Alberta Election (2015)

[ModlrMike]

Pot this is kettle....

Yes, and the same people who claimed the federal Torries illegitimate for taking 38% of the vote are curiously silent now.

 

[Brasidas]

Yes, and the same people who claimed the federal Torries illegitimate for taking 38% of the vote are curiously silent now.

...federal Liberals, 93-06...

 

[Kat Stevens]

I believe the line goes "the majority of Albertans did NOT vote for the NDP"  or something like that.

 

[daftandbarmy]

I believe the line goes "the majority of Albertans did NOT vote for the NDP"  or something like that.

At least more than half of them voted:

Alberta's voter turnout for yesterday's provincial election was the highest the province has seen in 22 years.

According to Elections Alberta, more than half of Albertans cast a vote, with 1,481,477 out of 2,543,127 eligible voters making their way to the polls.

That equals 58.25 per cent of the population.

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/05/06/alberta-voter-turnout_n_7224496.html

 

[Colin Parkinson]

Not sure what the Provincial NDP is like there, but the NDP historical has a decent grassroots organization, not as good as the CPC's but far better than the Liberals have ever had.

 

[Blackadder1916]

An interesting follow-on to the change of government.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/rachel-notley-orders-end-to-all-government-document-shredding-1.3072555

Rachel Notley orders end to all government document shredding
Directive comes hours after privacy commissioner launched unprecedented investigation

CBC News Posted: May 13, 2015 10:45 AM MT| Last Updated: May 13, 2015 3:03 PM MT

All departments of the Alberta government have been ordered to immediately stop shredding documents, according to a spokeswoman for premier-designate Rachel Notley.

"At the request of the premier designate, the deputy minister of executive council has directed all departments to stop shredding until the new government assumes office," Cheryl Oates said in a statement issued by Notley's office on Wednesday afternoon.

The statement was issued hours after Alberta's Information and Privacy Commissioner and the province's Public Interest Commissioner held an unprecedented news conference to announce they have launched a joint investigation after receiving complaints that allege documents were improperly destroyed by the province's department of Environment and Sustainable Resource Development

Jill Clayton, the Information and Privacy Commissioner, said her office has received letters of concern about the improper destruction of records during the transition period that followed the May 5 election, which ended a 44-year Progressive Conservative dynasty.

Never been here before

Clayton was asked whether she was surprised by the bags of shredded documents seen in the legislature hallways in recent days, or whether that was normal procedure during a change of government. "I'm not sure Alberta has been in this situation before," she said. "So I don't know to be able to say that this is typical.

"However, I would expect that when somebody is leaving office, that there will be a significant amount of records that will legitimately be destroyed."

The investigation will try to find out whether any documents were improperly shredded.

The Freedom of Information and Privacy Act does not apply to the personal records of ministers, or an MLA's correspondence with constituents, but does apply to departmental records and cabinet records, Clayton said.

Under FOIP legislation, she said, it is an offence to wilfully destroy records to evade an access request. The fine for that is $10,000 per offense.

May 12 whistleblower

Public Interest Commissioner Peter Hourihan said his office received a tip on May 12 from an anonymous whistleblower who alleged that some documents in the ESRD had been improperly destroyed.

Asked if his office has ever had similar complaints in the past, during a transition period, Hourihan said: "We've never had a transition period."

The anonymous tip, Hourihan said, "just talked about records," but the complaint did not say whether the records were paper or electronic.

"I do know, just based on some of the information that we've received in the complaint, that leads me to believe that it is a legitimate concern that someone has."

Clayton said the investigation could expand beyond a single department.

"The investigation is focused on Environment and Sustainable Resource Development," she said, "but certainly the investigation could be expanded to include other government departments as information becomes available."

No search and seizure powers

Asked if she has ordered the department to stop shredding records, Clayton said: "I don't have search and seizure powers. I can't go over there and stop everything from happening and take all the records away.

"They're definitely aware of this investigation. We've pointed out again that there are offences for wilfully destroying records to evade access requests. I think it might be in everybody's best interest that if there is some concern about the lawfulness of any destruction, that they would stop."

Clayton put out a statement last week to remind government departments about the guidelines and rules for dealing with documents, and to ask anyone with information about improperly destroyed records to contact her office.

"We have had a number of media inquires about this issue," Clayton said.

