A Government Failing And Falling

October 22nd, 2009

You didn’t need to be a fortune teller to predict Ed Stelmach’s trajectory as premier of Alberta. A few months working with Ed, his staff and key cabinet colleagues heralded the direction the Stelmach government has taken: downward, to a public disapproval rating estimated at more than 60%.

One phone-in poll this week suggests that 78% of Calgarians believe the premier will lose his Progressive Conservative Party’s leadership review in just over two weeks’ time.

Confronted with all of this, Ed told CTV Calgary’s Barb Higgins that he has to do a better job communicating with Calgarians. “We have a lot of work to do, in getting the message out…”

He still doesn’t get it. In public service, the top priority is to listen.

As one of Ed’s candidates in the 2008 Alberta election, I discovered that the premier and his people view communications as a one-way street. When I had the impertinence to suggest that voters, educators and business leaders deserved a turn at the wheel, the party’s thought-police loomed large in the rear view.

Here’s what I told one Calgary Herald writer on Feb. 8th, 2008, after our campaign team had successfully resisted an attempt by Ed’s staff to scuttle one of our key fundraising events - their reaction to my request that the premier live up to his promises, among them his pledge to meet with Calgarians alarmed by his new royalty regime:

“One-way communication of the sort we experienced this week is not the way to go. You don’t just call the bustling heartland of the most exciting city in North America and say, ‘No, we can’t make it’…

“If we really want to rebuild this government we have to do things differently.”

When the Calgary Herald published these words the following day, the premier’s people went into their panic-communications mode. Chains were pulled on the half-dozen PC party campaign officials, insiders and lobbyists on our Calgary Currie constituency team. ‘Silence your candidate,’ was the message.

Then, four days later, a poisonous attack article appeared in the National Post and the Calgary Herald (whose editors formally endorsed Stelmach’s PCs in the election). The article’s by-line was that of a Canwest employee notorious for his close links with Alberta Tories (click on The Page At Issue, top right on our Homepage).

Clearly, Ed’s closest aides, together with a few long-time beneficiaries of Tory patronage, felt they had to muzzle criticism of the party’s failure to reform its old ways.

In the 19 months since the assault on our campaign, many people have asked me why Premier Stelmach has led his government from one disaster to another, with no apparent effort to alter course. They ask: why can’t Ed respond to challenges with fresh thinking and adaptable policies?

Here again, watching the man at work with his senior staff and ministers is hugely revealing. There’s a tangible fear of new ideas. They shrink from even the slightest criticism, no matter how constructive.

Suggestions that the government embrace innovation and diversity are met with a lot of throat clearing and shuffling of feet. Their body-language, too, speaks volumes. These office-holders and functionaries are terrified by the prospect of having smarter people in the room, much less in cabinet.

To them, the concept of change is a public relations ploy, a promise that doesn’t demand genuine action. Above all, there’s deep-seated denial, an abject inability to recognize that after 38 years in power, the Progressive Conservative Party has reduced itself to an ineffectual dealership in patronage, a power structure whose machinery for awarding favours, contracts and jobs-for-insiders has eclipsed those ho-hum tasks of policy-making and governance.

The result?

A government that doles out $44 million in bonuses to its top staffers and executives, even while it claws $44 million back from the school boards educating Alberta’s future breadwinners.

A government that slashes health care by paying registered nurses to leave the province, despite an acute shortage of trained front line care givers, and while an aging population places greater demands on the system.

A government that borrows a billion dollars only ten months after predicting a huge budget surplus.

And whose leader, Ed Stelmach, made himself the highest paid premier in Canada, only to usher Alberta into a steady, seemingly unstoppable decline in economic competitiveness.

Ed blames the recession. Those of us who warned him of his recklessness know better.

By the time the downturn struck, Alberta’s key energy sector had already bled 10,000 jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars in scarce capital investment. The fingerprints on that file are Ed’s, not Goldman Sachs’ or Bernie Madoff’s.

Albertans ask: why are we facing a $7 billion deficit, while Saskatchewan will post a budget surplus this year? It’s a reasonable question to put to Ed Stelmach, while he busies himself getting out those other messages.

Meantime, here’s a note that comes our way from an Albertan rancher, whose family lives north of Calgary. In the best traditions of the West, he’s managed to keep his sense of humour:

“I guess there’s places in Canada where Ed wouldn’t be greeted with groans or heckling or a good kick in the pants. But in places like that, Ed wouldn’t be premier.”

Soon enough, Alberta could be one of those places, too. Even “Tory insiders” know an Arctic cold front when they feel it.

And all because the premier and his people failed to practice that crucial first imperative of public service, to listen.