Jason Stephan, the Red Deer-South electoral district’s absentee MLA, apparently now wants us to believe he had no idea in March that there was an Alberta election scheduled at the end of May.
At least one naïve octogenarian employed by Postmedia as a political columnist seems to have taken the bait.
But younger and more alert readers, and even your septuagenarian blogger, will recall that it’s been known since early November 2021 that a fixed election day for Alberta was set in legislation, and that since she took over as premier last October Danielle Smith insisted that the election would go ahead as legislated on May 29.
Nevertheless, making his excuses yesterday on the social media site that won’t publish links to Canadian news reports, Mr. Stephan insisted his family holiday to Africa was booked “months ago, in early March, before the election in May, before any swearing in date conflict.”
Seriously? Well, this is Alberta, so, presumably, yes.
Most of us would pick up on the obvious: that November 2021 – when the Alberta Legislature passed a law setting May 29, 2023, as the date of the next provincial election – was a year and four months before March 2023, when Mr. Stephan says he made his travel arrangements.
Moreover, most of us would also think that from sometime in March 2023 to the end of May 2023 was a matter of weeks, not months, but I suppose we can concede that point to Mr. Stephan on the technicality. He is, after all, an accountant in addition to being a lawyer, so he is bound to have some familiarity with both arithmetic and nice legal distinctions.
Mr. Stephan’s reason for this vacation seems like a perfectly fine one. “After graduating from high school and working to save money, my oldest son was called to a 2 year mission for our church in Africa,” he wrote. “This spring my son got married. As our wedding present to our son and his beautiful bride, my wife and I agreed to pay for a trip back to Africa, so he could share some of the wonderful places and people he served with us and his bride.”
Well, I’m not going to knock him for that. However …
“Upon learning of a swearing in date conflict in June, arrangements were made for me to sworn in shortly upon my 2 week return in the first week of July,” he went on in his post. “There is no impact on my responsibilities or my ability to serve.”
The latter point, of course, is a matter of opinion upon which reasonable people can reasonably disagree.
But it’s important to remember that holding an opinion different from one held by Mr. Stephan or any other UCP member does not make one a liar, and his characterization in the same post of a comment by Edmonton-Mill Woods NDP MLA Christina Gray as containing “many lies” is offensive.
“We have done nothing wrong,” Mr. Stephan concluded defiantly. “My wife and I and my son and his new wife are going to finish our trip.”
Well, good on ya, buddy. You be you.
After all, Mr. Stephan does have a history of tavelling when he really ought not to be on the road – and being self-righteous about it when busted.
It doesn’t change a thing, though. Given this weak excuse, it remains a reasonable conclusion that MLA Stephan is shirking his duties and treating his constituents with contempt.
His Central Alberta riding being where it is, he can take comfort in the knowledge he’ll almost certainly get away with it.
What’s more, as he pointed out by implication if not explicitly, nothing of importance is going to happen with the government’s legislative agenda anyway until well after July, when he has a date for a personal swearing-in session with House Speaker Nathan Cooper.
If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s probably the value of public figures being honest and open up front about their whereabouts on dates important to their constituents if they happen to be planning to be out of town.
I agree with most of what you say here, David. But I should like to point-out that Mr Stephan, my MLA elect, is supposed to represent the voters of Red Deer South, which like the riding of St. Albert, is considered an urban, if not urbane, riding.
Thanks, Neil. I do feel that what Alberta considers to be urban may not necessarily meet the definition most of us would apply to that work – I have seen for example, the town of Blackie (pop. 314 in 2016) south of Calgary described in an official document as “urban.” However, I’ll concede you the point on Red Deer. I can’t find a map that shows both the borders of the city of Red Deer and the riding – I’ll check with my colleague Cournoyer at the office tomorrow – but in the meantime I have declared the riding to be “rurban.” DJC
Red Deer South is almost entirely contained within the city limits of Red Deer, there are about a dozen residences in Red Deer County on the southern extremity.
Trust me, I’ve used a lot of boot leather knocking on doors for our NDP candidates, in this and previous elections.
Neil: You win. The offending word has been removed. DJC
This exchange raises an important point: Alberta’s famous political “three-legged stool” of Calgary, Edmonton and “rural”. “Rural” in this context is always meant to include the small(er) cities — Fort McMurray*, Grande Prairie, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, and Red Deer. (St Albert, despite being a city in its own right, is a part of the Edmonton doughnut and is IMHO more politically influenced by the capital city it abuts than the rest of the smaller cities).
