Ed Stelmach has given Ed Stelmach top marks for Ed Stelmach‘s first year as Premier of Alberta.
Category: Ed Stelmach
Last week, it was revealed that Alberta’s former Ambassador to Washington D.C. and Calgary-Varsity Tory MLA Murray Smith was paid $105,000 taxpayer dollars after quiting his job in Washington DC five months early. Smith has been replaced by another former Calgary-Mackay Tory MLA and Minister Gary Mar…
It has also been revealed that after trying to hide the fact, Ed Stelmach signed the 2004 contract that gave Murray Smith the $105,000 payout while Stelmach was Ralph Klein’s Intergovernmental Affairs Minister.
Because Alberta’s accountable and transparent Progressive Conservative Government obviously has nothing better to do with $105,000 of Albertans money, I’ve come up with a list to help Ed Stelmach and his Progressive Conservative crew with some ideas.
What would $105,000 buy?
– Approximately 70,000 large double-doubles at Tim Horton’s.
– 39 semesters of tuition for an undergraduate Arts or Science student at the University of Alberta.
– 3.5 taxpayer funded Tory Staffer bachelor parties in Las Vegas.
– 262 $400 prosperity rebate cheques…
– 5962 copies of Stephen Colbert’s new book I am America (and so can you!) on Chapters.ca.
– 1179 youth-size winter jackets from Mountain Equipment Co-op.
– +17,000 Subway sandwiches (perhaps for students at inner-city schools?).
– 21 tickets to an exclusive $5,000 per ticket reception with Tory Premier Ed Stelmach.
– +13,000 regular admission tickets to the Montreal Planetarium.
Feel free to add your suggestions…
The Murray Smith patronage scandal continues as Ed Stelmach has shown his true fiscal conservative credentials.
After refusing to make the contract public, it has been revealed that as Tory Intergovernmental Affairs Minister, Ed Stelmach put his signature on the 2004 sweetheart contract that gave Murray Smith (the former Tory MLA for Calgary-Varsity) a $210,500 annual salary, his car, his Washington apartment and other benefits, and $105,000 after he quit his job as Alberta’s Washington Ambassador five months early.
I wonder if Gary Mar is going to get the same deal.
Tax dollars at work, folks.
Also, Tory Finance Minister Lyle Oberg will be packing it in after the next election after apparent clash with Ed Stelmach’s elusive ‘leadership.’ Good riddance?
Categories
sunday: new poll
A new Leger Marketing poll has Ed Stelmach‘s Tories at 42% (up from 33% in the previous survey), Kevin Taft’s Alberta Liberals at 21% (up from 14%), Brian Mason’s New Democrats dropping to 6% (from 8%), and the Alberta Alliance at 5%.
Both the Tories and Alberta Liberals have increased support and remain the two major players, but all parties remain below their traditional levels of support, indicating that there is still a lot of work to be done in the run up to the next election. I would be very interested to see how the regional breakdowns of support in the poll flushed out (ie: Edmonton v. Calgary v. rural).
With the up and down fluctuations we’ve seen in the polls over the past year, it wouldn’t be surprising to see support levels shift a couple more times in the run up to and during the next election.
(h/t to Ken Chapman for the news link)
Today is the one-year anniversary of Ed Stelmach‘s selection as leader of Alberta’s 36-year old Progressive Conservative government (and also a first-anniversary for anniversary for Stephane Dion). On December 2, 2006, Stelmach came from third place to defeat Jim Dinning and Ted Morton in the final weekend of the Alberta PC leadership selection.
Stelmach’s year as Tory Premier has been the most shaky the Tories have witnessed in a long time. I could use this post to write about Ed Stelmach’s Tories and their many, many missteps and missed opportunities over the past year (the Calgary-Elbow by-election, EUB spy scandal, a damning Auditor General’s report, waffling on the royalty review, shutting down debate on Bill 46, taking 4 months to deal with Craig Chandler in Calgary-Egmont, the rest of the Top 10, etc), but instead, I’ll wish Premier Stelmach congrats on surprsing many of us by surviving one year.
In conclusion, I will leave you with everyone’s favorite theme song from the 2006 Alberta PC leadership race:
Today is decision day for Craig Chandler.
