So Kevin Taft makes it official and calls it quits as Alberta Liberal Leader after two elections and some five years of service. He will stay on as MLA for Edmonton Riverview and will still be making a political contribution to the public life of Alberta presumably for the next four years.
I wonder what will happen if an outsider wins the Alberta Liberal leadership. There may be some pressure on him to retire his seat then and force a by-election to give the new leaders a chance at a seat in the Legislature. Time will tell but Edmonton Riverview is by no means a safe Liberal seat. It will have to be won by a new leader should that be the case.
Kevin Taft was always a reluctant politician and even more reluctant as a party leader. But he was always ready, willing and able to learn both jobs and prepared to make the personal sacrifices and suffer all the other impositions of public political life. He was drawn into politics on a dare from Ralph Klein who once called him a “Communist” and suggested Taft run for office instead of criticizing from the sidelines. Taft responded to the taunt and took up the challenge, running successfully as the MLA for Edmonton Riverview.
He was thrust into the leadership role by and large because nobody else wanted the job after the former leader, Nancy McBeth lost an election and was replaced by Ken Nicol who was effectively an interim leader. Taft was an academic and learned party politics and political leadership on the job and mostly from a standing start. Regardless of his electoral success, one has to give him credit for being a quick study and staying the course.
Taft’s resignation will now give the Alberta Liberal Party a chance to reflect and reconsider its place and future in Alberta politics. I am hoping they take a page or two from the Progressive Conservative Party leadership process and improve on it around concerns about donation disclosures. But I encourage them to make their leadership process open to any Albertan who wants to buy an Alberta Liberal Party membership and have a say in the leader selection. After all we are talking about selecting someone who would be at least eligible to be Premier of our province. All Albertans should be interested in helping make that choice. It would be good for democracy and the Alberta Liberals too.
The Nervous Nellies in the Alberta Liberal brain trust will worry that PC’s might encourage their supporters to buy Liberal memberships just to select the weakest Liberal leadership candidate for reasons of pure political advantage. After all some believe that was what a number of Alberta Liberals did in the last PC leadership contest.
If that was ever actually happening, or even rumoured to be the case, I am pretty sure ordinary Albertans would engage actively in the Alberta Liberal leadership selection process to ensure that would not be the end result. Such a tactic would seriously devalue the level of trust and respect citizens would afford the PC Party I expect. Stelmach has 72 seats and all the power he needs to do anything he wants within the law, including making laws pretty quickly if he wishes.
The PCs do not need to undermine the Alberta Liberals by trying to hijack the leadership selection process. It would not be worth the risk to the PC party brand to engage in such shenanigans for such puerile political purposes. So I encourage the Alberta Liberals to open up their party and let ordinary Albertans in to participate in who might lead Alberta's Loyal Opposition.
With Taft’s resignation decision the party leadership transition in all of Alberta's significant political parties is complete. Ralph Klein, Raj Pannu and now Kevin Taft are all gone or going. The Alberta they knew is pretty much history too. Alberta has become a very different place since those leaders came on the political scene.
Albertans are ready to move on to the next stage of being an Albertan. I sense that the engaged Albertan wants real changes and real choices and clearly defined alternatives in its politics going forward. They want political leadership with personal character qualities they can trust and respect. We want political leadership that is competent and capable to actually envisage, design and deliver the next Alberta in a local, provincial, national, continental - and now in a global context.
I wonder if we Albertans will be engaged enough as citizens to make such demands of the Alberta Liberal Party during the leadership process. Or are we simply so cynical as citizens that we will just disengage and ignore this opportunity to have a say about how we are to be governed and by whom…even if it is only about our opposition party leadership.
My next post will be some thoughts on the likely suspects who have indicated interest in succeeding Taft. I will speculate a bit on others who may want to seek the Alberta Liberal leadership job and who might be checking out their support levels to see if they stand a chance of winning.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
I'm Betting Kevin Taft Intends to Stay On as Leader of the Alberta Liberals.
