When Manitoba Conservative Premier Heather Stefanson blew off Alberta Conservative Premier Danielle Smith’s call yesterday to ship Alberta oil through the Hudson Bay port of Churchill, Wild Rose Country’s most quotable and quoted political scientist called it a rebuff.
“This is a surprise,” tweeted Mount Royal University’s Duane Bratt. “Stefanson is rebuffing Smith.”
I’d say it was more than a rebuff. It was actually a good brisk “bug off!” Only, you know, not with a bug.
“There are other, more pressing things for us to be dealing with right now, which is why we’re here today to deal with the most vulnerable in our society,” Premier Stefanson told reporters at a news conference about her government’s plan to open more homeless shelters.
(Translation: Do you think I’m nuts? We’re getting our butts kicked here by the NDP and I’d kinda like to win at least one election as premier!)
Ms. Stefanson said she understood where her Alberta counterpart is at. “She’s facing an election and some tough things, tough challenges politically within her own province, and she wants to get some of these issues out of the way.”
This was a pretty shrewd analysis of what Ms. Smith was up to when she mailed off a wordy letter to Ms. Stefanson and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe rambling on about what a great idea it would be to build pipelines and ship bitumen from Alberta out through Churchill because, you know, Russia!
Ms. Smith has made a lot of promises to her base, the same ones who used to be Jason Kenney’s base, and they’ve already demonstrated what they do to politicians who fail to implement their Q-adjacent demands. At the same time, she knows some of those same policies are kryptonite to a lot of Alberta voters, especially in Calgary.
So maybe she can get some of that garbage out of the way now, then set about to acting like someone folks might elect in a couple of Calgary ridings.
She’d like a photo op at the other two Conservative premiers’ earliest convenience, Ms. Smith concluded her epistle to her fellow potential Buffalonians, where “we will kick-start our ongoing collaboration in this area and formalize a structure to engage with the Port, relevant ministries, First Nations and stakeholders to move this important work forward.”
Ms. Stefanson: Uh, no.
As for it being a surprise, well, that’s a matter of debate too.
Both Alberta’s and Manitoba’s Conservative premiers have essentially the same problem: an election is looming and their parties are both underperforming in the polls compared to the opposition New Democrats.
Ms. Stefanson, who assumed office a year ago Sunday after a party election, faces an election next year on Oct. 3. Recent polling suggests that if an election were held tomorrow, there would be an NDP majority in Manitoba.
It’s probably a little early for the province’s Conservatives to panic, but Manitobans have elected New Democrats lots of times before, so it’s not as if anyone would describe another NPD government there as a total fluke.
What’s more, given the small-c conservative approach the NDP took to running the province under Gary Doer from 1999 to 2009, it’s not like anyone could get away with calling them communists like the UCP is forever doing in Alberta.
Ms. Smith was only elevated to her current post 21 days ago, so maybe she’s still in leadership campaign mode with the fringiest fringes of the UCP’s base in mind. Or maybe she really is the conspiracy-obsessed sovereignist she appears to be.
The next Alberta general election is a little closer, at the end of next May – as long as the recent buzz isn’t true that she intends to ignore the province’s fixed-election-date law and hang around until 2024 without calling an election.
Like her Manitoba counterpart, Ms. Smith is yet to win an election as premier. What’s more, at the moment she doesn’t even has a seat in the Legislature, although she hopes to fix that next Tuesday in Brooks-Medicine Hat.
Whatever the explanation is, it’s apparent that Ms. Stephenson and Ms. Smith have hit on dramatically different election strategies, at least for now.
Maybe they’ll both work. Maybe neither of them will. Maybe by this time next year there’ll be NDP governments in three out of four Western Canadian provinces! Now wouldn’t that be a chuckle!
Also yesterday …
Some days it’s hard to know what Alberta story to comment on. Also yesterday was Canadaland’s story of a bizarre plot by sketchy operatives bankrolled by a cabal of Calgary Conservatives to try to trick then Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi into taking a bribe from a fake Russian oligarch.
Mr. Nenshi, of course, told them to take a hike.
