{"id":24748,"date":"2014-03-20T07:36:26","date_gmt":"2014-03-20T12:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24748"},"modified":"2014-03-20T07:37:20","modified_gmt":"2014-03-20T12:37:20","slug":"alberta-premier-resigns-just-ahead-of-the-party-lynch-mob","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/03\/20\/alberta-premier-resigns-just-ahead-of-the-party-lynch-mob\/","title":{"rendered":"Alberta Premier resigns (just ahead of the party lynch mob)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/news\/canada\/redfords-red-wedding-a-beleaguered-premier-exits\/\" target=\"_blank\">Colby Cosh<\/a> on the resignation of Alberta&#8217;s Alison Redford:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It was a tearful surrender for Alison Redford Wednesday night as she gave a curiously backward resignation speech, grocery-listing the accomplishments of her government\u2019s two years in power before announcing that she will step aside as Premier of Alberta on Sunday. Among these accomplishments, Redford trumpeted a \u201cfully balanced\u201d 2014 budget, which is \u201cbalanced\u201d in an unusual sense of that term meaning \u201cexpenditures far exceed revenues, but in a nice way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That sort of cynical language was, it must be said, part of her problem with voters. The Alberta budget became more cryptic under Redford, and the usual accounting fictions have been stressed to the breaking point, with revenues assigned hugger-mugger to \u201coperating\u201d and \u201ccapital\u201d purposes with no very clear line of demarcation between. If you think Albertans don\u2019t pay attention to that sort of thing, you don\u2019t know us too well.<\/p>\n<p>There will be a temptation to sum up Redford\u2019s ouster by citing her clownishly expensive December trip to South Africa to attend the funeral of Nelson Mandela. Redford, in truth, had almost literally every kind of problem you can imagine a Westminsterian political leader having, all of them chronically. Her relationship with her caucus was dire, as became obvious to the news-reading public in the last fortnight. Any defenders she might have had were keeping pretty quiet, and no one seemed to expend much effort reading from an orchestral score of talking points. Few MLAs ventured beyond muttering \u201cShe needs to make some changes.\u201d From some of these, it was pretty obvious that the change they had in mind was the one that happened tonight.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Redford\u2019s resignation completes the transition of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party from unstoppable electoral force to the Sick Man of Canadian Politics. Sick men have risen from their deathbeds before, and the opposition Wildrose Party may not be ready to complete a journey to power that is following the Reform Party model. (You will recall that this involved negotiating quite a few twists and turns and a couple of avalanches and volcanos.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colby Cosh on the resignation of Alberta&#8217;s Alison Redford: It was a tearful surrender for Alison Redford Wednesday night as she gave a curiously backward resignation speech, grocery-listing the accomplishments of her government\u2019s two years in power before announcing that she will step aside as Premier of Alberta on Sunday. Among these accomplishments, Redford trumpeted [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,84,53],"tags":[542,697,188,413],"class_list":["post-24748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-government","category-politics","tag-alberta","tag-budget","tag-electionwatch","tag-scandal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6ra","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24748"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24750,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24748\/revisions\/24750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}