Today, Ed Stelmach and the Alberta Progressive Conservative Association executive committee will decide the fate of the dually nominated Progressive Conservative candidate in Calgary-Egmont.
As yesterday was this blogger’s Birthday (thanks, Blake), I don’t think there could be a better present that Ed Stelmach and the Alberta Progressive Conservative Association executive committee could give this blogger than Craig Chandler, Progressive Conservative candidate for Calgary-Egmont.
UPDATE: Ed Stelmach has pretty much done what everyone expected he would do and rejected Craig Chandler’s nomination as the PC candidate in Calgary-Egmont. It should be interesting to see what Craig Chandler’s next move will be (considering he won the Calgary-Egmont nomination with the support of the large majority of Calgary-Egmont PC members).
Will Stelmach appoint his favorite candidate or let the constituency association hold another nomination meeting?
A bit of a look around…
– Gary Mar has strapped on his golden parachute and is on his way to a +$230,000 taxpayer funded gig in Washington DC.
– Ed Stelmach doesn’t want to meet with Calgary-Egmont nominated Progressive Conservative candidate Craig Chandler. Stelmach and his inner circle will meet on December 1st to decide whether PC members in Calgary-Egmont made a better decision than a small group of Conservative lawyers.
Concerned Christians Canada are calling it a witch hunt, but I tend to agree with Don Braid:
All this happened because local Conservatives, demoralized after Jim Dinning’s leadership defeat, didn’t have the will to fight off Chandler even though they saw him coming months ago.
– A number of candidate nominations happened yesterday. For the Alberta Liberals, Greg Flanagan was nominated in Calgary-Bow and Tony Vonesh in Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills. The Tories nominated Lindsay Blackett in Calgary-North West.
– Alberta’s Bill 46 battle continues, pitting rural landowners versus the Stelmach Tories.
The ongoing saga of newly nominated Calgary-Egmont Progressive Conservative candidate Craig Chandler continues as Ed Stelmach is now saying that he wants to meet with Chandler before allowing him to run for his party. This is a confusing about-turn by Stelmach, who refused to take action this August after Chandler declared that:
To those of you who have come to our great land from out of province, you need to remember that you came here to our home and we vote conservative. You came here to enjoy our economy, our natural beauty and more. This is our home and if you wish to live here, you must adapt to our rules and our voting patterns, or leave. Conservatism is our culture. Do not destroy what we have created.
You can watch Stelmach’s original reaction to Chandler’s comment in the video below:
And this is only the beginning in the long list of tasteless comments and declarations from Craig Chandler – just take a browse through Chandler’s online homes – podcasts of the Freedom Radio Network and a webboard called Project Alberta. Yes, Chandler is a grown man who posts on a webboard.
If Stelmach is really going to refuse Chandler’s candidacy, it would have made a lot more sense to have done so before Chandler overwhelmingly defeated Jonathan Denis and Rick Smith in last week’s nomination in Calgary-Egmont. I’m not sure what is different about Chandler now (but I guess that’s what you get when you have someone like Tom Olsen running your media machine…)
For more on the Chandler saga, see Calgary Grit’s extensive post.
Categories
stelmachian bureaucratics.
Our brilliantly articulate Tory Premier Ed Stelmach has pretty much cleared up any confusion as to what the problem is with Alberta’s 36-year old Tory government.
[Alberta] Liberal Leader Kevin Taft also asked Stelmach to explain why his governments refused to raise royalties until this year, despite warnings from the Energy Department that they were missing their internal targets.
“We take advice, obviously, from others,” Stelmach said.
“But at the end of the day in this government the decisions are made by government, not listening to advice that may come from bureaucracies.”
Categories
"compromise."
There may have been some young folks at this weekend’s Alberta PC convention in Calgary, but that doesn’t mean that there’s a new crew steering the S.S. Stelmach. You don’t have to look too far to see that it’s still the same stodgy crew running the show.
There are currently 61 Progressive Conservative MLA’s in the Legislature and with 42 of those have been re-nominated (19 of the 42 re-nominated Tories have sat in the Legislature for a decade or more), it’s going to be hard to make the case that the Alberta PC’s are going through a 1993 Ralph Klein-style reinvention.