It’s hard to believe the people said to be behind the scheme could be that stupid, but then again, maybe it’s not that hard.
Later yesterday, Mr. Nenshi suggested the Calgary Police Service and the RCMP “investigate this story deeply.” There were also whispers on social media of very senior Alberta Conservatives indeed being involved in this intrigue.
So it may be best to leave this one alone until the police have completed their investigation – which should be, you know, in three or four years …
There is also the possibility that the planned use by Ontario Conservative Premier Doug Ford’s government of the Notwithstanding Clause of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to smash a garden-variety public sector strike could provoke a general strike in Canada’s most populous province.
So that seems pretty worthy of commentary too.
Regardless, today’s pick was an opportunity to bask in the reflected glory of the New York Daily News’s headline about another Ford, U.S. President Gerald, on Oct. 30, 1975. It was, in the opinion of this former professional headline writer, one of the two or three greatest headlines ever written:
Ford to City: Drop Dead
Danielle Smith has a proven knack for putting her hoof in her mouth. It’s becoming a liability, and not an asset. What the results of this can mean is that it have an effect of the outcomes of the UCP trying to get back into power next May, and other elections in Canada, where the Conservatives hope to get back into power. After all, she still didn’t get resounding endorsement in the UCP leadership race. One of the reasons why is that nobody wants this type of buffoonery that she displays so well.
Yes, where to start? Well, Mr. Ford, the US President did have a long life, but his political one was short. New York is still very much here. So much for that.
Ms. Smith is like someone wriggling on a hook, desperately looking for a political win. She is not in a good position and she knows it. The current Premier of Saskatchewan can generally be counted on to be Alberta’s reliable junior partner – always aye ready, ma’am. If Smith could have left it at that, it might have been ok for her. The problem is the Manitoba Premier does indeed have her own political problems and she knows getting too close to her political crazy cousin to west is not going to help her. It is a bit unseemly for Smith to be so desperate, it is even worse to be told to bug off.
As for the conservatives trying to trap Mayor Nenshi, at least they did not hang out by bars waiting for him to drive home after drinking, but in some ways it was more pathetic with all the money, in this case their own, wasted in their desperation to get rid of him. Yes, there should be a police investigation, but the police are probably still busy investigating the previous UCP leadership race and other things too.
Mr. Ford, the President, might not have been the most successful politically, but at least his party had the sense at the time to replace their failed leadership with someone more moderate, so their political rebuke was relatively mild.
We’ll see if Smith gets around to pardoning anyone like Ford did, but perhaps her imaginary powers exceed her real ones.
“Mr. Ford, the President, might not have been the most successful politically, but at least his party had the sense at the time to replace their failed leadership with someone more moderate” … ummm, Mr Ford, although a Republican, was fairly moderate. He was succeeded in terms of Republican Presidents by Ronald Reagan, the furthest thing from a moderate.
Someone should tell Danielle the Port of Churchill is only open for 3 or 4 months of the year. She wants to build arenas and pipelines and couldn’t be bothered with the mundane of actually running the Province.
Interesting how Rob Ford woudn’t get off his rear end to help with the insurrectionist anti vax truckers and yet goes all in to break the Teacher’s strike. I guess a cunning politician has to pick his battles.
Mr. Ford may be shy about appearing before the Ottawa committee but is happy to stomp not on teachers just yet but on education support workers, the lowest tier in the education system, 55,000 classroom support personnel, caretakers and librarians. The imposed four year wage settlement while ridiculously low, makes a mockery of the notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights, the first time it’s been used in a collective bargaining setting. What’s a Charter of Rights anyway?
Alberta oil firsters have this fantasy that if a pipeline should magically appear in Churchill a bitumen-thirsty world will automatically beat a path to their door.
There is nothing more entertaining that an isolationist/quasi-nationalist politician getting hung up on their own petard because they have suddenly come to the realization that they need outside actors to move their agendas. It looks like Danielle Straitjacket has taken her Alberta Uber Alles stand right to its limit, before riding it over the proverbial cliff.