Within two days of the May 5 election, warnings about document shredding in government offices began to spread on social media and in news stories. Clayton was also asked Wednesday about photos and comments that began to appear on Twitter within 48 hours of the election.

"We might follow on Twitter and see that there's a photo that's posted that shows shredded documents," she said. "In my view, that's not enough to launch an investigation, which is why we put out the statement. I don't know what records those are, I don't know if they're subject to FOIP, I don't know who's responsible for them. So, we requested that anybody with some evidence, or with concerns, that they provide that to me so that I would have something to go on, someplace to start with an investigation like this. We're not able to go out there an seize records. I don't have the people to be overseeing every single shredding machine in the Government of Alberta."

Truck filled with documents

One photo on Twitter showed bags of documents in the back of a pickup truck.

"I'm aware of that photograph," Clayton said. "I don't know what records those are, I don't know whose truck that is."

In order to prosecute any who improperly destroyed records, the investigation would have to meet the "threshold" to prove it was intentional, Clayton said.

"It has long been a challenge to move forward with offence prosecutions where there is that wilful element. That is the most difficult thing to establish in any of our offence investigations."

The commissioners have the authority to go to IT people in the department and try to get original documents off computer servers. Clayton said she can compel departments to produce documents.

Clayton said the investigation could serve as a warning to other departments, and is intended to reassure the public that someone is looking into how documents have been handled.

"This has got so much attention right now by people across Alberta ... that I think Albertans want and need to know that something is taking place."

This is the first time the two commissioners have launched a joint investigation. The results will be made public, she said, even if it turns out nothing was done wrong.

 

[jollyjacktar]

Ezra Levant is reporting Ms Notley has appointed Mr. Brian Topp as her CoS.  Ezra is claiming he is rabidly against the Sands and Pipelines.  Not good news for the future if true.

 

[PuckChaser]

So what happens when all of the provinces are have not provinces? I highly doubt the NDP are going to cut services, only jack up taxes and hope it works out on the balance sheet.

 

[George Wallace]

So what happens when all of the provinces are have not provinces? I highly doubt the NDP are going to cut services, only jack up taxes and hope it works out on the balance sheet.

Then all those morons from the 1970's who collected Pogey and plastered "Make the Rich Pay" signs all over the place have won.

I asked one of these people what would happen when all the 'Rich' had paid and had now become poor, making her richer than the formerly 'Rich'?  She could not wrap it around her mind that she would land up having to pay.

 

[Rocky Mountains]

The Alberta NDP has a serious problem because the PCs governed like socialists.  Despite endless whining, Alberta probably has the best social programs outside of Quebec.  Coincidentally we are paying for both of them.  To do anything new, the $5 billion deficit will go up as will taxes.  I suspect we will see a lot of the BS and little of NDP economics in the next 4 years.  Much NDP economics and the tax revenue will dry up as international capital heads for greener pastures.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

or if the big companies are smart place the NDP over the barrel and get better deals on royalties and such to stay.

 

[daftandbarmy]

Meanwhile, in Alberta    ;D

 

[a_majoor]

The American Interest on how the oilsands and NDP will interact:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/05/15/troubled-times-for-albertan-oil/

Troubled Times for Albertan Oil

When the left-leaning New Democratic Party ousted the more oil-friendly Progressive Conservatives in Alberta’s recent elections, greens hailed the results as a death knell for oil sands production. Bloomberg reports on how the new regime plans to crack down on the industry:


[New Democratic Party leader] and soon-to-be Premier Rachel Notley, a 51-year-old lawyer whose father ran the party in the 1970s, plans to make the oil industry pay up and fill a C$7 billion ($5.8 billion) budgetary gap for schools and hospitals—even after crude prices collapsed last year. “We need finally to end the boom-and-bust roller coaster that we have been riding on for too long,” she said in her May 5 victory speech. That means higher corporate taxes, a review of royalties that companies pay the government for extracting fossil fuels, and tougher environmental and climate rules for a province that accounts for 38 percent of Canada’s carbon emissions.