With Ed Stelmach failing to stand up for Albertans by compromising on resource royalties and continuing to refuse to fire Energy Minister Mel Knight after Auditor General Fred Dunn singled out Knight’s Department of Energy for failing to collected billions of dollars in natural resource royalty revenues owed to Albertans, it’s clear that it’s business as usual in the halls of the Tory government.
With the likes of Lyle Oberg, Lloyd Snelgrove, Ray Danyluk, and Luke Ouellette running the show, a close look will reveal the same old stodgy Stelmach Tories.
Similar to the Liberal Party of Canada under Stephane Dion, the Alberta Progressive Conservatives failed to realize that simply changing your leader doesn’t equal revitalization in the minds of voters. Like Dion’s Federal Liberals, the Stelmach Tories have embraced institutional mediocrity and have clearly not begun to undertake the road to revitalization and re-branding that occurred under two previous 1990’s-era leaders.
INTERNAL MEMO
Dear Premier Ed Stelmach,
Please find below six-easy steps on how to compromise the interests of Albertans on the royalty review.
1) Appoint a friendly-voice such as Bill Hunter to chair a committee to review and make recommendations on Alberta’s natural resource revenue framework.
2) When Bill Hunter releases the report, do not give details but react to the report as if it will include radical and dangerous changes to Alberta’s economy (focus on dangerous).
Stay quiet on the royalties issue and give the opposition parties and oil companies time to post their opposition or support of the report (this will keep us from compromising the $15,000 annual donations to the Alberta PC Party from the oil industry).
The tone of the report should be critical of Ralph Klein’s Tory government, but the recommendations should be fairly moderate and tame (DO NOT bring up the fact that you were a central member of Klein’s cabinet for a decade).
3) After weeks of silence, muse about responding to the report during your ‘State of the Province’ address. If you change your mind and decide to announce the next day, don’t worry about it, the prime-time address will only cost $145,000. We have lots of money in the PR budget, so we can do both.
Respond to the report by only adopting some portions of the report (you will know which ones to adopt when we get the speech from the Public Affairs Bureau).
This will allow you to appear as a moderate who is balancing the interests of Albertans and the oil industry. Though you will deny it, you will clearly be compromising the interests of Albertans to the oil companies by not collecting a reasonable share of royalties (remember of those $15,000 annual political donations, Premier!)
Important! stay stern, Premier. DO NOT be as obvious as to tell the media to “please don’t call this a compromise“.
4) Use the Public Affairs Bureau to buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising in all the major Alberta newspapers (including a full-page ad in the front-section of the Globe & Mail). The ads should reinforce the idea that you did not compromise (see 3 for explanation). Ads should include blue and orange colours.
5) The fallout from your announcement should overshadow smaller and more damaging issues such as Auditor General’s report slamming Ralph Klein’s government and the Department of Energy for failing to collect billions of dollars in royalty revenues since the 1990’s (AGAIN, DO NOT bring up the fact that you were a central member of Klein’s cabinet for a decade – this is critically important!).
Also, stick to your guns and don’t fire the Minister responsible for the Department of Energy, Minister Mel Knight. He supported and delivered votes for you in the PC leadership race. You owe him. Think about sending him out of the province for a couple of weeks after the review to let things cool down.
6) Stand proud, sit back, and enjoy your heroic glory, Premier Stelmach.
Albertans won’t have a clue what happened.
I have three main thoughts on Ed Stelmach‘s royalty position and the past couple of days:
1) “Please don’t say it’s a compromise,” were Ed Stelmach’s words after announcing the Tory position on royalties. The quarter-page ad in today’s Edmonton Journal didn’t convince me.
Sorry, Premier. You compromised.
Rather than taking a truly historical position, Ed Stelmach’s Tories have clearly compromised with the oil sector at the expense of Albertans. By taking a slow (a perhaps “dithering“) approach by only adopting certain portions of the already moderate and tame “Our Fair Share” report Stelmach has compromised the interests of Albertans in favour of oil companies that are posting record profits.
