Kaycee Madu, out as justice minister, in as labour minister (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr).

Friday’s announcement of the job swap between Alberta’s justice and labour ministers illustrates just how shallow the talent pool of potential cabinet ministers still trusted by Premier Jason Kenney has become.

It also shows how low the ethical bar now is for ministers in the United Conservative Party cabinet. 

Tyler Shandro, in as justice minister, out as labour minister (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr).

Faced with the need to fire Justice Minister and Attorney General Kaycee Madu for attempting to interfere with the administration of justice, Mr. Kenney immediately shuffled his only Edmonton MLA into the labour portfolio.

Confronting the resulting need to find another lawyer to serve as minister of justice, the premier announced he was swapping Labour Minister Tyler Shandro into Justice. As is well known, Mr. Shandro, recently shuffled out of the health ministry in a similar swap, is a disaster in his own right.

Mr. Madu got in hot water in January after the CBC revealed he’d phoned Edmonton’s police chief in March 2021 to “discuss” a $300 distracted-driving traffic ticket he’d received from an Edmonton Police Service officer who observed him using his cell phone as he drove through a school zone. 

Embarrassed, Mr. Kenney asked Mr. Madu to “step back” from his position as justice minister until an independent investigator could review the facts. 

That investigator, retired Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Adèle Kent, turned in her report on Feb. 15 and an embarrassed Mr. Kenney made it public Friday. 

Despite sound Conservative connections, Ms. Kent found that Mr. Madu may not have interfered with the administration of justice – but he’d tried to. 

Needless to say, this does not qualify as an exoneration. 

Retired Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Adèle Kent (Photo: Court of Queen’s Bench of Alberta).

At this point, any other Canadian premier regardless of party would have fired Mr. Madu and washed his or her hands of the matter. 

Instead, Mr. Kenney shuffled him into a ministry where his ethical standards and renowned lack of diplomatic skills, which got him shuffled out of the municipal affairs ministry back in August 2020, will now be visited upon the province’s workers.

As Opposition Leader Rachel Notley tweeted this morning: “The Minister who thought it was OK to use his executive authority to get out of a traffic ticket is now in charge of protecting workers’ rights. What could go wrong…”

In a statement yesterday, Mr. Kenney fudged Ms. Kent’s findings. “The report concludes that Minister Madu did not interfere in the administration of justice but that the phone call could create a reasonable perception of interference,” the statement says. (Emphasis added.) 

Ms. Kent’s conclusion was more blunt: 

“Did Minister Madu interfere with the administration of justice? He did not. 

“Did Minister Madu attempt to interfere with the administration of justice? He did. 

“Is there a reasonable perception that Minister Madi interfered with the administration of justice? Yes.” 

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr).

Mr. Kenney’s statement said: “Given her findings, and the unique role of the office of the Minister of Justice and Solicitor General, I have concluded that it would be appropriate for Minister Madu to step aside from that position.” (Emphasis added.)

Does this not suggest that, in Premier Kenney’s mind, ethical lapses are only a problem for one ministry in his government? A low bar indeed! 

“This is a firing offense for any cabinet minister and most especially for the Attorney General,” said Ms. Notley in a news release.

“It is totally unacceptable for Kaycee Madu to remain in the UCP cabinet,” she continued. “For Jason Kenney to allow him to stroll down the hall into another ministry and continue to sit as part of the province’s executive council is unforgivable.”

But then, as the former NDP premier observed, “it’s clear that Jason Kenney’s desperation to survive his leadership review is the only thing that drives decision-making in this government.”

As for Mr. Shandro, he’s had a few troubles of his own. 

NDP Opposition Leader Rachel Notley (Photo: David J. Climenhaga).

Alert readers will recall that after a disastrous two-and-a-half-year tenure as health minister that included an incident now being investigated by the Alberta Law Society, Mr. Shandro was sent to the labour ministry in a similar swap back in September.

He was replaced by Jason Copping, a more capable minister. Legislature scuttlebutt has it that Mr. Copping took the job only on the understanding he wasn’t going to run again in the next general election. 

The Law Society plans a hearing into complaints Mr. Shandro violated its Code of Conduct in three incidents in the spring of 2020 when he was minister of health.

To wit: Yelling at a doctor who criticized him in the man’s driveway as his family watched; getting personal information from Alberta Health Services to call other docs who’d criticized him; and sending an email to another critic who contacted his wife’s business threatening to sic the authorities on her.

No date has been set for the hearing. 

So this is sort of a good-news/bad-news joke for Alberta.

