Does Chandler Have Opposition in Calgary Egmont Nomination?

Some efforts are starting to emerge to take on the Craig Chandler campaign in Calgary Egmont. I expect Mr. Chandler would be more comfortable in Link Byfield’s Wildrose Party not the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta.

I smell something between political opportunism (a la Chandler) and real democracy (a la the August 29th posting by The Enlightened Savage) in the air.

If the Enlightened Savage is seriously into running for the Calgary Egmont PC nomination – I am behind him all the way.

It is Time to Resolve the Teacher's Unfunded Pension Issue

As school starts for a new year in Alberta the old issue of teacher’s unfunded pension liability is working its way through the political system. Premier Stelmach took the position during the PC leadership that the issue of pensions and contract negotiations were separate issues. He was then, and still is, keen to resolve the unfunded pension liability…if for no other reason it is still a real debt hanging over the head of the province and it is a significant burden on young teachers.

There is lots of history here and divided opinions – mostly based on ideology rather than logic. Some recent blogger and media commentary is available. For full disclosure, a few years ago I helped the ATA in their attempts to get the Klein government to revisit the unfunded pension liability issue with some moderate success but nothing conclusive. The efforts eventually paid off became it was a key issue in the PC leadership campaign. Many of the candidates took policy stands saying it needed to be resolved as a priority issue.

This is a key public policy issue that demands political leadership and there has never been a better time to resolve it. The issues are well understood and the solutions are obvious. To go through the current exercise of a province wide consultation on this matter is not going to add any light on the issues. The solution is to be found in the exercise of some pure political will and leadership. The current round of public consultations is no reason to delay a Government of Alberta decision on resolving the unfunded liability issues either.

It is time to get the unfunded pension liability issue dealt with and behind us. Then the system can move on to deal with the outstanding teacher contract concerns right afterwards. Nothing is really standing in the way of this resolution happening, except some old attitudes and personal grudges of a past Minister arising out of the 2002 teacher's strike.

The Greatest Canadian Premier

The Calgary Grit has narrowed the Greatest Canadian Premier Contest to Peter Lougheed of Alberta versus Oliver Mowat of Ontario.

I was just the 223 person who voted and the race was a 1 vote separation. Of course my choice was Lougheed, being that I am from Alberta but my reasons run deeper than that.

The poll is open Monday until 11 pm Mountain time. Visit the Calgary Grit and play along an make your choice in this interesting exercise.

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.