Environmentalists (rightly) take issue with the crude from the oil sands for being particularly dirty and energy-intensive. But while new taxes and royalties might tighten the vice on the industry, the real problem for Alberta’s oil sands is the oversupplied market. Alberta’s reserves rank amongst the most expensive in the world to produce. Even in the heady days of $100+ per barrel prices, Alberta’s crude operators already had their work cut out for them. Now that the price of oil has dropped precipitously, the firms involved have had plenty to worry about. With OPEC showing no willingness to cut production, and with the U.S. shale industry finding ways to produce even in these difficult conditions, it’s hard to envision this glut ending anytime soon.

Energy production doesn’t turn on a dime, and the difficult nature of oil sands extraction makes it especially sluggish to respond to market and political forces. The investments the industry has already made into production have been large enough and have long enough lifetimes that output won’t fall as fast as prices have (it’s actually increased since last summer). Moreover, Alberta’s crude will eventually come out of the ground based purely on the notion of supply and demand—and the fact that oil is a finite resource. But, that said, things aren’t looking good. The oil sands are in for a rough patch, and Alberta’s—and Canada’s—economy is going to suffer for it.

 

[Edward Campbell]

I'm not a great fan of Ezra levant, but I found this article, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Financial Post, interesting ... to say the least:

http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/ezra-levant-meet-albertas-new-chiefs-of-staff

Meet Alberta’s new colonial chiefs

Ezra Levant, Special to Financial Post | June 12, 2015

A Toronto anti-oilsands activist – still registered as an anti-oil lobbyist – is now running Alberta’s energy department

Graham Mitchell is a powerful anti-oil sands activist based in Toronto.

Until yesterday, he was the executive director of a U.S.-funded lobby group called Leadnow.ca. They specialize in organizing anti-oilsands street protests and producing slick anti-pipeline YouTube ads.

Mitchell was also the director of training and leadership at the Broadbent Institute. Last year he organized a boot camp teaching people how to campaign for a moratorium on fracking.

And Mitchell is a registered lobbyist in Ottawa. As of yesterday, his lobbying disclosure form lists among his goals “asking that the Conservative federal MPs in BC pressure cabinet to stop the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline.” He’s been an eco-activist since his days as Jack Layton’s assistant on Toronto city council.

Fighting against oil and gas is his job. But it’s also his personal passion. His Twitter feed is full of personal jabs, demonizing “Big Oil” and anyone who deals with them. He’s a practitioner of the activist tactic of “denormalization” – demonizing an industry until it is no longer considered socially acceptable.

Mitchell has an impressive resume. But it got more impressive this week. Alberta’s NDP Premier, Rachel Notley, appointed Graham Mitchell to be the chief of staff to Alberta’s minister of energy.

A Toronto anti-oilsands activist – still registered as an anti-oil lobbyist – is now running Alberta’s energy department.

There are twelve ministers in the Alberta cabinet, including Notley herself, each with a chief of staff. And ten of those chiefs are, like Mitchell, NDP activists from other provinces, many of whom will commute each week to Alberta from Vancouver, Toronto, or elsewhere.

There is something weirdly colonial about non-residents being sent in to run a province to which they have few or no ties. It feels as if the NDP believes Alberta lacks people with talent and judgment to govern themselves. It feels nepotistic – highly paid consolation prizes for failed NDP activists from other campaigns.

Like Nathan Rotman. He worked on Olivia Chow’s unsuccessful campaign for Toronto mayor. Now he’s the chief of staff to Alberta’s Finance Minister.

Was there no-one in Alberta with any financial background? No socially conscious businessman, or even an NDP-friendly professor or think tank economist? Four million Albertans, but not one who understands Alberta’s fiscal situation better than an Olivia Chow door-knocker?

Although many of these senior staff have no connection to Alberta, they certainly have strong views about Alberta – as a political punching bag. Robin Steudel, the new chief of staff for the Minister of Infrastructure and Transportation, was a deputy director of the B.C. NDP’s 2013 election campaign. The central platform of that campaign was anti-Alberta: no oilsands, no pipelines, no tankers. It was so extreme that even environmentally conscious British Columbians rejected it, wiping out the double-digit lead the NDP had at the beginning of the campaign.