Reading Kevin Taft’s op-ed in the Edmonton Journal this Monday does not sound like a man about to leave his party’s leadership or political life for that matter.
My bet is Taft is planning on staying on as the Alberta Liberal leader and he will announce that intention on or before next Monday.
WHAT IS SO SMART ABOUT SAVE ALL THE SURPLUS IN THE HERITAGE FUND
Taft is definitely talking future forward in the op-ed and making suggestions about what to do with non-renewable resource revenue surpluses. He suggests we bank the entire $32B in estimated surpluses said to be coming the next 2 years. He says put it all right into the Heritage Savings and Trust Fund in perpetuity.
His rationale makes some short term sense. He says that while we need pubic infrastructure, we don’t need it all at once and we ought not build it in ways that cost a premium in our overheated economy and that adds to our increasing inflation. He says saving all the resource revenues is the best solution to the problem he identifies as our government not knowing how to spend these funds sensibly. Isn’t that a sad indictment of the capacity, consciousness and vision of our political class – from all parties?
WHAT ABOUT ALBERTA'S HUMAN AND NATURAL CAPITAL DEFICITS?
The problem with the total saving suggestion is that it ignores the other significant Alberta public infrastructure deficit, namely the huge and growing social infrastructure deficit. The wealth Alberta is generating is not being shared equitable with all Albertans. We are quick to note how much of our growth benefits the rest of Canada. We are myopic on the social damage the pace of growth and coagulation of cash at the top of our social food chain is having on the quality of life of ordinary Albertans.
We have our most vulnerable citizens being left on our streets like the hard to manage developmentally disabled people are being sent to hospitals because there is nobody able to meet their needs in safe and nurturing places. They are now clogging our hospitals because we don’t pay communiy based social service staff a livable wage as they try to meet the complex needs of developmentally disabled citizens. So many of the programs get cancelled and seriously at-risk people end up getting turned away and loose in our community with nowhere to go. We are recycling other less fortunate’s through our shelters, courts and correction system. We find many other vulnerable citizens like the elderly and addicted being subjected to more abuse and violence and that is making our communities unsafe and our citizens insecure.
We also need to invest more in the environmental deficit we have created with growth pressures caused by runaway oil sands development. We need to do something serious about picking up the pace reclamation and cleaning up contaminated abandoned convention oil and gas sites. We need R and D investment in new green technologies and techniques like carbon capture and sequestration and new oil sands extraction technologies making it a greener energy source.
I am all for saving a significant portion of non-renewable resource revenues and agree we can spread out our building of some public capital infrastructure projects. Alberta cannot continue to delay addressing the human, social and natural capital infrastructure deficits we have created and ignoring.
So much of our political thought these days focus on rising costs and inflation. That is part of the puzzle but not all of it because it focuses on the importance of controlling costs and ignores the enhancement of the value of what makes our lives worth living.
IT'S ABOUT MORE THAN THE ECONOMY
A strong adaptive economy is like water is to soup, necessary but not sufficient in itself. Part of the role of modern democracies is to facilitate the expression of our collective empathy over what we as a society are responsible for and what we really care about. That must include caring for people, protecting place and addressing our many predicaments as a society.
Socking some of our cash in the Heritage Fund is part of a long term inter-generational fairness solution. But to rely solely on non-renewable surpluses for savings as a fiscal policy is not a serious solution to any of the real and immediate and significant challenges we face in our society today. Using such savings as a means to merely reduce taxes is more about pandering politics than good public policy. It ends up stifling the capacity of our government to use the tax base and the growth of the economy as the means to meet our current, on-going and long term social and ecological obligations.
Saving is a virtue but not the only virtue for a society. Taxes may be just plain evil in the minds of many citizens, but we also know they are a necessary evil. Governments are supposed to find the balance for us and so far Mr. Taft's proposal for saving all our surpluses has not done that.
My bet is Taft is planning on staying on as the Alberta Liberal leader and he will announce that intention on or before next Monday.