I’m sure during one of her gabfests with the Calgary Cabal/Alt-right looneys this idea of building a pipeline all the way to Hudson’s Bay got some traction. I’m one of the big brains around the table just spouted off something about “Saskatchewan and Manitoba can be bought” and everyone else thought it was a done deal. Of course, no one considered for even one second that the access to Hudson’s Bay is largely impassable, not to mention that the bay itself lacks sufficient deep water access to the super-tanks Calgary’s big brains hope to attract. And of course there’s the untold, never mentioned hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of capital needed to make this crazy notion get off the ground, let alone working. But when the room is filled with Hawaiian shirt-wearing Incel-Bugaloo Boys, bad ideas are just going to fall out everywhere.
The premier of Manitoba saw this and told Smith to get stuffed (my colourful vernacular) because disaster awaits and Manitoba will have to pay for it. Of course, I’m sure the Calgary Cabal is trying to engineer a way to take down Manitoba’s premier and replace her with someone more to their liking. But considering the way these geniuses engineered and botched their brilliant plot to ruin Mayor Nenshee, this brain trust should be allowed near a Lego set, let alone Machiavellian-level machinations. They’re just too damn stupid.
What to do about Danielle? She can try paying for every vote personally in her byelection, but that may not even work out for her, as the price will just keep going up.
How desperate is Danielle Smith to win this election? Very, very desperate.
Heh, maybe Danielle read one of my posts somewhere—the one about the sixty-odd permutations of secessions and/or confederations that would get Albetarian Crude (diluted bitumen, to earth people) to tidewater. By far the most likely of the by-far-mostly-unlikely permutations is for all three Prairie provinces to secede from Canada, theoretically allowing the flow of dilbit through Churchill on sunny Hudson Bay. Some will say BC is the better option but, despite an existing pipeline to an existing tidewater facility, and a Canadian owned—by each citizen, that is—brand new pipe being laid across BC to that same super-tanker facility right now, UCP types daren’t appreciate Justin Trudeau’s TMX gift or fain friendly cooperation with socialist (quasi-, anyway) BC. And, despite plenty of expat Albertans retired out here on the Wet Coast, most seem to quickly ‘see the light’ through flood-causing “atmospheric rivers,” deadly “heat domes,” and now-annual wildfire smoke (phew!) that dilbit produced in Alberta and shipped out of BC contributes to these symptoms of climate-change, not to mention these retirees’ closer appreciation of marine splendour directly threatened by dilbit spills. Danielle thus prefers to entertain the more remote pipeline (there’s also a railway connection to Churchill—like everywhere else in southern Canada, including the Atlantic Coast).
Why is it or isn’t it “surprising” that Manitoba’s caretaker premier gives Alberta’s caretaker premier’s proposal a reception as chilly as a winter-icebound Hudson Bay harbour? To DJC’s list of answers I would add that Smith likes the concept of an “area” of both geological and politically partisan homogeneity. It’s merely presumptuous on Smith’s part—and just as hopeful on premier Stefanson’s part—that the Prairie provinces remain a bastion of western conservatism. While NDP victories loom on both premier’s horizons, while Manitoba has elected quite a few Dipper governments, and while Alberta is flirting again with Dipperdom, I would remind that Saskatchewan has done some pretty heavy petting with socialism in the past (indeed, of two of its scions, one was a Conservative PM so Progressive as to cooperate with a socialist prairie preacher MP to bring our federation its commonwealth of universal public healthcare. Yes, it was Dief the Chief’s PC government which produced the white paper on universal public healthcare, and Lester Pearson’s Liberal minority which NDP leader Tommy Douglas forced to legislate it.)
I also question the equating of the two premiers as conservatives, but, aside from my approval that Manitoba’s is prioritizing what I think real conservatives should with respect an organically whole society, it’s prob’ly quite enough deliberation on that important social point for now.