The good news is that there’s a cabinet shuffle. The bad news is that Mr. Madu is being shuffled with Mr. Shandro. 

Health Minister Jason Copping (Photo: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr).

As someone observed on social media yesterday, the jokes just keep writing themselves. 

There are 60 UCP MLAs in the Alberta Legislature, counting the Speaker. 

There are 20 cabinet ministers and another five “associate ministers” who get to sit in cabinet meetings.

There are eight lawyers in the UCP Caucus, five of whom are already in cabinet – Messrs. Madu, Shandro and Copping, plus Energy Minister Sonya Savage, who has been serving as acting justice minister, and Doug Schweitzer, who was demoted from the justice portfolio in August 2020. 

The backbench MLAs with law degrees left are Mickey Amery, Nicholas Milliken, and Jason Stephan, the latter being a notorious anti-vaccine-mandate nut.

Yet Mr. Kenney can’t think of any way to find a more suitable candidate for justice minister. Or, for that matter, for labour minister.

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30 Comments

  1. Great political analogue of the classic German army change of underwear: “You change with Otto and Otto with Helmut”

    Cheers.

    1. You have me there, Green. It is so. I thought it best to leave out all references to underwear, though. DJC

      1. Ohhh, you mean like if you wave a pair of white underwear outside your truck window then you can’t be arrested?

        I can’t think of the last time I owned, never mind wore, a pair of white underwear.

  2. The Bloviator’s government reminds me very much of the Devine government in Saskatchewan before it was defeated. Nearly 50 percent of the caucus was in the cabinet. Golly, looks pretty similar. Could this be how most terminal governments are composed? Just asking.

  3. Correct me if I’m wrong, and I don’t think I am, but didn’t the University of Lethbridge Board of Governors appoint Kaycee Madu’s Edmonton-South West United Conservative Party association president as its chief negotiator — one Dwayne Chomyn?

    So Kaycee Madu, who was deemed not fit to serve as Justice Minister and Attorney General, for his failed attempt to use his power to save his own skin, is able to provide confidential direction to the University of Lethbridge Board of Governors concerning the current faculty strike, now in its third week, with his own constituency association president leading negotiations with the faculty?

    https://lethbridgeherald.com/commentary/opinions/2022/02/19/universities-operating-in-an-opaque-labour-relations-environment/

    Kiss the term goodbye, then, thanks to one Jason Kenney.

  4. So jasons’ biggest problem is he is surrounded by people of his own caliber?
    How could that have happened?
    A dropout and a pit crew educated way beyond their intelligence.
    Blueslime grift ads taking credit for oil prices coming soon.

    1. “How could that have happened?”

      Yours is a very interesting question, with an even more interesting answer, especially when you consider the huge talent pool Jason Kenney could choose from. Kenney first started his project to unite the Wildrose and PC parties less than 2 years after the 2015 provincial election, so there were two somewhat qualified candidates from legacy parties for every riding that he could have chosen from. In many cases, however, it appears neither made it onto his slate.

      I suppose some felt disinclined to run again, but given the enthusiasm the right wing media had for Messiah Jason’s arrival on the provincial level, I don’t think there were too many of them. I would like to know, however, how many would have run were they not put off by Jason Kenney and his slick demeanour. Pretty much right from the get go Kenney’s popularity has never been as high as his party’s.

      The remaining scenario as to what happened to the 2015 candidates is Kenney vetoed them. I think Rick Strankman, in Drumheller-Stettler makes an interesting case study. Prior to being elected in 2012, Strankman actually went to jail for hauling grain into the US, to protest the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly of grain sales. Stephen Harper pardoned Strankman in 2012, so Jason Kenney had to have been very aware of Strankman’s history. Being strongly principled clearly is not a valued trait in Jason Kenney’s caucus, as Mr. Strankman never made it onto the UCP slate.

      What does seem to be a valued trait, however, is people who will make the leader look good. I definitely agree with your point that being too smart is not an asset in Kenney’s cabinet.

  5. The dark comedy that is UCP Alberta continues, undiminished and increasingly getting weirder.

    While Premier Crying & Screaming Midget goes onto Twitter, denouncing the Russian invasion of the Ukraine by saying a litany of “I told you so” and “buy more Alberta bitumen”, there is a cabinet shuffle that moves a lawyer under review by the Alberta Law Society for unethical conduct into the Attorney-General’s office. I suspect that there will be plenty of screaming in all the courtrooms across the province c/o Giant Lungs Shandro. I’m not sure how anyone could think that someone whose only talent appears to be his shrinking face, relative to the size of his enormous head, apart from his monumental bungling of the public health portfolio, but that’s the way Kenney’s brain works. He really doesn’t care what others may think; he just wants to reward his loyal followers and plow into his enormous mountain of cough syrup down at the Sky Palace.

