The fall sitting of the Alberta legislature has sat for precisely three days. And it already feels like an eternity.
The United Conservative government has been flinging out announcements almost on the hour while the Opposition NDP has been holding counter news conferences to try to shoot them down just as quickly.
It’s like watching a political skeet shooting competition.
This, of course, is what we expected.
The government called the session back two weeks earlier than planned because it has so much legislation to introduce.
Busy with bills
Among those is Bill 14, the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporate Act, that the government hopes will entice First Nations to invest in the energy sector and thus help counterbalance the public relations damage done by First Nations that are against more pipelines.
There’s Bill 15, the Real Estate Amendment Act, that has allowed the government to fire the entire board of the Real Estate Council of Alberta. The council’s job is to protect consumers and enforce professional standards. An external audit done by KPMG discovered the current board members get along about as well as the UCP and NDP during question period.
If you were buying or selling a home the past few years, odds are you never knew about the “dysfunctional” council. The council’s problems apparently didn’t impact the day to day operations of the market.
And buying and selling will continue as normal under an interim administrator until a new council is appointed. The NDP is not defending the council or criticizing Bill 15 but just wants people to know the former New Democratic government was the one that started the external audit.
A war room by any other name
Then we have the continuing evolution of the “Energy War Room.” Or, at least, the evolution of its name.
First promised by UCP leader Jason Kenney during the provincial election campaign as a way to quickly respond to the “lies and myths” about Alberta’s energy industry, the term “war room” has fallen out of favour.
“War” is a wonderfully combative name that fit nicely with Kenney’s “fight back” strategy during an aggressive election campaign. But it also has bullying overtones. So, last week Kenney began referring to it as the “Alberta Information Centre,” which sounds like a rustic building you’d set up on the border for tourists to learn about the province.
That apparently sounded too bland and too narrowly focused on Alberta.
So, now, it is officially called the “Canadian Energy Centre” as if the new entity is supported by, and speaks for, the whole country.
It doesn’t, of course.
This is a creature created and funded solely by the Alberta government, to the tune of $30 million. The “Alberta Energy War Room” would be a more apt name. Most apt perhaps would be “Jason Kenney Using Public Dollars to Criticize His Political Enemies Centre.”
But Canadian Energy Centre it is.
“The energy centre is going to have to go out on a global stage and talk to investors in New York and London to make them understand and to tell our story, so I think the word Canada is reflective of that,” said Energy Minister Sonya Savage when asked about the new name.
She announced the managing director of the centre would be Tom Olsen, who was a journalist with Postmedia before taking a job as press secretary to Premier Ed Stelmach in 2007, then becoming a lobbyist and most recently running as a UCP candidate in Calgary-Buffalo (losing to NDP Joe Ceci).
Besides complaining about the money being spent on a “Twitter machine” energy centre, the NDP says giving Olsen the $195,000 a year job as managing director is a prime example of government patronage.
Even if you can make an argument for the war room, um, energy centre, there’s the disturbing fact that it will be working behind closed doors.
Although Savage told journalists Wednesday the centre will be open to freedom of information (FOIP) requests from the public, that won’t be the case.
The centre has been set up as a private corporation and will not be open to FOIP requests.
That’s similar to Kenney’s public inquiry into foreign-funded environmental organizations. The inquiry has been structured so that it is not beholding to FOIP laws and can operate with little, if any, public scrutiny.
The government has another dozen pieces of legislation to introduce in the fall sitting that is scheduled to run until the first week of December.
Three days down, eight more weeks to go.
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