Food safety, children’s safety and public health are topics too important to be left to a committee chosen and led by a Conservative sinecure holder and former star candidate.
Nevertheless, that’s precisely how Premier Danielle Smith and Health Minister Adriana LaGrange propose to set up an “external” panel to look into the E. coli poisonings of more than 300 pre-school children and staff members at 11 day care facilities in Calgary at the start of September, an incident that quickly became a major embarrassment to the United Conservative Government.
The government announced on Sept. 27 that the panel would be led by former Calgary police chief Rick Hanson, 68, who in 2015 ran for the Progressive Conservative Party in the Calgary-Cross riding.
Mr. Hanson is also the chair of the Alberta Parole Board, former UCP Premier Jason Kenney’s idea of a big slap in Ottawa’s face and the very definition of an unneeded expense, including the stipends Mr. Hanson and other members are entitled to receive for attending the board’s unnecessary meetings.
Mr. Kenney’s objective appeared to be to fool voters into thinking Alberta was being tough on serious crime by creating a body that had no jurisdiction over prisoners in federal custody serving sentences longer than two years.
Never mind that that the federal government was willing to do that job for the province for free – presumably because there were so few cases of inmates with short provincial jail terms applying for sentence reductions, or that there was already plenty of Alberta representation on the National Parole Board.
It was a meaningless gesture, but it made a nice sinecure for Mr. Hanson, which by the sound of it didn’t involve much work, after his ambition for a new career in politics was swamped by the Orange Wave that brought Rachel Notley’s NDP government to power in 2015.
The lack of legitimate purpose may explain why the Alberta Parole Board now has almost zero presence on the Government of Alberta website or anywhere else. Too much attention and Albertans might cotton onto just what a waste of time and money it is!
Come May 5, 2015, and Mr. Hanson was defeated by Ricardo Miranda, a former flight attendant and Canadian Union of Public Employees staffer that almost nobody in Alberta had ever heard of until election night. Mr. Miranda later served as minister of culture and tourism in Ms. Notley’s cabinet.
Shortly after Mr. Hanson’s political ambition went up in smoke, he resurfaced briefly in 2017 as part of a legalized-marijuana advocacy organization called the Canadian Cannabis Chamber.
One of the eventual results of the NDP victory, of course, was the union of the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose Party in the United Conservative Party, now led by Premier Smith.
It should be obvious why having a political partisan like Mr. Hanson select and lead such a committee isn’t a good idea, even if the incident that prompted the decision to strike the “Food Safety and Licensed Facility-based Childcare Review Panel” hadn’t immediately become a major embarrassment to Ms. Smith and the UCP.
It would be a bad idea even if the UCP didn’t already have a tarnished reputation for mishandling possibly the most serious public health crisis of the past century and running the province’s public health care system into the ground, not to mention the fact the party is led by a group of people who reject the key role of government in both public health and regulation to protect citizens from unsafe business practices.
Indeed, the committee’s structure would be inappropriate even if Ms. Smith and the UCP didn’t desperately want the whole messy and potentially scandalous business put on a back burner as quickly as possible where it can simmer down and be passed off as an isolated incident at one centralized kitchen, not the result of a systemic failure of inspections and licensing.
After that, the committee could safely make a few anodyne recommendations that won’t upset any commercial apple carts.
In other words, no matter how well intentioned, there’s nothing particularly “external” about the committee Mr. Hanson is likely to cobble together.
This is true whether or not he still nurtures the political ambitions he did in 2015, when then-premier Jim Prentice appointed him PC candidate in Calgary-Cross less than 24 hours after he’d stepped down as chief of the Calgary Police Service.
The seven PC candidates who had been campaigning to be the party’s standard bearer when an election was called just had to swallow their disappointment with Mr. Prentice’s choice of what local media repeatedly described as a “star candidate.”
“We have a candidate that I, as the leader, have chosen in consultation with a nomination committee that’s responsible for this, province wide,” Mr. Prentice explained at the time. “This is a candidate who has overwhelming support in the community … and so he’ll be an extraordinary candidate.”
Ah well, the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.
What’s actually needed is a real public inquiry, called under the terms of the Public Inquiries Act, and led by an impartial judge with the power to compel testimony from witnesses.
That might risk some embarrassment for the Smith Government, but it would also demonstrate good faith on its part.
With an impartial inquiry, members of the public could be confident that any findings and recommendations had not been drafted with partisan political considerations in mind.
They can have no such confidence now.
Of course, when the UCP wants to distract from the massive and unusual (unusual for its scale in the modern world) E. coli outbreak, set up a panel to investigate and submit a fact-finding report. In other words, pay off some partisan hacks and hope everyone forgets what E. coli is in a year’s time.
Meanwhile, there’s an abundance of signage rolling around T.O. and other locations in Ontario, denouncing the Federal Carbon Tax, c/o the Alberta taxpayer. Yep. Someone let Canada’s crazy cousin out the attic again.
One wonders if all this is just another stunt to offload the cost of another third-party advertising campaign onto Alberta? Maybe this is another stunt by the War Room, again c/o the Alberta taxpayer.
These CONs sure love spending other people’s money.
