Alberta’s so-called turn-off-the-taps law was pretty obviously unconstitutional when Rachel Notley’s New Democratic Party passed it and it continued to be unconstitutional when Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party had it proclaimed into law. So yesterday’s ruling of the Federal Court of Canada granting British Columbia a temporary injunction blocking application
Continue readingTag: Alison Redford
Alberta Politics: Alberta’s perpetual fiscal crisis will never be fixed without revenue reform — so you might as well get used to it
Even real conservatives, if such a species exists anymore, know something’s gone awry with Alberta’s fiscal setup and that part of the solution’s on the revenue side. The fact we’ve not faced up to this is why Alberta is so vulnerable to the unavoidable volatility of the fossil fuel market.
Continue readingAlberta Politics: ‘Inauthentic activity’ on social media, abuse of progressive women in politics … is there a common thread here?
Is there a common thread running between reports Friday that a spike in “inauthentic activity” on social media just before the Alberta provincial election came from unidentified backers of the United Conservative Party and news stories Saturday about harassment of federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Catherine McKenna? It would
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Conservative mismanagement of health care, which we’re about to see return to Alberta, is a feature, not a bug
Last Thursday, Tyler Shandro advised Albertans that the promised United Conservative Party review of Alberta Health Services is rolling ahead. Well, he did once tell us that things tend to happen in due course. This is pretty much the first we’ve heard from Alberta’s baby-faced health minister since he famously demonstrated
Continue readingAlberta Politics: UCP Government, with no apparent short-term Plan B, seeks leave to appeal injunction suspending Bill 9
Unsurprisingly, the United Conservative Party Government has filed notice of appeal on the temporary injunction granted by the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench that halted application of Bill 9, playing havoc with Premier Jason Kenney’s strategy for putting off a crisis with the province’s public sector unions until after the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: The Prodigal Roughneck returns – Bernard the Roughneck throws his hardhat into the ring for FCP in Grande Prairie
The good news for Alberta’s Freedom Conservative Party is that it’s recruited a national figure as one of its candidates. The bad news for the FCP may be the national figure in question is Neal Bernard Hancock, better known as “Bernard the Roughneck.” A three-paragraph news story on Mr. Hancock’s
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Former Alberta immigration minister asks federal immigration minister for investigation of UCP candidate’s alleged immigration practices
Former Alberta employment and immigration minister Thomas Lukaszuk has written federal immigration minister Ahmed Hussein urging him to open a formal investigation into serious allegations a temporary foreign worker was improperly treated by a business person who is now a United Conservative Party candidate in Calgary. Mr. Lukaszuk, who was
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Unveiling of portrait of Jim Prentice, premier of Alberta, accompanied by warm words and a non-partisan moment
A dignified official portrait of Jim Prentice, last Progressive Conservative premier of Alberta, was unveiled in the Alberta Legislature yesterday. It’s a very nice piece of official portraiture that does justice to the beautiful third-floor hallway of the Alberta Legislature’s Rotunda where portraits of the province’s former premiers hang. Its
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Former UCP MLA warns more scandals are coming for party as election nears … but don’t count on it unravelling fast enough!
It would be a huge mistake to count on the United Conservative Party unravelling fast enough to blow its big lead in public opinion polls by the time the next Alberta provincial election is upon us, which will be almost before we know it. It is a virtual certainty that even
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Blown off by Jason Kenney’s UCP last fall, former Wildrose MLA Rick Strankman heads for the Independent benches
When this blog’s entirely fictional Vegas oddsmaker Jimmy “The Geek” Porcospino celebrated the first birthday of the United Conservative Party last summer by setting the next year’s resignation odds for each of the party’s remaining caucus members, he gave Drumheller-Stettler MLA Rick Strankman only 20-1 odds of heading for the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Enough already! It’s time for the NDP to implement the Bighorn park plan immediately
Were provincial officials taking part in town hall meetings on the Alberta Government’s plan to create a park in west central Alberta’s Bighorn Country really harassed and threatened by all-terrain-vehicle enthusiasts opposed to restrictions on their motorized activity in the environmentally sensitive Rocky Mountain Foothills between Banff and Jasper national
Continue readingAlberta Politics: AlbertaPolitics.ca: still here after 11 years writing about Canada’s most interesting provincial political scene
Today marks the 11th anniversary of the first post published on this blog, known at the time as St. Albert Diary. And thank God for that, since I’m in a post-Christmas funk with barely an idea in my head about what to write next. By the standards of the Internet,
Continue readingAlberta Politics: ‘Has Trudeau committed treason?’ The answer is no and the question is completely bonkers!
Donna Kennedy-Glans, by all accounts an intelligent and accomplished Alberta Conservative, recently posted and pinned a Tweet asking, “Has Trudeau committed treason?” If her intention was to grab the attention of Alberta’s chattering classes, she succeeded. If she was out for attention, though, I’m not sure she really wanted the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Why is the UCP keeping the Progressive Conservative and Wildrose parties on life support?
Inquiring minds want to know: Why is Opposition Leader Jason Kenney keeping the Progressive Conservative and Wildrose Parties around? Media generally refer to Mr. Kenney as the United Conservative Party leader. But in reality, he’s the leader of the United Conservative Party, the Progressive Conservative Party and the Wildrose Party,
Continue readingAlberta Politics: If Rachel Notley caps Alberta oil production tonight, how quickly will Jason Kenney change his tune?
If Rachel Notley uses the Alberta Government’s power to put a cap on oil production tonight, as she hinted she would do in a newspaper op-ed Friday, how long will it take Opposition Leader Jason Kenney to change his tune? Not long, one imagines. Of course, if Mr. Kenney does
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Professors protest Moe Government plan to shutter archives in four locations, including University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon
SASKATOON, Sask. No sooner did the government of Saskatchewan oh-so-discreetly announce it is about to close four branches of the provincial archives and consolidate it all in one location in Regina than more than 30 Canadian scholars had an open letter of protest circulating on the Internet. When the branch
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Alberta’s Bill 27 may not take the politics out of pensions, but it will certainly help
Tabling on Tuesday of Bill 27, Alberta legislation that will wrest control of public service pensions from the sole hands of the minister of finance and hand it to joint boards run by public service employees and employers, should be the denouement of a long and sometimes dramatic story. “This
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Criticism of John Carpay, who compared pride flags to swastikas, called the work of a ‘left wing mob’
According to an increasingly influential segment of the United Conservative Party’s social conservative base, Albertans who have taken to social media to assail an ally of party leader Jason Kenney for the bigotry evident in his comparison of the pride flag to the Nazi swastika are nothing more than “the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Rachel Notley’s pension announcement yesterday was an ironic coda to Alison Redford’s 2014 war on unions
When Premier Rachel Notley announced to the annual general meeting of the United Nurses of Alberta yesterday morning her government would keep a promise made to working Albertans 26 years ago by a Conservative government, it offered an ironic coda to one of the issues that contributed to the downfall
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Hugh MacDonald, four-term Edmonton MLA and scourge of Tory governments, quietly resurfaces
With an election in the wind, it’s always worth remembering there’s life after politics. Consider Hugh MacDonald, once renowned as Alberta’s hardest-working MLA. The former Alberta Liberal Party stalwart served four terms as MLA for Edmonton-Gold Bar and certainly would have been elected to a fifth had he chosen to
Continue reading