File under, “Dinner, done like”… Alison Redford serves dinner to Thomas Lukaszuk as Jim Prentice, at left, and Dave Hancock, Doug Horner and Ric McIver look on. Actual Tory premiers, former premiers, would-be premiers and former would-be premiers may not appear exactly as illustrated. Below: The author with Ric McIver. It just seemed like the right time to trot this one out!

Looks like it’s time to start planning for a couple of years of a McIver Government.

Leastways, the past couple of days have not earned any gold stars for former infrastructure minister Ric McIver’s two competitors, supposed frontrunner Jim Prentice, the former banker supported by almost all of the Progressive Conservative caucus, and Thomas Lukaszuk, the former deputy premier who is supported by almost no one in the Tory establishment.

With his announcement last week that Alberta MLAs and premiers should be reined in by unconstitutional term limits, Mr. Prentice has revealed himself to be the Mitt Romney of Alberta politics – with just the right amount of grey in his hair to be a triumph of appearance over substance.

For his part, Mr. Lukaszuk must have been feeling pretty pleased with the nearly universally negative reaction to Mr. Prentice’s Big Term Limits Idea when the Edmonton Sun reported yesterday he let the people of Alberta pay when he got dinged for $20,000 in roaming charges while on a personal trip to Israel, the West Bank and his native Poland in 2012.

Even before the shocker about Mr. Lukaszuk’s cellular roaming bill surfaced, Mr. Prentice had started to back away from his silly term limits suggestion when almost everyone but a few Americanized nuts on Twitter started screaming about how it’s totally unconstitutional and a terrible idea to boot. For a minute there, it was almost as if the whole province had been reading Alberta Diary and absorbing their lessons!

Saving his pride a little, Mr. Prentice, who is also a lawyer, insisted manfully that the idea could pass constitutional muster, but conceded that there are ways to achieve the same goals without passing a law – like, you know, just making his own caucus do it.

Well, good luck with that. It might stand a chance of working for a couple of terms if 80 per cent of the seats in the Legislature are Tory seats, but that’s an outcome that seems increasingly improbable.

As for Mr. Prentice’s insistence on the constitutional merits of the idea, the Calgary Herald trotted out a trio of well-known constitutional lawyers who dismissed it as a pipe dream.

Now, that constitutional law stuff only goes so far with the locals hereabouts, but Mr. Prentice’s proposal really got into trouble when it started to sink in that it would have prematurely ended the stellar political careers of such Tory demigods as Peter Lougheed, Ralph Klein, and … wait for it … Stephen Harper. Not to mention Winston Churchill, rumbled Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid disapprovingly from the high plains of Cowtown.

With the shocker registering that this lame idea could also apply to conservative colossi and not just popular Liberals and New Democrats, as if such a thing existed in this province anyway, the thought that Mr. Prentice might be a bit of a lightweight despite his beautiful suits seemed to be starting to sink in among the general populace.

As for Mr. Lukaszuk’s unexpected phone bill – well, actually, our phone bill unexpectedly run up by Mr. Lukaszuk – he initially reacted huffily, saying he personally paid for the trip even though it was “pseudo government related.” (Say what?)

“Lots of documents were shipped then and that was in official capacity and I continued working,” he sniffed, complaining to the Sun’s reporter that the person who slipped the tabloid the documents this late in the leadership race was obviously a Jim Prentice supporter.

A little later, Mr. Lukaszuk sensibly apologized for the mistake to another newspaper and admitted it was his. “Absolutely I made a mistake, and for that I apologize,” he told the Edmonton Journal. “I did not check the data plan myself, and I did not confirm that my office had done so.”

That was better than Mr. Prentice’s response to the reaction to the term limits brouhaha, but it does little to alter the widely accepted narrative about the Alberta PCs’ lack of care with money raised from taxes and the idea Tory insiders like Mr. Lukaszuk have a powerful sense of entitlement.