    At least we know that the inquiry found while Kaycee Madu didn’t do anything wrong when he called Edmonton’s Chief of Police over a traffic ticket, it’s clear that he was up to something and it was untoward for his to even contact the Chief. Only in Alberta would something like this not even bat an eye with disbelief.

    Since it appears that Kenney and the UCP government cannot win any support (for Kenney’s continued leadership) by being capable governors, they’ve decided they would rather govern by trolling. Matt Wolf has taught them well.

  6. I used to joke that BC and Alberta pass the worst political leadership in the country back and forth like a doobie. BC is going to have their work cut out for them out-idioting Alberta after a) alberta voters spurning the first halfway competent government they’ve had in decades, then b) the whole circus sideshow that is Jason Kenney. It’s the political equivalent of watching a monkey eat a hand grenade. You want to look away but you just can’t.

    Don’t get me wrong, I have faith that BC will have the dumbest provincial government in Canada again, but it might take them 5 years.

  7. This is a damning indictment of the last several years of the Kenney government. In a way it shows everything that is fundamentally wrong with it. Here is why.

    First of all, it is a sign of the lack of talent in the UCP bench that the only one he could find to fill the Justice position was another Minister who was almost as disgraced, but who was also kept in cabinet, probably because they didn’t have anyone better on the backbenches to fill his spot either. This really is like shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic, a lot of action, but not achieving anything substantial.

    The root of the problem is this – good politicians try to recruit quality candidates. Yes, they want people with some degree of loyalty, but that is not the primary criteria. Kenney seemed to pick them mostly young, inexperienced with no political base of their own and either in sync with or in awe of him. I believe he did this so no one would challenge him as leader in the future. It might work and help Kenney survive his current leadership problems, but no one thinks that his cabinet is anywhere close to the best and the brightest in Alberta politics. Its a group of cheerleaders for a one man band.

    A second problem is Kenney’s own lack of moral or ethical compass. He just doesn’t seem to care that Madu tried to influence the administration of justice in his favour. He found a good Conservative retired judge for his inquiry, but unfortunately for Kenney they are not going to cover for his mistakes, just like Steve Allan’s inquiry into the activities of environmentalists. Their reports are somewhat sympathetic, but they clearly are not going to conclude with the lies and whitewash that Kenney wants. These people have some integrity. Of course, Kenney then just ignores what they really say and goes and spins the results of these inquiries the way he wants anyways.

    Kenney’s way of dealing with this problem is a lot like sweeping it under the carpet. It is still there, just in a different, less visible place. It sounds a lot like the approach certain religious institutions took to dealing with problematic clergy. Maybe this is where Kenney first learned this technique. However, it didn’t work well for them in the long term and unfortunately only ended up causing a lot more grief for everyone. I suspect this will eventually end badly for Kenney too.

  8. The jokes keep writing themselves with the UCP, because the UCP are a joke to begin with. What isn’t funny is that Albertans are paying for the very pricey shenanigans that the UCP does.

  9. The only thing to do with the UCP is to meet every announcement, pronouncement, and denouncement with wave after disrespectful wave of mocking laughter.

    $20 to the journalist that replaces their presser question with naught but gawfaws.

  10. If Kenney had gotten into power through some military coup, or war crime a la Putin, it would be one thing, but…

    The stupid people of Alberta willingly voted him into power! I’m so disgusted with my fellow Albertans.

    You get what you deserve. Keep on suffering Albertan, until you’ve had enough and are prepared to vote intelligently.

    Is this a good time to remind people that Alberta has a perfectly capable, ethical, and corruption-free Premier in Rachel Notley? Next time…

  11. From George Monbiot, describing what the current national government of the U.K. is doing to that nation. Sounds oh so familiar in our little corner of the world!!
    “They would damage our sense of national cohesion with a blatant disregard for the rules the rest of us must follow. They would seek to ensure that we lost faith in the political system and ceased to believe that those who govern us have our best interests at heart.

    The hostile power would also set out to destroy, through subtle and insidious cuts, our social infrastructure: the effective delivery of health, education [at all levels], social, environmental and local services. It would allow our physical infrastructure – public transport, sewerage, public buildings and other essential services – to deteriorate until, in some cases, it [comes] close to collapse.”