WHAT IS SO SMART ABOUT SAVE ALL THE SURPLUS IN THE HERITAGE FUND
Taft is definitely talking future forward in the op-ed and making suggestions about what to do with non-renewable resource revenue surpluses. He suggests we bank the entire $32B in estimated surpluses said to be coming the next 2 years. He says put it all right into the Heritage Savings and Trust Fund in perpetuity.
His rationale makes some short term sense. He says that while we need pubic infrastructure, we don’t need it all at once and we ought not build it in ways that cost a premium in our overheated economy and that adds to our increasing inflation. He says saving all the resource revenues is the best solution to the problem he identifies as our government not knowing how to spend these funds sensibly. Isn’t that a sad indictment of the capacity, consciousness and vision of our political class – from all parties?
WHAT ABOUT ALBERTA'S HUMAN AND NATURAL CAPITAL DEFICITS?
The problem with the total saving suggestion is that it ignores the other significant Alberta public infrastructure deficit, namely the huge and growing social infrastructure deficit. The wealth Alberta is generating is not being shared equitable with all Albertans. We are quick to note how much of our growth benefits the rest of Canada. We are myopic on the social damage the pace of growth and coagulation of cash at the top of our social food chain is having on the quality of life of ordinary Albertans.
We have our most vulnerable citizens being left on our streets like the hard to manage developmentally disabled people are being sent to hospitals because there is nobody able to meet their needs in safe and nurturing places. They are now clogging our hospitals because we don’t pay communiy based social service staff a livable wage as they try to meet the complex needs of developmentally disabled citizens. So many of the programs get cancelled and seriously at-risk people end up getting turned away and loose in our community with nowhere to go. We are recycling other less fortunate’s through our shelters, courts and correction system. We find many other vulnerable citizens like the elderly and addicted being subjected to more abuse and violence and that is making our communities unsafe and our citizens insecure.
We also need to invest more in the environmental deficit we have created with growth pressures caused by runaway oil sands development. We need to do something serious about picking up the pace reclamation and cleaning up contaminated abandoned convention oil and gas sites. We need R and D investment in new green technologies and techniques like carbon capture and sequestration and new oil sands extraction technologies making it a greener energy source.
I am all for saving a significant portion of non-renewable resource revenues and agree we can spread out our building of some public capital infrastructure projects. Alberta cannot continue to delay addressing the human, social and natural capital infrastructure deficits we have created and ignoring.
So much of our political thought these days focus on rising costs and inflation. That is part of the puzzle but not all of it because it focuses on the importance of controlling costs and ignores the enhancement of the value of what makes our lives worth living.
IT'S ABOUT MORE THAN THE ECONOMY
A strong adaptive economy is like water is to soup, necessary but not sufficient in itself. Part of the role of modern democracies is to facilitate the expression of our collective empathy over what we as a society are responsible for and what we really care about. That must include caring for people, protecting place and addressing our many predicaments as a society.
Socking some of our cash in the Heritage Fund is part of a long term inter-generational fairness solution. But to rely solely on non-renewable surpluses for savings as a fiscal policy is not a serious solution to any of the real and immediate and significant challenges we face in our society today. Using such savings as a means to merely reduce taxes is more about pandering politics than good public policy. It ends up stifling the capacity of our government to use the tax base and the growth of the economy as the means to meet our current, on-going and long term social and ecological obligations.
Saving is a virtue but not the only virtue for a society. Taxes may be just plain evil in the minds of many citizens, but we also know they are a necessary evil. Governments are supposed to find the balance for us and so far Mr. Taft's proposal for saving all our surpluses has not done that.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Is Harper Trying to Intimidate the Judiciary?
I see the Harper “government” is continuing to be total consistent in its exercise of poor judgment and for its tendency for using tactics to trump statesmanship.
Now they have delved into the tax returns of our judiciary presumable as a negotiation technique to "settle" compensation negotiations for Judges.
The story the Harper Cons spin is all about putting the judiciary in their fiscal place and showing them that the Prime Minister is the Executive Branch he is the real Sheriff in town. The Judges better toe the line if they know what is god for them - or else.