Indeed, the inevitable denouement of this narrative is that the Tories have learned nothing, even now, and therefore never will.

This may be unfair. For example, who knows or cares what the prime minister pays for secure communications when he’s abroad? But it’s a problem that the Alberta PCs created for themselves, and now it won’t go away.

I would suggest the inevitable public reaction to this means Mr. Lukaszuk’s candidacy is done like dinner.

As for Mr. Prentice, he is not in quite as bad shape, since there are plenty of Albertans who think that anything a bunch of professors don’t like must be a good idea and may have missed the bit about Stephen Harper.

Still, in the immortal words of Sid Vicious and the rest of the Sex Pistols, it sure makes him look pretty … vacant.

By comparison, the brief flutter over Mr. McIver’s appearance at Calgary’s March for Jesus back in June is starting to look pretty benign. If he can just keep his nose clean for 12 more days, he might just pull off an upset.

This post also appears on Rabble.ca.

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12 Comments

  1. An appology means absolutely sweet tweet to me, everyone of those who were in the trough to fill their own pockets or take advantage of taxpayer money should have to pay it back, 100%….or be jailed…and it doesn’t matter hich party they represent, theft is just that, theft…..if it were to done in the private sector, they would be fired and charged with fraud…I am sick of the entitlement of these so-called “honorable” people…

  2. The reality is we need a strong conservative like Mitt Romney in Alberta politics. No more of these phony conservatives!

    1. Joe! I’m truly astounded you’re prepared to forgive “Romneycare,” which, as we all know, is exactly the same as “Obamacare.” Not a bad legacy for either man, if you ask me.

    2. Follow US politics much? There are no conservatives in US politics. Their right wing is righter than our Harper cons. Romney is poster boy for the Tea Bagger extremist wing of the Republican Party. He’s an elitist corporatist who hides his money offshore and vilifies the mooching class, which by his definition is anyone who doesn’t belong to his billionaire club. Yeah, let’s put a multi-billionnaire Mormon in charge and pray to Jesus the trickle down theory works. Hint: trickle down, Reaganomics, supply-side economics doesn’t work!

  3. re: “he might just pull off an upset.”
    re: ” start planning for a couple of years of a McIver Government.”

    Lougheed vs Strom.
    Smith vs McIver.

    PC’s might be obliterated after 2 years of daily McIver vs Smith and Notley.

    Leader-centric politics:
    Public speaking skills, charisma, TV, hair, etc.
    Ridiculous criteria in some respects.
    Little or nothing to do with capacity for good governance and policies re public good.

    Also some additional parallels:
    e.g. Trudeau vs Standfield, Trudeau vs Mulcair/Harper, Reagan vs Carter

  4. One small point in defense of Thomas Lukaszuk. The world is full of horror stories of these roaming charges from another country. He’s not alone.

    But let’s look t the big picture. That bad news is Cdns will probably continue to pay the highest cell phone rates in the world. The good news is the proceeds will go towards funding Rojer’s TV deal with the NHL.

    The bad news is a good chunk of this change will go towards subsidizing US sunbelt hockey operations which are average 547 paying customers a night. The good news is probably half of players will be Canadian so a good portion of these multi-million salaries will end up in the hands of the tax man in Ottawa

    The circle of life. As Canadian as a Tim Hortons tax lawyer.

    1. Hopefully for all of Alberta’s sake, McIver will take over as Premier and after the next elction he will be relegated to leader of the opposition to maybe learn what the leaders job really is all about..As for Luchazak, he should be like all other Canadians who have been nailed with roaming charges, and pay them out of his pocket…If he is that “stupid” or “Naive” about how the cell phone system works he should not be leader of anything more than a boy scout troop…I d not accept his appology…..as for Prentice, I have very little good to say about him except that he has been caught in one lie, how many more are there…he is an opportunist …who was it that said “kill all the lawyers”…maybe a td harsh bu we don’t need a lawyer to do the job of Premier…Mr. Harper has proven that..

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