Alberta’s Red Blanket Leadership Crisis
December 11th, 2009
When a government goes into cardiac arrest, a clever leader applies serious CPR, and fast. But last week, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach responded to the many emergencies afflicting his flat-lining administration by downing a couple of aspirin.
The premier blamed his government’s collapse in performance and public approval on a nagging headache: Albertans just don’t understand him. The prescription was obvious. The premier’s director of communications had to go.
With that one, hapless aide excised, the patient was discharged and the province lurched towards the next crisis.
As ever, Stelmach and his advisors are dodging the hard facts, the realities that speak to a pronounced case of managerial incompetence. Little details, like the loss of Alberta’s competitive edge in a tsunami of red ink and fiscal chaos. Rising unemployment, a health care system headed for bankruptcy — and the refusal, by government, to be accountable for these and other failures.
But there’s a more basic dysfunction driving the Progressive Conservatives’ decline, one that is glaringly obvious to any of us who’ve worked within the machine.
It’s known, rather misleadingly, by a single word: patronage.
Definitions vary, but come down to phrases such as: “the awarding of jobs, contracts or favours to gain political advantage.”
To fully understand the corrosion brought on by patronage, and how these covert give-and-take practices render governments distant and incapable of responding to challenges and opportunities, a sojourn through electoral politics with a party machine like the PCs is painfully instructive.
You come to recognize the look and the smell of patronage, even its personification: the party insiders who exploit the ritual workings of patronage for personal gain, and preside over its functions.
This is not about qualified professionals appointed by government to perform vital public services. It’s the doling out of positions, projects or benefits on the understanding that the recipients will return the favour with their unwavering support. Often this includes introducing new contributors to the party’s fundraisers.
The damaging by-product of patronage is obvious in Alberta’s current predicament, as it was when Premier Stelmach and his key aides bluffed their way through the 2008 election campaign on false promises and a resolute determination to ignore the warnings of other, more experienced Albertans — our leaders in business, the arts, education and medicine.
Patronage creates two classes of Albertans: those the party leadership listens to, and those on the sidelines, the cold-shouldered majority.
In truth, Ed Stelmach and his long-serving contemporaries in the Alberta PC leadership have had precious little experience in direct communications with the public. On election eve, so late in their careers, they felt no need to raise their game, and still don’t.
After nearly four decades in power, they are propped up – shielded and cocooned – by a massive network of dependants, the grateful beneficiaries of patronage.
To this candidate, contesting the 2008 election for Ed’s PCs in my home riding of Calgary Currie, it was impossible not to be moved by the alarming hostility among the leaders of our energy companies. These constituents are international leaders in their field, yet they complained then, as they still do, that the traditionally pro-business PCs ignore their advice on the management of their sector.
It was the same story with many of our leading educators, health care professionals, technologists and entrepreneurs. Why was the government not listening to them? Why was Alberta being allowed to slide into mediocrity by a clutch of elected officials who seemed totally cut off from reality?
The answer was painfully simple, as our campaign team soon discovered. Why should the leadership listen to anyone other than their unquestioning protégés, whose loyalty had been bought and paid for, and who wouldn’t think of troubling the premier with tiresome irrelevancies like public policy.
Worse, the practitioners of patronage constitute more than just a wall separating the public from their elected public servants. They are enforcers, too, ready to be used as the guardians of Tory favouritism, benefaction and conformity.
Next: how the enforcers deal with suggestions of change (the genuine kind).