{"id":27375,"date":"2014-08-16T10:06:11","date_gmt":"2014-08-16T14:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27375"},"modified":"2022-09-05T17:54:00","modified_gmt":"2022-09-05T21:54:00","slug":"alberta-politics-have-never-been-more-interesting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/08\/16\/alberta-politics-have-never-been-more-interesting\/","title":{"rendered":"“Alberta politics have never been more interesting”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s<\/em>, Colby Cosh<\/a> explains why the recent Auditor-General’s special report has been unusually newsworthy:<\/p>\n

The fireworks that accompanied last week\u2019s special report by Alberta Auditor-General Merwan Saher<\/a> were, at first blush, a little mysterious. The A-G\u2019s report into disgraced premier Alison Redford\u2019s bizarre use of government aircraft had already been partially leaked, and did not contain much that had not already been reported. But it was greeted with remarkable excitement \u2014 broken down, line by line, on social media as if someone were tweeting the Dead Sea Scrolls.<\/p>\n

Even a political commentator born in Social Credit Alberta needed a little time to realize why. It wasn\u2019t that Redford and her daughter had been allowed to treat Alberta government aircraft like theme-park rides. It wasn\u2019t that the premier had tried to build a secret downtown crash pad in a government building in the capital. It was that an independent officer of the Alberta legislature was pointing it all out, harshly, in plain English, with no fudge.<\/p>\n

Such characters\u2014departmental ombudsmen, freedom-of-information (FOI) commissioners, and the like\u2014have usually been very tame creatures in Alberta, often doing more to make scandals disappear than they do to rectify them. (The Edmonton Journal<\/em> observed in July that over the past 20 years, two-thirds of Alberta FOI requests for provincial records yielded no documents whatsoever.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

However, scandal or no scandal, it would be rash to predict a sudden end to the Alberta Progressive Conservatives no matter how much dirt is evident:<\/p>\n

Alberta\u2019s privileged classes thus have a sort of unspoken deal with the PCs, and it is this deal the PCs are counting on as they try to hustle Prentice to the podium in September. But the 2011 election results and the current polls show Albertans wondering whether Danielle Smith\u2019s Wildrose Party could not manage things at least as competently as Ed Stelmach or as ethically as Alison Redford. The province\u2019s labour markets remain tight, and oil prices are buoyant, but the treasury is borrowing. Young liberal urbanites who were stampeded into voting PC in 2011 will not be so easy to terrorize a second time.<\/p>\n

In short, Alberta politics have never been more interesting. Yet it is worth remembering that both Stelmach and Redford won enormous election victories, and that the PCs have survived in power through a 150 per cent increase in the province\u2019s population. Four decades\u2019 work is not undone overnight.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Maclean’s, Colby Cosh explains why the recent Auditor-General’s special report has been unusually newsworthy: The fireworks that accompanied last week\u2019s special report by Alberta Auditor-General Merwan Saher were, at first blush, a little mysterious. The A-G\u2019s report into disgraced premier Alison Redford\u2019s bizarre use of government aircraft had already been partially leaked, and did […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"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":[6,53],"tags":[542,188,413,1486],"class_list":["post-27375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-politics","tag-alberta","tag-electionwatch","tag-scandal","tag-socialcreditparty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-77x","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27375","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=27375"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":76223,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27375\/revisions\/76223"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}