Canadian politics

Coal is Alberta’s dirty little secret

Mar 112013

Cheap and abundant, coal is among the filthiest of fossil fuels.

While the tarsands get all the press, Albertans have another energy demon to face down. Our province is endowed, or cursed — depending on your perspective — with some of the biggest coal deposits in North America. It’s a primary reason why we have some of the lowest electricity rates in the world. But as a recent Pembina Institute report details, there are high costs for that cheap power.

And it seems we are in the dark, at least figuratively, about this dirty little secret. Surveys found that only one-third of Albertans realize we get almost three-quarters of our electricity from coal.

NS NDP fundraising gaffe

Mar 092013

Canadian politics

Party requests donations for ill-conceived attack ads.

by Stephen Kimber

Few will be surprised to know I’m a financial as well as philosophical supporter of the New Democratic Party. I’ve been making modest, tax-write-off-able, publicly recorded donations since the early 1980s when the provincial party had no MPs and a single MLA. Giving then seemed more act of charity than political statement.

Walk 8000 steps in her shoes

Mar 072013

Canadian politics

CARE Canada steps up for women and girls this International Women’s Day

from Care Canada

Canadians from coast to coast are getting ready to step up for women and girls worldwide.

In celebration of International Women’s Day on March 8th, CARE Canada is hosting its third annual Walk In Her Shoes campaign. It challenges participants to walk 8,000 steps per day (roughly six kilometres) for eight days to simulate the distance women and girls walk daily in the developing world for basic needs such as food, water, firewood or health services.

Ontario parties neck and neck in the polls

Mar 072013

Canadian politics

Ministry changeovers fraught with potential missteps.

from Inside Queen's Park Volume 26, Number 5

It was a refreshing change when Andrea Horwath switched from her ultra-earnest generic message about the imperative of making minority government work to her scowling and very specific demand that the government chop auto insurance premiums or suffer the electoral consequences, soonest. The earlier line had begun to be more than a little tedious, yet an election is a high price to pay for a change of pace, IQP supposes.

Such calculations should rest on evidence of electoral support, and there is not a lot of light between the three parties. Consider just the three most recently published polls cited in this newsletter:

**Innovative Research**
LIB	24
NDP	20
PC	23

**Vector Poll**
LIB	25
NDP	20
PC	36

**Forum Research**
LIB	27
NDP	27
PC	31

**Average party percent**
LIB	27
NDP	27
PC	27

The closeness of the three packages and of the averages derived from them suggests that all three parties and their leaders would be at risk if they provoked an election.

The parties’ CFOs have to worry over how much of the money they borrowed to fight the 2011 election is yet to be repaid, as well as what they must do to satisfy their bankers respecting the re-payment obligations which will be accelerated to fight the 2015 contest a year or two early.

There’s no substitute for cash already raised when you are talking to the bank, so the NDP pulled off a coup with its lavish Art Gallery of Ontario “flag-ship social event” on February 28. Although the event raised eyebrows over its $2,500 ticket price, the rumoured take of $700,000 makes it clear that the price-point was correctly set.

Wynne causes confusion by shuffling ministry responsibilities
Embarrassing as it may be, it’s not unknown for the name of a ministry to be mangled when the swearing in of a shuffled cabinet involves moving this branch there and that other component somewhere else. (Premier Dalton McGuinty was especially given to taking a couple of small ministries apart and putting them back together – in what IQP described as ‘shufflets’.) But it is of course much more embarrassing when the muddle directly involves the premier.

The latest such snafu happened when Agriculture, Food & Rural Affairs was broken up in the February 11 swearing in of Premier Wynne’s cabinet. She retained the agriculture part, the better to woo Ontario outside the cities, and gave the Rural Affairs component to Jeff Leal, to give him a secretariat to help his boss — but there was no provision made for food.

That omission, which of course did nothing to lend credibility to Wynne’s grass-roots plan to gruntle vexed constituents on the back forty, was rectified 72 hours later by having her repeat the oath for a ministry called A&F. The government attempted to do this on little cat feet but the clumsy error had by then been noised about by Ernie Hardeman, PC agriculture critic. This wasn’t in the same league as unearthing a third embarrassing tranche of gas-plant closure documents and spreading doubt about what else had yet to be found by searching the government’s massive file servers. But it damaged the new regime’s credibility.

Media coverage unfairly termed this a mistake on Wynne’s part. Yes, the newly minted premier read out the oath formally stating her portfolio responsibilities, but the job of getting the wording right for the swearing-in script surely fell to Cabinet Secretary Peter Wallace.

John Gerretsen had found himself in a similar pickle when he was only partially sworn in October 2003 as McGuinty’s Minister of Municipal Affairs, without any mention of Housing. In that case, the embarrassment of not highlighting a key component of the ministry which was a major Liberal strategy, was not expunged until March 2004. The new government had initially brushed off the mistake. Statutory reporting requirements will eventually catch up with anyone playing fast and loose with ministerial names.

Mowing traditional grass
As noted in past issues, Premier Wynne began her leadership address in Maple Leaf Gardens and her Throne Speech at Queen’s Park by reminding her listeners that they were on turf that is considered to be the “traditional lands” of the Mississaugas of the New Credit. That same message was right up at the top of the remarks Wynne delivered at the opening of the huge 2013 convention of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada. The impact of this gargantuan convention has to be seen to be believed. PDAC reported today that the 2013 convention attendance has exceeded 30,000 for the second year running.

Christy Clark faces pressure to resign

Mar 062013

Canadian politics

Manitoba's Howard Pawley salvaged the NDP party by stepping down before election.

by Bill Tieleman

"People are not sure of who's in charge of the store or, more frighteningly, is anyone in charge of the store."
– Manitoba dissident NDP MLA James Walding, 1988

by Gillian Steward

Could Calgary be the colonoscopy capital of Canada?

That’s certainly the impression that is emerging as a public inquiry into queue jumping in the public health-care system reveals all sorts of interesting data about a state-of-the-art colon cancer screening clinic associated with the University of Calgary’s medical school.

According to testimony at the inquiry, patients who were clients of a boutique private clinic, a privilege for which they paid $10,000 a year, were booked for screening colonoscopies almost instantaneously. Other patients usually waited two to three years for the widely promoted procedure.

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