When Jason Kenney asked former finance minister Janice MacKinnon “to conduct a deep dive into Alberta’s fiscal situation” he told her to deliver recommendations to balance the budget by 2023 and develop a plan to retire the province’s debt without considering the revenue side of the equation. Ms M
Continue readingTag: Jason Kenney
Alberta Politics: Alberta schools are public no more … What gives?
Alberta schools are public no more. Or something. A ministerial order signed by Education Minister Adriana LaGrange on Aug. 15 eliminated the word “public” from the legal title of all public school divisions and boards in Alberta. What’s going on? That’s not immediately clear, but given Premier Jason Kenney’s promises
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Kate Aronoff asks how much destruction is needed before we’ll start taking climate change seriously – though the answer at this point looks to be that no amount of damage will be enough to move a substantial number of politicians off their insistence
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Can Kenney, Curly (Ford) and Moe pull it off?
Conservative leader ‘Chuckles’ Scheer might not offer much of a challenge to Justin Trudeau but when you consider the three stooges running in the back field, it makes you think. Canadians, outside of parliament and his Regina riding, have little reason to have an opinion of Chuckles. Very few of
Continue readingAlberta Politics: ‘Blue-Ribbon Panel’ report sets stage for full-blown austerity, private health care, soaring tuition and much more
The recommendations of the Kenney Government’s “blue-ribbon panel” on Alberta’s finances yesterday went further over the top than you’d even have expected from a report ginned up by a couple of Fraser Institute ringers, a former bank president, and a few additional followers of the government’s low-tax, market-fundamentalist ideology. As
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your Labour Day reading. – Hassan Yussuff discusses what’s at stake for Canadian workers in this fall’s election campaign. And Binyamin Applebaum and Damon Winter rightly point out that while one job can be difficult enough, there are added stresses where workers need to try to satisfy
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Happy Labour Day, Alberta Day, or whatever … brace yourself for unpleasantness tomorrow!
Happy Labour Day! Given the occasion, it’s mildly surprising Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government didn’t use today to announce the “findings” of its “blue-ribbon” panel’s “deep dive” into the state of the province’s finances. The idea of poking a stick in the eye of unionized public employees on Labour Day
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Albertans: “People of Destiny”
On Sept 1 Premier Kenney wished Alberta a happy birthday. Not once in his video message did he mention Canada. It was as if Alberta became a province in 1905 only to float around in No Mans Land for the next 114 years. He did, however, acknowledge Alberta’s connection to
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Why Canadian media won’t call post-Brexit protests ‘pro-democracy demonstrations’
If there are riots in Britain after the hard Brexit Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his Conservative Party cronies have scheduled for Halloween, will mainstream media in Canada describe them as “pro-democracy demonstrations” as they do when similar violent outbursts take place nowadays in Hong Kong or Moscow? On the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Never mind sparse facts in Alberta’s first-quarter financial update, its subtext is deep cuts are coming soon
The United Conservative Party Government led by Jason Kenney wants deep cuts, and, by God, it’s going to have them. That includes tax cuts, which will drive the province’s books deeper into the red, and cuts to services to help pay for the tax breaks. If the facts, such as
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Tuesday Morning Links
This and that for your Tuesday reading. – Paul Krugman writes about the U.S. Republicans’ new complaint of evil eye economics – though it shouldn’t come as much surprise that people who treat the economy as nothing more than a confidence game would object to anybody pointing out how the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: Andrew Weaver to Jason Kenney: ‘Every day you keep opening your mouth, more people come to the B.C. Greens!’
When it comes to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, Andrew Weaver is not a fan. This will not come as a complete surprise to anyone who follows either Alberta or British Columbia politics. Dr. Weaver, after all, is the leader of the B.C. Greens. He is also a climate scientist. In
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Evening Links
Assorted content for your Sunday reading. – Binyamin Appelbaum discusses the folly of having turned economic decision-making over to people who somehow saw income inequality and the concentration of wealth as desirable ends. And Geoff Zochodne points out that Canada has been suffering from the “American disease” of having corporate
Continue readingSusan on the Soapbox: Mr Kenney’s Announcements on TMX and KXL
This just in from the how-to-make-a-good-news-story-sound-bad department: Mr Kenney’s government issued two press releases this week, one about the restart of construction of the TMX pipeline project, the other about the favourable ruling of the Nebraska Supreme Court on Keystone XL. Both of these announcements are about a good result
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: New column day
Here, on how right-wing provincial governments across Canada are deliberately denying benefits to their constituents solely to try to avoid any credit going to the federal level in advance of this fall’s election. For further reading…– Murray Mandryk, Sarath Peiris and plenty of letter writers have already pointed out the
Continue readingAlberta Politics: It was a delight to talk with Andrew Weaver about Jason Kenney, details to follow soon
VICTORIA, B.C. — If Jason Kenney’s ears were burning today, perhaps it was because of what Andrew Weaver had to say about him. Mr. Kenney, as all readers of this blog should know as part of the price of admission, is now premier of Alberta; Dr. Weaver is the leader
Continue readingBabel-on-the-Bay: Jason Kenney: Alpha Male?
When Gillian Steward from Calgary wrote in the Toronto Star recently about Alberta’s Jason Kenney being the federal conservative alpha male, it had to be another example of her wonderful sense of humour. Quite frankly, by no definition, that I can think of, can you consider Kenney an alpha male.
Continue readingAlberta Politics: UCP slaps Alberta Teachers Association … probably not for the last time
Almost completely missed in media coverage of Friday’s purge of NDP appointees to agencies, boards and commissions by Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government was the revelation that the same day the government abruptly cancelled a three-year-old memorandum of agreement with the Alberta Teachers Association to co-operate on curriculum development. While
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading. – Nicholas Kristof writes about Donald Trump’s choice to put the most virulent anti-worker cronies imaginable in charge of U.S. labour policy. David Climenhaga weighs in on the UPC’s laughably biased committee charged with the task of driving down wages for service workers. And
Continue readingAlberta Politics: UCP’s Friday Morning Massacre purges NDP appointees from Alberta’s boards, agencies and commissions
You almost have to admire Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government for the thoroughness of its sudden purge of NDP appointees to government agencies, boards and commissions yesterday. The Friday Morning Massacre began with news the UCP was clearing out NDP appointments on the boards of 10 post-secondary institutions and the
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