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  1. FWIW… re AB PC/conservatives control of media coverage of GoA policies… the view that Harper was the most intense communication control freak of modern conservatives that Canada has suffered under is mistaken. From my own first hand experience in the 90s on environmental files, I think Klein’s administration was the nastiest controlling communication team… Rod Love’s Machiavellian leadership was more destructive to having an informed citizenry or at least equal to Harper’s mode.

    For example, if you didn’t have reason to follow politics closely in the 90s you might not have noticed or heard that journalists who reported stories that embarrassed the Klein PCs on environmental issues sometimes had their jobs threatened.

    There was in fact, systemic intensive widespread control of GoA communications: one small example that illustrates the extreme control freak approach that was in place… the AB Parks newsletter about Natural Areas…e.g. before it could be printed, the AB Parks dep’t had to submit its Natural Areas newsletter to a GoA communication staff for a censor type of review before its few hundred copies could be sent out to the volunteer stewards of AB natural areas who generated the activities reported in this newsletter. All this newsletter did was go out to those few hundred AB citizens volunteering to monitor the condition of the couple hundred natural areas that, BTW, didn’t have much legal protection against damaging activities like OHV mud-bogging. But even that tiny publication had to be watched in case it revealed some story about the actual damage permitted by the Klein GoA’s lack of actual on-the-ground environmental protection.

    IMO… most Albertans generally have very little knowledge of how much they’ve actually been kept in the dark about all sorts of public policy issues since Klein’s cabinet launched the corporate takeover of AB politics after Getty quit.

  2. “Leading by good example?” What happens when one side plays the game with no contact basket ball rules and the other side plays with no-limits rugby rules? Hint: the NDP lose.

  3. You know boss… I’m not getting any younger, and considering that some doddering ruin such as yourself could likely hand me my liver in a set to, I have to point out that you are now in the realm of this guy: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a56700/delaney-2020/ Who wrote, and I quote: “You can accept that political activism is a sucker’s game and give up, or wrap yourself in the robes of ideological purity as though they were suits of armor. Or, you can accept that political activism is a sucker’s game and then engage in political activism to make it less so. And, as I went back and forth between the Senate chamber and the South Lawn in the dark of the early morning on Friday, I thought a lot about Alaska.” You’re welcome!

  4. Gordon Campbell’s first act as new premier of BC was to increase the premier’s office budget by eight fold and install about 250 staff—where about 30 did the job previously. It seemed so prescient and, sure enough, it foretold of abuses to come. Another Gordo invention, the BC Public Affairs Bureau and the “PABsters” who worked there, became such a butt of derision that Christy Clark, when she took over from her disgraced predecessor, changed its name.

    The BC Liberals were notorious for hiding information, neglecting to record meetings about the public interest, triple deletion of government emails, frustrating of FOI requests and, most infamously, secret insider deals for which two BC Liberals (so far) were convicted of corruption in the sale of publicly owned BC Rail. More will be revealed as the new government continues to move ahead through assiduosly poisoned, tampered and boobytrapped books which the BC Auditor General condemned for every single year of the BC Liberal regime. It’s taken 16 years for self-satisfied West Coasters to realize the reason any government would want to interfere with access to public information is to hide things they wouldn’t approve of. With any luck we will be fully apprised sooner than later.

    Obviously the PAB was not intended to inform, but rather to bafflegab the public with misinformation that concealed the real state of affairs. Otherwise, accessing public information, like applying for medical benefits or finding a campsite, is in BC like entering a Frank Kafka novel. The hope must have been to turn citizens off of asking.

    Good luck to Alberta in this regard. It’s probably impossible to prevent subsequent governments from reestablishing an abuse-prone PAB, but, as we hope BC’s new NDP government will do, publishing examples of abuse by predecessors may help keep such bureaus and their administration within the conscious minds of voters when they decide which party they can trust.

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