  12. Gee what a surprise Don Trump is praising Putin proving just how stupid this guy really is. If I were him I would find somewhere to hide. There maybe Ukraines willing to do him in. We know how many of them live in Canada, some are relatives of mine.

    1. One horrible leader praises another. This isn’t shocking. In Alberta, we have a very large Ukrainian Canadian population, as does the other Prairie provinces, and other places like Toronto. Many of us have Ukrainian ancestry, and/or have Ukrainian relatives. I wonder what kind of kickbacks these leaders give each other? What were Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin doing behind the scenes? Donald Trump wouldn’t be brave enough to say that he supports Vladimir Putin to people’s faces. Not without repercussions. The Ukrainians suffered horribly under Josef Stalin, and now they are suffering again, under Vladimir Putin.

  13. Am uncertain if Mr. Kenney feels that his choice of cabinet ministers should be based on the academic achievements, the professional credentials or any known evidence of appointees’ competence. His choices are indeed limited resulting in any obedient sycophant holding on to a cabinet job. Looking at the current crop which includes the dull [LaGrange] to the deluded [Orr] yes a mess, a sad one.

  14. Have been away from this site for far too long. Much critical information released at this location. Firstly, kudos to Mr. Copping for his forthrightness. Soon leaving the ‘whack-a-loons’ behind before being infected by what they carry? Hoping more and more Albertans eventually discover this site. This type of information must reach more Albertans. Contributors, well done!

  15. Hi Dave

    Thank you for the link to Adèle Kent’s judgement on the matter of Kaycee Madu’s ticket. With Sunday morning coffee I read through the link and I found it to be very humanizing. I find I can’t quite accept all the former judge’s logic, but she wrote her justifications as a public document, for the rest of us to review and consider as we see fit, so good on her. And, after reading the report, the tweet you linked to from Rachel Notley seems a bit cheap, an oversimplification to score political points. Well, she is the Opposition Leader; I suppose it’s her job.
    I quite agree with you on the ridiculous nature of the UCP’s ‘management’ of the matter. Low bar, no depth of talent…once again, they are Gong Show government.

    cheers DB

  16. In my experience GOOD leaders want to surround themselves with very good, ethical people. It tends to increase their probability of success.

    I believe that most Albertans can draw their own conclusion on our current Premier and his band of sycophant Cabinet ministers.

  17. What are the chances that Madu will try to weasel himself into representing the UCP in a conservative-fencepost constituency such as Grande Prairie-Mackenzie at the next election considering that he has absolutely no chance of winning even the dog catcher’s position anywhere near Edmonton?

    If you needed a lawyer, would Kaycee Madu enter your calculations of success?

    1. Sorry, Covkid, but Grande Prairie-Mackenzie is the sprawling federal riding currently held by Conservative Party of Canada MP Chris Warkentin. As for Grande Prairie’s two provincial constituencies, Grande Prairie [city] is held by none other than Tracy “Aloha” Allard, who might be vulnerable to a nomination challenge, while Grande Prairie-Wapiti is held by Finance Minister Travis Toews, who is likely not going anywhere.

  18. Wait until Brian Jean gets elected. We believe the people in Fort McMurray aren’t smart enough to vote for the NDP . Kenney and Jean have them believing how evil Notley is. Infighting between Kenney and Jean hasn’t even begun yet.

    As my conservative friends point out Jean proved what a liar he was as leader of the Wildrose making the people take a chance on Kenney and we know how that went. We don’t need these two fools embarrassing us.

      1. Anonymous With the Kenney government obviously on their way out I find it hard to believe that so many Albertans are still trying to become members of their party running against their members in the upcoming candidate races. They can’t be very smart. Let’s hope the bye election goes the way we want it to, no one wants another Brian Jean repeat.

  19. Too bad Bumbles did not finish his higher education at the Jesuit institution he quit before completing his degree. There, he might have encountered Nicolo Machiavelli’s treatise, “The Prince”. He might have found the opening to Chapter 22 instructive, just as we might now:

    “The choosing of ministers is a matter of no little importance for a prince; and their worth depends on the sagacity of the prince himself. The first opinion that is formed of a ruler’s intelligence is based on the quality of the men he has around him. When they are competent and loyal he can always be considered wise, because he has been able to recognize their competence and to keep them loyal. But when they are otherwise, the prince is always open to adverse criticism; because his first mistake has been in the choice of his ministers.”

    Bumbles may have some obsequious sycophants as his loyal ministers, how loyal is debatable (rats and sinking ships), but there is no question they are, by and large, incompetent. This does not reflect well on Bumbles.

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