Stelmach Touches the Brakes and Shifts Gears At the Same Time

So Premier Stelmach has once again exercised a bit of political muscle. He first did it over Alberta teacher’s unfunded pension liability and set the wheels in motion to resolve that problem when the old attitudes of the Klein – Dr. Oberg regime threatened to derail doing the right thing for all Albertans again.

Now with Stelmach’s personal intervention to reverse the Dr. Morton decision to allow seismic testing on Marie Lake he has shown that there is a way to "touch the brakes" and not mess with the market place. You do that by accepting that the environment is the trump card in all long and short term planning decisions. Stelmach did and he led yesterday and played the eco-logical trump card last night. Stopping any testing on Marie Lake is touching the brakes for reasons more significant than the sanctity of the marketplace. It was about sound stewardship and nothing less than an overarching concern about the sustainability of the biosphere.

He also personally intervened on the big cities infrastructure funding issues. The need to provide assured long-term, flexibility for sustaining intelligent planned growth in Edmonton and Calgary is a no-brainer. What ever political forces that came into play to put a great urban infrastructure policy initiative in jeopardy have been culled by Stelmach. By cutting the Municipal Sustainability Initiative strings for the big cities yesterday he set another smart political direction and reassured Albertan of a good governance stance going forward.

Marie Lake and the plight of Alberta’s municipalities, especially the two big cities, have emerged as symbols of what as been out of whack in the governing principles of Alberta in the past decade. Economic growth at any cost is not sustainable. The messy inefficient but largely effective policy tools of the free marketplace and democracy are sometimes blunt instruments to resolve complex issues.

As a good friend once told me “Sometimes you have to put away your principles and do the right thing.” Ed Stelmach believes in the free marketplace but he also knows it has its place and it alone cannot solve all of society’s ills. He also believes in democracy but he also knows it can sometime result in pooled ignorance instead of collective wisdom. When the blunt instruments are found wanting to resolve issues or to achieve the common ends of the society, that is when the sound judgement of quality leadership comes into play.

Growth has a cost and demands investment and planning – long range integrated planning. Short-sighted incrementalism is not good enough any more. Integrated sustainable approaches with full life-cycle cost-benefit analysis are what we need to embrace in our governing principles from now on. Ed Stelmach showed yesterday that he understands that and he is starting to act accordingly.

P.S. Congratulations to MLA Denis Ducharme for his good work on Marie Lake and to Mayor Mandel of Edmonton and Mayor Bronconnier of Calgary for their efforts on the MSI policy changes too.

Going Nuclear Demands That Albertans Take a Holistic and Integrated Approach

Conservation is becoming renewed foundation of progressive conservative political philosophy. Be it in ecological, economic or social terms, enlightened conservatives are embracing conservation. This is especially true amongst progressive conservatives when it come to addressing stewardship responsibilities and concerns for the environment.

The need for an integrated approach to modern public policy development is also becoming a vital new and systemic challenge. The old idea of “a balanced approach” was too often an excuse to seek a "no action stasis." The balanced approach too often pitted one weighty issue against another but failed to reconcile or resolve the respective issues at hand. A mediocre goal of achieving some sort of temporary equilibrium in the face of changing dynamics of today’s complex inter-dependent world is just not good enough. In fact it is down-right dangerous.

Old style balanced approaches are just like left versus right or Conservative versus Liberal tags. They are becoming meaningless because the approach is to mistakenly define reality in discrete compartments that are deemed to be mutually exclusive to each other. That old fashioned adversarial political model and policy development perspective is under siege as highly ineffectual and it is finally fading.

Now we have to look at the real world with a more comprehensive set of social, ecological and economic progress indicators that see success as a more inclusive, integrated and meaningful way. The limitations of outmoded GDP measures of success are well known. They simply fail to consider what genuine progress really is, how it is being achieved and at what total cost.

We need to use genuine progress indicators that look at policy initiatives and investments in public infrastructure that goes beyond the purely physical aspects of roads and bridges. We need to consider investment in infrastructure areas like our natural capital and social capital elements that also preserve and project as much as grow and expand. We need to plan our public investment in these "softer" infrastructure areas just as purposefully and as significantly as we do in our physical infrastructure approaches.

We must begin to look at the full cost life-span cost accounting model for all types of infrastructure projects. The present value model of evaluation is shallow insufficient and misleading and ignores to true long term demands and benefits of a project. Conservation and stewardship policy concerns will also demand newer comprehensive long-view costing metrics be applied to evaluating projects and their contribution to our genuine progress.

The emerging idea of nuclear energy in Alberta is a perfect place to start this new integrated, holistic, comprehensive long-view, full cost accounting approach. We need to study, understand and appreciate just how nuclear energy will serve to advance our genuine progress economically, socially and ecologically. We need to have the first kilowatt of power costed at a rate that considers the total and comprehensive long term amortized costs of the project.

Those long term cost must include the cost of dealing with the waste now. It is not fair to leave the nuclear waste issues for some future generation do handle while this generation enjoys all the "benefits." Before we even start to consider a nuclear future, we need to have an acceptable resolution of how to handle the waste from the resulting depleted plutonium. That plan has to be acceptable to Albertans who are able to provide an informed consent to the risk.

We need to have the risk issue thoroughly assessed and evaluated and part of the costing. We need to ensure that we have a complete, ready, realistic and executable disaster response plan in place now. We need a disaster mitigation strategy in place now that has to include reclamation of land, water and air contamination as well as habitat replacement for wildlife and humans in the event of a nuclear accident...regardless of how remote we are told it will be.

That sense of conservation and stewardship would be Alberta at its Progressive and Conservative best and serve us well as we face our fate of an uncertain future. If we are to have a nuclear future or continue along in a fossil fuel future - we best consider just how conservation and stewardship define and determine our progress in that brave new future.

We Live in Exponential Times Update

This is a very thought provoking piece - it is 8 minutes long but worth every minute of it.

An official update to the original "Shift Happens" video from Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, this June 2007 update includes new and updated statistics, thought-provoking questions and a fresh design.

For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com -- Content by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, design and development by XPLANE.

Give Elections Canada Audit Powers

Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch has a Letter to the Editor in this weeks’ edition of the Hill Times calling for Elections Canada to be given audit powers in dealing with political parties’ books. I could not agree more.

More on MP Integrity Awards

Good to see the Edmonton Journal Editorial Board also seeing the MP integrity awards as somewhere between pathetic and pitiful. My take on this hair-brained idea is in my post of September 1, 2007

Their front page story in the Edmonton Journal on Sunday September 2 deals with the serious negative implications for the Nonprofit/Voluntary Sector from the pending Bill 1 Lobbyists Act in Alberta. This legislation is a good idea that has gone too far. Full disclosure - I helped write the position paper for Volunteer Alberta and did an editorial of my own on it on our affiliate website Policy Channel. You can read the entire document on Policy Channel in the Community Theme area.