I can appreciate Stefanson wanting to safe distance from her Alberta ‘sisterCon,’ but I can also imagine Danielle imagining what a great idea sistering-up their respective election dates would be. Certainly a couple terms of ProgCon government has fomented some serious social problems in Manitoba, so I wouldn’t expect an early election there—especially not to sister-up in tandem with Alberta’s scheduled one. But Smith is loopy enough to imagine the alternative by either ignoring Alberta’s fixed-term law or outright repealing it. The latter wouldn’t be a very right-wing thing to do (all fixed-election dates were implemented by right-wing governments), but Danielle is enamoured with showing her determination—and, anyway, “The Resistance” depicted on the cover of MacLean’s magazine is kaput: Scheer, Pallister, and Kenney are wiped out, Legault is a qu’est-ce que c’est conservateur, Houston is too progressive, Higgins is from a bilingual province, and Ford is a D’ohFo (but prob’ly not as much as D’anielle).
Come to think of it, there might be a parallel between D’ohFo’s threat to use the notwithstanding clause to foil a teachers’ strike and Danielle’s claws, notwithstanding the Constitution, not just teachers’ right to strike.
And that Nenshi thing is really intriguing.
Man! Alberta’s really got it on lately—like, since about 2011.
It’s “Quest for the Bay”, starring Danielle Smith! Will she survive the dangerous rapids intact, or will she succumb during a demanding portage? Stay tuned.
The only thing we know is that she recycled Michaela Frey’s old slogan, “Pipelines, pipelines, pipelines,”.
Plus we have the case of Duncan Kinney and the charges he’s facing from the EPS and the Crown Prosecutor. Is this another variant of the tried & true SLAPP method of silencing critics? We’ll have to wait until disclosure.
So what is happening to Duncan Kinney would be called a SPAPP? Strategic Prosecution against Public Participation. SPAPP seems to be a pretty common technique used by police that doesn’t get enough notice.
Ms. Smith must be assuming that voters in Alberta are so dim that they would swallow her Churchill port nonsense and start singing her praises.
A port that is open from August-late October, sometimes November at the latest????
She continues to embarrass herself, her Party, and Albertans.
Shame really.
History shows hers to be a pretty safe assumption.
Sadly, Brett, some of them DO believe this drivel. It’s classic PR spin by unethical actors: superficially plausible, attractive, with lots of wish-fulfilment potential–and utterly impractical when you stop to think about it.
The comments section of this CBC article:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/manitoba-other-priorities-alberta-shipping-oil-churchill-1.6635452
–is instructive, if depressing. Most of the pro-Smith comments are basically, “Yeah, great idea. Let’s do it tomorrow!” A few less-credulous comments point out the very long lead time for megaprojects and the extreme cost (billions of dollars).
By the time an oil terminal could be built, Europe will have solved its energy crisis. Heck, by the time the construction permit could be approved, the EU will have built out enough renewable-energy projects to free themselves from Putin’s pipeline blackmail!
Sadly, this simple fact of life doesn’t appeal to anyone who thinks “Oil will save us (again).”
There’s a bit of a snake-eating-its-tail argument at play here, since the only way Hudson’s Bay becomes navigable for more of the year is if climate change gets bad enough that the Arctic Ocean becomes ice-free during the summer. But if the world succeeds at slowing, then stopping, global warming before that 2° C threshold, it’ll be partially by reducing consumption of fossil fuels such as bitumen end-products — thus putting an end to any need for ocean access to the Port of Churchill.
Boy were the former MLAs right. When Canadians finally realize what these Reformers stand for they will finally kick them out. Too bad they aren’t smart enough to not elect them in the first place. The damage they create while they are in power is sickening. Of course refusing to listen to those of us who are smart enough to know they shouldn’t isn’t an option to these fools.They think this time they will be different but they never are. Any fake conservative who refuses to follow what Lougheed did for us , like collecting proper corporate taxes and royalties should never be considered, Smith has never once suggested it.Of course treating doctors, nurses, teachers and students like third class citizens is their trade mark, they all use it, yet many of our fellow seniors don’t care, they vote for the word conservative and don’t care who is hiding behind it.