This Putin-esque and Bush-league breach of privacy was done to bolster the arguments the Cons want to make that the Judges never had it so good and they don’t deserve a pay raise. The “reality” is the Cons wanted to prove was that the Judges are making more money on the Bench than they ever did in private practice. The story indicates that is true some cases and not for others, but so what! When was remuneration of a professional like a lawyer, the best test of their capacity to act independently, courageously and judiciously? In fact it may be evidence to the contrary.
The past private income of Judges when they were lawyers has nothing to do with their capacity and ability to do their job in the judiciary. The fact is the Harper Cons don’t understand this and if they do they don’t care about the privacy of citizens – even those in the judiciary who we depend on to protect us from the abuse of power by the state. Harper’s henchmen believe they are the only authority in government and they can breach the privacy of anyone they choose, including the judiciary.
The fact the Harper Cons believe they can access private tax records of individual citizens to aid their puerile political purposes and that they can do so with impunity only adds to the mounting evidence this bunch are not straight shooters.
I think it is only fair and I would like to see the tax records of the Harper highly paid and pampered Cabinet and Parliamentary Secretaries. Let’s see if they all took a pay cut in order to get into politics. The Cons are there to serve their own greater personal interests in public instead of being persons who are dedicated to serving the public interest.
The story the Harper Cons spin is all about putting the judiciary in their fiscal place and showing them that the Prime Minister is the Executive Branch he is the real Sheriff in town. The Judges better toe the line if they know what is god for them - or else.
This Putin-esque and Bush-league breach of privacy was done to bolster the arguments the Cons want to make that the Judges never had it so good and they don’t deserve a pay raise. The “reality” is the Cons wanted to prove was that the Judges are making more money on the Bench than they ever did in private practice. The story indicates that is true some cases and not for others, but so what! When was remuneration of a professional like a lawyer, the best test of their capacity to act independently, courageously and judiciously? In fact it may be evidence to the contrary.
The past private income of Judges when they were lawyers has nothing to do with their capacity and ability to do their job in the judiciary. The fact is the Harper Cons don’t understand this and if they do they don’t care about the privacy of citizens – even those in the judiciary who we depend on to protect us from the abuse of power by the state. Harper’s henchmen believe they are the only authority in government and they can breach the privacy of anyone they choose, including the judiciary.
The fact the Harper Cons believe they can access private tax records of individual citizens to aid their puerile political purposes and that they can do so with impunity only adds to the mounting evidence this bunch are not straight shooters.
I think it is only fair and I would like to see the tax records of the Harper highly paid and pampered Cabinet and Parliamentary Secretaries. Let’s see if they all took a pay cut in order to get into politics. The Cons are there to serve their own greater personal interests in public instead of being persons who are dedicated to serving the public interest.
George Carlin Checks Out and Will Be Missed.
George Carlin died yesterday. He was a brilliant political observer and social commentator about so many things. He had a peculiar and particular ability to point out the profoundly stupid aspects and attitudes of those beings they call human. He was America's immoral compass.
Carlin was philosophical, insightful, pointed, profane and so very funny. Consider this classic Carlinism as a "clean" example of his observations:
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
George Carlin
George Carlin
I am going to miss him.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Dion Shifts From Neutral to Green - Harper Still in Reverse.
Here it is – the Dion “Green Shift” initiative that was announced today. This website is going to be one that I will book mark and visit often.
I, along with many other Canadians who are beginning to look seriously at new ways to address the challenge of climate change, need to get engaged and stay on top if this new policy initiative.
This is a great start and I see I have lots of reading and reflecting to do. Let’s see just how far, fast and deep this cultural change can happen. It is time we started pulling for the planet – each and every one of us.
I, along with many other Canadians who are beginning to look seriously at new ways to address the challenge of climate change, need to get engaged and stay on top if this new policy initiative.
This is a great start and I see I have lots of reading and reflecting to do. Let’s see just how far, fast and deep this cultural change can happen. It is time we started pulling for the planet – each and every one of us.
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