But Lethbridge and Red Deer have both broken the 100,000 population threshold, and none of the five smaller cities I’ve named can legitimately be called “rural” — and yet, when it comes to voting, most of them tend to vote in lockstep with their genuinely rural neighbours.
Columnist Jason Markusoff has tried to coin the term “Otherland” to refer to this amalgam of the smaller cities and rural Alberta. I’m not sure how much traction that coinage has, but it has the benefit of accuracy. Another term that gets bandied about is the neologism “rurban” — but that’s not really a word. But a city of over 50,000 can hardly be called “rural”.
*Technically the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo (RMWB), but we all still call it Ft McMurray.
May as well have said, “I’m re-elected — what are you gonna do about it?”
While Stephan plays mental pretzel logic, he only reinforces the notion that not only can anything blue get elected in Alberta, they will have job security, no matter what kind of stupid stuff they do.
At this time, CPC PM Matt Jeneroux, Skippy Pollivere’s point-man and maybe the most ardent Taylor Swift fan in all of Canada, has filed an official grievance with the House of Commons protesting — yes, PROTESTING — the absence of any Canadian dates on Taylor Swift’s current and massively popular Eras Totally & Globally Domination Tour. Swift tour is so massive, the show such an enormous visual spectacle, in certain venues, of roughly four hours in length. I mean this is hugeness that only Taylor can pull off, and with such enormity that politicians are freaking at the possibility that people will like them more if they can get Taylor’s attention. Enter Matt Jeneroux bizarro act that would make any Swiftie proud. Of course, being a CPC MP from Alberta, this just highlights that Jeneroux has nothing to do and has nothing to worry about. He can do all the stupid shite he wants and nothing will happen to him, electorally speaking of course.
All I want now is for PMJT to pull a fast one and attend a Taylor Swift concert. Maybe organize a command performance at Rideau Hall: Intimate & Interactive with Taylor Swift. Hosted by Justin Trudeau and Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, it will be the event of the year. And you can blame Trudeau for it, as well.
Mr. Stephan is really not helping his case, his weak arguments just make him look even more ridiculous. What part of fixed election dates did he not understand?
While some people did not believe Smith would stick to the election date set out in law, it was actually very clear what the date was, there was no mystery about that. Maybe Stephan also did not believe Smith when she said a number of times she would hold the election on the fixed date, but if so then that was his misjudgment.
I have to say Smith, who made many misjudgments in the past, actually handled the fixed election date issue well. I suspect she realized that UCP support, while shaky was good enough and probably was not going to any get better by waiting. Of course, it was a bit close for comfort, and others have said if 1,300 people had voted differently in certain Calgary ridings, there would have been a different party in power.
Nonetheless, it worked out for the UCP this time. However, Stephan is now doing no favours to his party or his constituents by having failed to take the fixed election law more seriously when he made his travel plans.
If you were an employee, you cannot take off on a vacation whenever you felt like it, and make weak excuses for it, because if you did so, you’d be fired by your employer. It doesn’t matter about your son’s wedding, or whatever other reasons you conjured up. What’s also appalling is that Jason Stephan thought that he could evade the Covid-19 rules that his UCP government made Albertans adhere to, and leave Alberta, like other UCP MLAs did, such as Pat Rehn, Tracy Allard, and Miranda Rosin,
without any real disciplinary action by the former UCP leader. We couldn’t do that, or we’d be in trouble. In addition, with your links, from seeing the comments, there are people who are quite content with defending this phony conservative and Reformer. This isn’t a surprise to see that. Anyone who speaks out against these phony conservatives and Reformers, gets called nasty names. We have the UCP in power once again, and Albertans didn’t learn their lesson. Expect to see us cheated out of our oil and tax wealth, even further, that will set us back billions of dollars, more very pricey shenanigans, that will also cost us billions of dollars, public healthcare, and public education taking further cuts, so they can be privatized, more erosion of our social programs, making people struggle even further, greater hardship for senior citizens, utility costs that will skyrocket, insurance costs that will go up even more, and no regards for looking after the environment. Where’s the sense in this? It’s obvious that Albertans haven’t learned their lesson, and we are no better off because of this.
Jason, in January of 2020, I attended a Chartered Professional Accountants (CPA) of Alberta professional development course you instructed. These courses are intended to be non-partisan professional venues for learning, However, you corrupted it by using it as an opportunity to stump for the Alberta UCP and denigrate your provincial and federal political opponents. So appalled by your behaviour, I filed a complaint with CPA Alberta and made sure never to register for another course instructed by you. Apparently, this instance of poor judgement by you was not a one-off but a regular occurrence as demonstrated by your recent decision to travel out of country for leisure during a global health pandemic during which your own party had implored and advised all Albertans to stay home and avoid all non-essential travel in efforts to get a deadly pandemic under control. These regular demonstrations of poor judgement make it clear that you are ill-suited to being an effective and responsible representative for Albertans. You should resign.
