberta's latest Electoral Boundaries Commission

djclimenhaga — Thu, 12 Jan 2017 06:01:13 +0000

You've got the postcard in the mail and maybe heard your political activist pals muttering about this redraw of the electoral boundary maps. You don't know what it is and you're not sure if you want to.

We're here to help. Here are five things you need to know about the Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission.

What do they do?

Alberta is divided into 87 electoral districts, and each district elects an MLA. After every two elections, a commission is struck to spend about a year dividing our province into 87 pieces roughly equal in population.

For the sake of a healthy democracy, Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission needs to extend submissions deadline

djclimenhaga — Wed, 11 Jan 2017 07:45:40 +0000

By trying to ensure the boundaries of Alberta's 87 electoral districts are reviewed in an orderly and responsible way, the province's Electoral Boundaries Commission risks putting the bureaucratic cart before the democratic horse.

The commission, which by law must review provincial constituency boundaries with population changes in mind by Halloween this year, has scheduled 15 hearings and asked for written submissions from interested Albertans by Feb. 8.