Edmonton’s Fringe Festival doesn’t open until August but theatre season is already upon us. Political theatre season, that is. At times it seems to verge on the theatre of the absurd.
UCP leader Jason Kenney signed a “public health guarantee” at a campaign announcement in Edmonton Wednesday. (Scott Neufeld/CBC )
Edmonton’s Fringe Festival doesn’t open until August but theatre season is already upon us. Political theatre season, that is. At times it seems to verge on the theatre of the absurd.
On Tuesday, Premier Rachel Notley unveiled a $3.7 billion deal for Alberta to lease its own little railway, on Wednesday United Conservative leader Jason Kenney signed a giant cardboard “guarantee” on health care, and on Friday we’ll have Alberta Party leader Stephen Mandel fretting his hour on the Court of Queen’s Bench stage arguing he should be allowed to run in the upcoming election campaign.
Notley would no doubt prefer not to be in the position of borrowing 4,400 rail cars from CN and CP to ship Alberta crude to market but this is what happens when the headline act “Pipeline to Tidewater” has been postponed indefinitely.
Notley was hoping Prime Minister Trudeau would play a supporting role in the deal but he’s busy starring in his own melodrama involving a former attorney general and a corruption prosecution against SNC-Lavalin.
Even though Trudeau agreed to buy the Trans Mountain pipeline for $4.5 billion last year, he apparently doesn’t feel the need to ride to her rescue on the eve of the Alberta election this year.
Crude by rail
“The risk is in doing nothing,” Notley told reporters Tuesday.Yes, but there’s also a risk in doing something.
For Notley, the long-term risk is that this deal might not work out. On paper it will cost the province $3.7 billion but recoup $5.9 billion for a profit of $2.2 billion.
But for Notley the real risk here isn’t long term economics but short term politics.
Alberta Premier Rachel Notley announced a plan Tuesday to lease locomotives and rail cars to get oilsands crude to American and international markets. (Emilio Avalos/CBC)
Her multi-billion-dollar rail deal has painted a great big $3.7-billion target on her government’s back — alongside a $7.5-billion deficit and a $50 billion-plus debt.
After mulling over the deal for a day, Kenney contacted CN and CP to tell them he will scrap the deal if he becomes premier.
“If elected, a United Conservative government will do everything within our power to cancel the NDP’s reckless $4-billion expenditure of borrowed tax dollars to interfere in the market,” said Kenney.
That prompted Notley to accuse Kenney, who has told his supporters to “stay humble” in the upcoming campaign, of displaying “an unprecedented level of arrogance” for already presuming he’ll win.
When it comes to political theatre, though, Kenney is something of a carnival barker himself.
Health care guarantee
In a news conference Wednesday, he announced a UCP government would quickly conduct a performance review of Alberta Health Services “to get more bang for the taxpayers’ buck.”
That doesn’t sound like a bad idea except that Kenney tends to suggest he can find efficiencies in administration when in fact Alberta spends the least amount of money of any province in health administration (3.3 per cent vs. a national average of 4.5 per cent).
And if Kenney wants to know why we spend so much on health care, look no further than the old Progressive Conservative governments that gave large salary hikes to doctors and refused to scale back rural hospitals.
The NDP has frozen wages for pretty much everyone on the health care system but that’s a Band-Aid, so to speak, on an open wound.
Kenney also promised to maintain or increase health care spending and to maintain a universal, publicly funded health care system.
And, as if to make the promise legal, he signed a giant cardboard health care “guarantee” onstage.
Of course, this puts you in mind of his famous big, cardboard “grassroots guarantee” he signed onstage during the UCP leadership race where he insisted, “The policies of the United Conservative Party must be developed democratically by its grassroots members, not imposed by its leader.”
But when some party members endorsed policy resolutions he didn’t like at their founding convention last May, he declared, “Guess what? I’m the leader. I get to interpret the resolution and its relevance to party policy.”
Sometimes political guarantees aren’t worth the cardboard they’re written on.
Mandel’s ban
And finally we come to the tragicomedy that is the Alberta Party and leader Mandel’s court case Friday where he is hoping to overturn a decision by Elections Alberta to ban him from elections for five years for failing to turn in financial documents on time last year.
Stephen Mandel is challenging parts of the election finance legislation after he was handed a five-year ban from running for provincial office because he missed a deadline set by Elections Alberta. (Scott Neufeld/CBC)
Mandel has alternately complained that the fault was his chief financial officer’s, that the rules were confusing, that the penalty is too severe.
If this little tale was limited to Mandel, it would be sad enough but a half dozen other Alberta Party candidates are facing a similar fate. What’s up with that?
For the sake of giving Albertans a choice in the upcoming election, I hope Mandel wins his case.
But voters will be forgiven for wondering if the Alberta Party is, to paraphrase Shakespeare, a party that struts and frets its hour upon the campaign stage, and then is heard no more.
This column is an opinion. For more information about our commentary section, please read this editor’s blog and our FAQ.