Don’t look now, but the BC NDP government seems to be acting like an NDP government. Anyone worried about what might happen if the Alberta NDP get elected and then act like an NDP government should consider the following cautionary tales:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-teachers-federation-tentative-agreement-1.6635666
I hate how expensive education is. That said, this could be tremendously positive, the citizens of BC have quite frankly abused the teachers who they then entrust their children to for more than 40 years – IMO the BC government, and the voting public of BC, owe their teachers and their children an honest explanation (ie “we were greedy, paradigm locked, institutionalized, and felt too perpetually anxious about bills, rent and status to devote much time to understanding the issue”) and a sincere apology. Beyond noting that it is a welcome deviation from the status quo and hoping that they are going to spend wisely, I don’t know enough to have an opinion except to say education is complicated.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-doctor-supports-announcement-1.6635200
I have no specialized or insider knowledge, but I firmly believe the fee-for-service method does not meet the needs of society today and disincentives doctors from being as socially responsible as (many of them) want to be. I’m glad BC is trying something new even while acknowledging that we’re going to have to wait and see how it plays out, in either case it ought to be a useful model for other provinces to study. Looks like they’re going to build primary care networks, I think Alberta already has those but I could be wrong, it’s been a while. Basically, every week you doctor meets with a team of random specialists. They all bring various patients’ issues to the meeting and, when appropriate, they refer patients back and forth. Upshot for the patient is they get what their doctor knows, plus what they can ask their team, plus access to appointments with various specialists.
Health care is very, very, veryveryvery complicated and expensive, and the devils in those details can determine who dies. By all appearances, Alberta’s governing party as an institution does not know or care about how their citizens get health care. We wouldn’t make someone who didn’t know or care about hockey the GM of an NHL team, would we? Gosh, even a year or so of really bad GMing could set a franchise back for a long time. Support the Oilers or the Flames, but ask yourself this – would you want Ms. Smith in charge of your team? Would you want her in charge of your opponent’s team? How long would it take her to trade your best players for magic beans?
Judging by the way Western Canada’s CON premiers seem to be giving Danielle Straitjacket shade (Or in the case of Manitoba, telling her to sit on it and spin) it’s beginning to look like all the CON’s excesses of the last decade or so are finally coming home to roost.
The antics and dirty tricks of Stephen Harpo’s ‘Boys in the Short Pants’ made news that very likely sunk the CON’s re-election chances in 2015 seem to have never went away. Indeed, watching Skippy Pollivere’s trite sloganeering and laughable attempts at policy reveals a character that is likely as shallow as his base. How shallow? I never known a CON of this ilk to be a deep thinker. Or, even responsible. Trapped in a perpetual state of adolescence, they are usually obsessed with terminal navel gazing and constant whining about their pathetic state. It must be someone else’s fault, for they are beyond reproach. This is the sort of person who is the perfect audience for the Alt-Right talk radio echo chamber, ready to believe anything they are fed. Rush Limbaugh proved time and time again that enough morons with votes can be dangerous to everyone.
So, now that it’s beginning to look like no one wants to return Danielle Smith’s calls, Skippy has gone silent. Fearing ridicule in any form, he avoids the media (It seems now even Postmedia) and ducks out of anything that separates him from his social media mob. Even Skippy needs to be in an echo chamber, because the thought that PMJT will crush another CON leader is too hard to bear.
What a junk gossip smear article with little fact.
Why can’t we debate the policies without all the teenage high school she said he said. Danielle Smith has some very reasonable ideas and speaks with respect any time I’ve watched her directly.
Another dramatic headline that fails to reasonably report the news.
I’m rootin’ for the head of iceberg lettuce.
I know D Smith is making some frightful statements. No one can know what she can/will achieve but she seems likeable and without the arrogance of the last premier. I loathed that man even before he got to be premier. In fact I couldn’t believe Albertans didn’t figure that out beforehand.
Let Ms Smith be the premier, for heaven’s sake. She couldn’t possibly be as corrupt as Kenney. I think I’ve read every negative thing that people have said about D Smith’s lack of competence. You have to admit, she must be “tough” to put up the constant criticism.