Steudel has no connection to Alberta. Like the other colonial administrators, she will likely jet back home on weekends – or maybe back to the United States, where she worked as a field coordinator for the anti-oilsands Obama campaign. These senior staff likely won’t move their families to Alberta, buy homes, enroll their kids in schools. So they won’t make friends outside of political circles – they won’t actually get to know normal Albertans, and have their carefully-nurtured anti-Alberta myths challenged by real facts. They’re just visiting – political mercenaries doing a well-paid tour of duty, until they can go home to take another crack at beating Christy Clark or John Tory.

There’s a problem with this. Their interests are not aligned with Albertans. This week, the president of Total SA, one of the world’s largest oil companies, said that if Alberta raises taxes, it could cause the cancellation of billions of dollars in investments. That’s not an idle threat; Total has already shelved their Joslyn mine, an $11 billion project. That’s $11 billion in construction, let alone the decades of permanent employment that would come. Investment is already in jeopardy because of low oil prices and high labour costs. A tax hike could be the deciding factor on tens of billions of investment dollars this year alone.

That would be terrible news to Albertans – including unionized construction workers, or nurses or teachers whose salaries are paid for by taxes from successful energy companies.

But ten of Alberta’s new chiefs of staff – including the premier’s own chief of staff, a Torontonian named Brian Topp – aren’t Albertans. To them, a cancelled project might seem like a good thing – something many of them have been campaigning for, for years, back in Vancouver or Toronto.

          Although many of these senior staff have no connection to Alberta, they certainly have strong views about Alberta – as a political punching bag

When Topp ran for the federal NDP leadership three years ago, he made global warming a central issue. He proposed  a “hard cap on emissions”, a carbon tax and even “getting fossil fuelled cars out of our cities.”

Total SA cancelling a mine is a disaster for thousands of Alberta families. But it’s a policy success for those who have been campaigning against the oilsands from Toronto.

Alberta’s nominal Minister of Energy is Margaret McCuaig-Boyd, a sixty-something teacher with no experience in or demonstrated prior curiosity about oil and gas.  Will she be doing whatever her staff tells her to do and reading whatever speeches they hand to her to say?  The real operational power will rest with Graham Mitchell, and his boss Topp. What will that be like?

Mitchell gave a hint, in a tweet we wrote last fall, quoting Olivia Chow: “movement advice: stop being nice and demand more.”

Albertans are about to find out what that means.

It is a thought provoking thesis, isn't it?

 

[jollyjacktar]

In my opinion, what the new alien overlords are going to do in the patch will make PET's National Energy Program's sucker punch look like a love tap.  They, are screwed.  Elizabeth May must be weeing herself at the possibilities of foxes in the hen house.

 

[RedcapCrusader]

It is going to be a very long, painful 4 years. Now I'm starting to think that the Left Wing's cleverly concocted false flag operation by planting an unconfirmed quote from PM Harper "You won't recognize Canada when I'm through with it" was actually part of the Left Wing masterplan to destabilize and separate the west, creating the tree-hugging socialist utopia that they ambitiously dream of creating here in Canada.

 

[Brad Sallows]

>It is a thought provoking thesis, isn't it?

It's bloody disturbing.  I'd like to know (for comparison) whether it is a common practice for provincial governments to drag in out-of-province high political functionaries; but on the face of it, it stains the NDP deeply given all the crap they spout about fairness and self-determination and sinecures/senate appointments for political operatives and democracy and whatnot.

Imagine if the NDP had enough provincial strength in QC to win an election and pull that stunt - would they dare?  That thought experiment should tell any person all he needs to know about the integrity of the NDP.

 

[Retired AF Guy]

>It is a thought provoking thesis, isn't it?

It's bloody disturbing.  I'd like to know (for comparison) whether it is a common practice for provincial governments to drag in out-of-province high political functionaries; but on the face of it, it stains the NDP deeply given all the crap they spout about fairness and self-determination and sinecures/senate appointments for political operatives and democracy and whatnot.

Imagine if the NDP had enough provincial strength in QC to win an election and pull that stunt - would they dare?  That thought experiment should tell any person all he needs to know about the integrity of the NDP.

I don't think the AB NDP will do anything radical until after the federal election in October. If they do something stupid before then, it could have a
blowback effect on the federal NDP.

 

[Kirkhill]

http://socialistinternational.org/

Borders

 

[Brad Sallows]

>I don't think the AB NDP will do anything radical until after the federal election in October.

If Levant's article in the FP is half-accurate, and if the practices described are not common among provincial governments, they already have.