Ed Stelmach’s compromise with the oil companies includes increasing royalty rates by only $1.4 Billion across the sector starting in January 1, 2009 and not reaching this amount until 2010. This gives oil companies over a year to reap the rewards of current royalty system, which was created when oil was $11 a barrel. This compromise includes only moderate increases in royalties for companies such as EnCana, who have posted the largest annual profits in Canadian history. I have no problem with these companies making a profit, but these natural resources do not belong to the oil companies, they belong to Albertans.
Stelmach’s $1.4 billion will be $500,000,000 less than the amount recommended by the “Our Fair Share” report – which again was seen as a moderate and tame report to begin with (the $1.4 billion was also supported by Alberta Liberal Leader Kevin Taft) . Other reports, such as this report released by the Parkland Institute, recommended a more aggressive approach to royalty revenues.
A Premier should stand up for the interests of the citizens of his/her province. Stelmach didn’t do that. Instead, he compromised with the oil companies and made it clear that he is willing to hand over the potential of Albertans natural resources to the oil companies, rather than allow Albertans to directly benefit from the resources that they own in the first place.
2) Where’s the accountability? Mel Knight remains Minister of Energy even after Auditor General Fred Dunn singled out Knight and the Department of Energy for failing to collect billions of dollars in resource revenues over the past 15 years.
Here is what Dunn said of Knight’s Department of Energy:
“The principals of transparency and accountability, I believe, were not followed. I’m not impressed.”
“The department should demonstrate its stewardship of Alberta’s royalty regime and provide analysis to support that stewardship and this was not done.”
“The department’s monitoring and technical review findings were communicated to decision-makers. The question is: Did they hear or were they listening? At the end of the day, I don’t know, but they chose not to act.”
Former Auditor General Peter Valentine has been appointed to investigate, but don’t expect any heads to roll in this scandal.
3) There is very little talk about why Stelmach decided it was a good idea to spend $145,000 of public dollars to hold a prime-time infomercial on Wednesday night which only offered vague platitudes and sweeping visuals of Alberta’s foothills. Maybe the Public Affairs Bureau is bored?
There is much debate over this issue, here are some opinions and responses floating around the blogosphere:
– The 5 R’s – Calgary Grit
– A Half Billion Short – Le Revue Gauche
– Royalty Check – Andrew Coyne
– Stelmach’s Choice – The EcoLibertarian
– Premier Stelmach Brought Progressive Conservative Politics Back to Alberta Tonight – Ken Chapman
– Alright, everybody exhale now – albertatory
– National “Eddie” Program – The Black Kettle
I spent a good chunk of my evening at a reception hosted by Spieker Point, an Edmonton-based political consulting firm, where I had a chance to take a look at some of their new online political software (and enjoy the really good cheese and political discussion). Thanks to Allie for the invite.
Because I haven’t had a chance to take a close look at the details of Ed Stelmach‘s resource royalty announcement from this afternoon, I will take a look at recommendations and provide some more detailed comments tomorrow.
But considering the media is reporting that Stelmach’s Tories are only adopting certain portions of the fairly moderate and tame “Our Fair Share” report, I’m not sure it’s going to be as ‘historic‘ as the Public Affairs Bureau would like Albertans to believe.
A friend offered the following commentary by email tonight:
The reaction in this Post opinion piece is pretty funny:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=95dc1f42-34bb-4f91-ad6c-dc152d884f51
The premier, a farmer from Northern Alberta, showed little appreciation for the implications of his actions, suggesting the sector will continue to thrive.Emphasis added. Not a farmer! Silly old Northern Albertan farmer. Clearly incapable of appreciating the high finance world of Toronto investment bankers and Calgary oil execs. 🙂
This story paints a less doom’n’gloom portrait:
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=af56606f-3eee-4fb0-bf7c-3cde573e125b
Mr. Stelmach’s announcement came on the same day that the price of oil surged to an all-time high, and three of Canada’s biggest oil and gas companies reported stellar third quarter profits buoyed by high energy prices.While the Public Affairs Bureau might not have written a very inspiring speech last night, their timing here was brilliant. And, perhaps, a bit lucky.