I suppose Mr. Manning was not available, so they had to get Mr. Hanson, who probably knows just about as much about food and child care safety.
I get the sense the last thing the UCP wants here is a serious inquiry. What they really want to do is bury this problem and have people eventually forget about it, but for now they have to go through the motions of appearing to do something.
The reason for their discomfort is because this situation goes to the heart of the UCP’s approach, its weaknesess, failures and raises all sort of uncomfortable questions. It was a perfect storm result of the bad consequences of the combination of privatization, inadequate regulation and contracting out.
Now the UCP doesn’t really care about child care that much, but where the big dollars and their accute political interest is in bringing more of this approach to health care. So the very last thing the UCP wants is a serious examination of the flaws in this approach.
A conservative leaning former police chief, possibly with political ambition, is a good candidate to help them avoid the scrutiny they so want to evade here.
Do you think he’ll recommend a living wage for daycare and kitchen staff (meat packing plants while you’re at it) to attract skilled staff and to avoid high turnover? Ongoing, on the job paid training in safe food handling? Updated staff ratios, space requirements, ventilation, hygiene practices? No, not holding your breath? I expect part of this committee’s mission to establish a true picture of the situation will involve crawling on the floor with the infants for a while, holding their little poopy hands, licking a toy or two…
But Danielle Smith cares so much about the children that she made strange faces and almost, but not quite, managed to squeeze out a tear. Oh, well. She tried. All the world’s a stage, no more so than now.
Harper appointed Leah Lawrence to be CEO of SDTC.
Another dubious appointment of a failed Alberta PC candidate. And this one lost way back in 2008 when most PC candidates were elected as long as they could still fog-a-mirror.
https://t.co/gF62YbBzMJ
Now legit clean-tech startups may fail because of dubious decisions.
Did Harper appoint Leah Lawrence to promote clean tech or kill it?
Ronald: I’m sure there are hundreds of examples. There’s even another one on the ludicrous Alberta Parole Board, a UCP nomination candidate who was cheated out of a fair chance by the UCP candidate, now the MLA, who won the manipulated vote. DJC
Always keep an eye on Alberta’s TBA Government ABCs… Agencies, Boards and Commissions.
Pork-barrel politics and guv’mint secrecy are alive and well in the Queendom of Qberduh. But there’s a glimmer of light and maybe even hope on the horizon.
Mike de Souza of The Narwhal has filed a complaint with the Information and Privacy Commissioner about being shut out when he submitted FOIP requests:
https://thenarwhal.ca/oipc-alberta-danielle-smith-foi/
Along with info on oil and gas influence (read “instructions”) to Smith et al, we might learn something about food inspections. I’m not holding my breath, but we might as well hope.
There is something fundamentally wrong with this. It is another very expensive panel created by the UCP, and that’s one thing. The UCP’s panels are always slanted towards the UCP, and their ideologies and intents. Another issue is that Rick Hanson was quite controversial as the Calgary police chief. He didn’t have respect. This is a political appointment, by the UCP, where another defeated Conservative candidate gets a reward. There will be a cover up, and the UCP won’t be found responsible, even though they are at fault for causing the second largest E-Coli outbreak in Canada’s history. The UCP cut red tape. They even have a ministry of red tape reduction. Safety standards became very lax. The accreditation process needed to be a daycare employee in Alberta was cut back by the UCP, and they even said that this was another form of red tape reduction. Former Children’s Services Minister, Rebecca Schulz is responsible for this. She won’t be held liable. Neither will the UCP. Of course not. Danielle Smith doesn’t even see the obvious conflict of interest with Rebecca Schulz, and her lobbyist husband, but that’s another issue. A police officer isn’t a medical expert, and should not be overseeing this investigation. That’s another mistake here. The logical course of action would be to have an independent expert on human health, and disease, look into this matter, but that isn’t how the UCP operates. The UCP blocked a motion from an NDP MLA, David Shepherd, to make Dr. Deena Hinshaw independent. Covid-19 cases in Alberta spiked. Preston Manning is no medical expert, and we are still waiting to see what his $253,000 salary, and $2 million expense account has gotten us, with the Covid-19 pandemic report, that may never even see the light of day. This is another example of the UCP’s buffonery in action.
I hate to be a downer, but I wonder how many judges in Alberta are impartial. Given some of the disastrous Miisters of Justice we have had.
I doubt that ANY highly-placed Albertan can be truly impartial anymore. It takes constant effort, intense training and lots of reminders for anyone to overcome their biases. In Oilberduh (pre-UCP) and now Qberduh (the Smith Era) impartiality is neither encouraged nor, these days, tolerated.
Remember what people said during King Ralph’s reign. You couldn’t get anywhere in Tory Alberta unless you were a loyal Tory. Danielle Smith might not demand loyalty—but I bet Rob Anderson and David Parker will.
Did Jason Kenney swipe all the blue ribbons for panels on his way out of office? Therein lies the scandal!
Harmers continue to harm
This a horrible appointment. A blatantly political hack with no understanding about the subject matter as the committee chair for another report which will be suppressed. Perhaps it might be useful to appoint someone with some knowledge of the subject matter as chair. Oh heck, this is the UCP and Lagrange we are talking about here. Argh.:((