Is there not an essential, nay potential, conflict of interest when an elected official tries his or her best to serve their constituents AND their god? Perhaps all your constituents couldn’t care less about gay marriage or drag shows but your church of fire & brimstone is totally against such blasphemy. How do you vote? And how much help will some evangelical kid be to the citizens of whichever nation he has been sent to? Lots of Canadians could use his help.
There’s always a song! This one’s for all the UCP and their voting supporters. https://youtu.be/nKuF3XsR7FI?t=1 Have a nice Sunday!
I’d go with this one, myself – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0CyOAO8y0
Are we to believe Mr. Stephan when he said he did not know about the May election when he booked his holiday in March, or is he really saying that he didn’t believe what Danielle Smith told us when she said the election would be held in May? If we give him the second point, then maybe we really did come that close to not having an election in accordance with legislation, or perhaps at all.
Perhaps it’s best to stick with the truth, whatever that is.
Jason Stephen has made several mis-steps as listed by the other comments, and exhibits no remorse nor apology. He snubs all Albertans, doing what he pleases no matter his AB govt pay cheque, pension and benefits. He placed a target on Kenney’s back when Kenny reprimanded him for his Arizona trip. Now that he’s buddies with Smith, maybe he thinks he’s immune. I voted for him in RD South, despite the fact that I find him arrogant. But it was really a vote against the other party, and not a vote for him personally. So glad he doesn’t have a Ministerial position – when would he have time for it ? I purchased a UCP membership a few months back for one particular purpose – to help relieve him of his duties as a MLA, representing me.
I am not sure how voting for Jason Stephan was supposed to “help relieve him of his duties as a MLA.” I take it that the membership you purchased was to try to get a competitor chosen as the Red Deer South candidate, but in the end you still voted for him because you couldn’t abide the NDP? In this case, why not just go to the polling station and formally decline your ballot – thereby simultaneously giving your vote to neither and declaring that none of the candidates on offer were to your liking?
Following this last election I managed to find a quote (that I will edit but not cite) that fits the occasion. “This is the mountain that the (NDP ed) must now climb: How to persuade bad-news-averse marginal voters to vote for us again without plying them with soothing lies.” Taken from the original Greek.
DJC, you deserve more than a day off, but no rest keeping up with the ‘what ‘??
FWIW: while waiting for the game to record, commercials make me twitch, so a little homework. Results via SMSTWPLTCNR……..JS :
Feb 27-” last night my son and I listened to Dr J Pedersen in Calgary …..as we listened to messages about the vital importance of truth,principles of freedom and prosperity…..”
Mar.22 –to Trudeau and his NDP puppets :Alberta is a land of freedom and prosperity–your woke socialist ways do not belong here– go away and leave us alone.
April 27– National Citizens Inquiry ( with J in pic used in intro )
April 28– “this morning I volunteered again @the NCI in Red Deer . Great witnesses, including John Carpay ….”
May 1st– ” Dear All Conservative Voters Living in Red Deer South ,
Today the ALBERTA PROVINCIAL ELECTION was called! The vote will be Monday May 29……
May 6th– “We are into the Alberta provincial election….”
May 11th– “There are about 20 Trudeau lovers living in Red Deer. That’s how many NDP supporters started booing me as I stated how getting rid of Trudeau would improve living standards for Albertans…… ”
May 16th– “Thank you to conservative friends who joined me to visit our neighbors and talk…..”(photo ID– campaign worker???)
( also attended JP’s conference in Red Deer)
May 16th– profile picture ***
“I love Alberta and I love Red Deer South . Thank you for the opportunity to continue to stand for more accountability and transparency in government and for principles and policies calculated to promote and protect our freedom and prosperity.
June 2nd–Jason – updated their cover photo…..
(Son and his beautiful wife’s wedding picture )
June 9th–” This morning I was delighted to attend the ribbon cutting for the ‘Red Deer Dream Centre’. It was great! We are going to see miracles at our Centre, as those suffering under addiction are loved and supported in becoming free from addictions, blessing themselves and…..”
*** anyone following PP’s posts/ birthday cake arm–???
Jason did thank him for the endorsement….
Curious or maybe not, use of words ” son was called to a 2yr mission for ‘our church in Africa ‘…..
Mr Stephan is certainly a very busy man, scheduling conflicts seem inevitable, imo.