Before we all get our knickers in a twist, let us remember that once upon a time all Alberta Government communications and public engagement operations came under the Executive Council, that is to say the provincial cabinet, which for all practical purposes means the Premier’s Office.
That includes the first year or so of the NDP Government that was elected in that hope-filled spring of 2015, after which then-premier Rachel Notley made the honourable if not necessarily hard-nosed decision to move the communications wing over to the Finance Department.
So it shouldn’t come as a total shock that the United Conservative Party has now quietly moved responsibility for provincial government communications back into the Premier’s Office.
Perhaps the UCP didn’t want to announce the move because its strategic brain trust anticipated they would be blasted for trying to use government communications for partisan political purposes. For whatever reason, they snuck it through in a cabinet order back on April 29 and nobody, not even the sharp-eyed watchdogs of the Alberta media, noticed until last week. The scoop goes to The Canadian Press, but no one is exactly covered in laurels by this somewhat tardy discovery.
That said, as a cynical veteran of another province’s government communications staff in another century and an interested observer of Alberta politics, I am here to tell you that while the UCP has finally gotten around to undoing one of Ms. Notley’s better decisions, not much will change in the quality or quantity of official communications put out by Premier Smith’s government.
In theory, and to a degree in practice, some government communications are statutory or practical requirements and need to be handled by the civil service with professionalism and neutrality, and some are clearly partisan and advance the political propaganda of the party in power. The line between the two has always been blurry and always will be.
In 2016, premier Notley, who had criticized the Progressive Conservative government led by Alison Redford for using official press releases to disseminate partisan hot air, put a fellow named Corey Hogan in charge of what was then known as the Public Affairs Bureau.
With the NDP in charge, the Opposition Liberals and Wildrose parties complained mightily. The Liberals called naively for the PAB to be disbanded. Then Liberal Leader David Khan called the NDP move “lipstick on a pig,” which was an uncharacteristic disservice by the gentlemanly Mr. Khan to the professional communications officers then employed by the government.
Former Wildroser Derek Fildebrandt, by then an influential UCP MLA, used the occasion to carp about the carbon tax (so what else is old?) complaining to the CBC’s Kim Trynacity that the PAB “has been a partisan political arm of the premier’s office for over a generation, and it got no better under the NDP.”
But as Mr. Hogan said at the time – accurately then, as now – the government has a duty to inform the public of decisions it makes. “We’re governed by a strict code of ethics,” he told Ms. Trynacity. “We stay non-partisan and we stick to our lane.” In truth, though, nothing would have been wrong with the NDP exerting a little more partisan control over the PAB.
“What I think has been happening gradually over the last six years is that government communications have become increasingly partisan,” Deputy Opposition Leader Rakhi Pancholi told The Canadian Press this week. “The decision to bring it under executive council and the premier is clearly a decision to formalize that process.”
Based on my own observations, I would say Ms. Pancholi’s first point is completely accurate. The UCP, which is without shame, is naturally shameless about the way it uses government news releases and engagement campaigns to its political advantage.
Whether the decision to pull it into the Premier’s Office is an attempt to somehow formalize the way things are done is less clear, and probably not worth worrying about because it’s going to keep happening whatever department is responsible for the communications budget.
Regardless, opposition parties will always complain about government communications.
Nevertheless, in Ms. Notley’s day, the senior levels of the Alberta civil service held communications employees to higher standards than does the current generation. Ms. Notley’s government respected that, as for the most part did the PC governments of Ed Stelmach, Ms. Redford, and Jim Prentice.
Regardless of the party in power, government communications should be judged by the extent to which they remain neutral and balanced, not what department they report to.
And where are they now? Ms. Notley, as is well known in Alberta, has retired from provincial politics. She is doing some legal work for a North Vancouver law firm, but one expects there will be a bigger announcement one of these days. Mr. Khan now practices Indigenous rights, land claims, and environmental law in Vancouver. Mr. Fildebrandt runs a far-right news and commentary website. Ms. Trynacity publishes a Substack called “The Ledge.” And Mr. Hogan is the Liberal Member of Parliament for Calgary Confederation. He campaigned under the excellent slogan “Confederation is worth fighting for.”