'Sky Palace' Upgrades Sees Bill Soar To Almost $1 Million: Wildrose

EDMONTON - The final price of shutting down former premier Alison Redford's infamous "sky palace" rose higher Thursday — but the Opposition Wildrose party and the government locked horns over how much.

Wildrose member Kerry Towle announced Thursday that a freedom of information document search revealed a new bill of $930,000 for luxury elements to the proposed penthouse suite for Redford on a government building.

That's five times the Progressive Conservative government's original estimate of $173,000 in May.

Lukaszuk Says Redford Should Consider Resigning MLA Seat

EDMONTON - An Alberta Tory leadership candidate says Alison Redford needs to consider whether she's fit to serve as a member of the legislature given revelations the former premier had a travelling trip planner that billed $330,000 in expenses.

"I'm at a point right now where I think I'm tired of talking about the member for Calgary-Elbow," Thomas Lukaszuk said in an interview Thursday referring to Redford's seat.

The Rockefeller Files: Alison Redford and the power and energy sector

While Jim Prentice was overseeing the U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue (CED), launched in 2009, the Harper Cabinet appointed political fixer Bruce Carson to hold a variety of business conferences on that theme. The CED envisions that Canada's "cheap, clean" power -- generously subsidized by Canadian ratepayers -- ramp up production for export.

In a variety of speeches, Carson advocated the creation of a massive high-voltage/direct-current (HVDC) "smart" electricity grid that would march "both North-South and East-West" across the country and the continent.

Alison Redford's Unbuilt Penthouse Cost Taxpayers $173,000

EDMONTON - Alberta taxpayers were billed $150,000 just for design concepts on a planned penthouse for former premier Alison Redford, show documents tabled this week in the legislature.

The total bill for all consulting work on the suite, dubbed the "sky palace" by the opposition and media, was just over $173,000.

Thanks to memo, Albertans know it wasn't just Alison Redford with entitlement issues

Albertans owe Thomas Lukaszuk a small gesture of thanks for illustrating it's not just Alison Redford who had the problem with entitlement.

Surely it's a sense of entitlement that drives the attitude, all too typical among members of Alberta’s still-ruling Progressive Conservative elite, that the rules are for everyone else.

And the view that the rules are not for PCs but just for the rest of us is, pretty obviously, what was behind the former deputy premier's Nov. 29 memorandum,revealed Tuesday by the Wildrose Opposition, that ordered his Redford Government cabinet colleagues' press secretaries to slow down and control freedom of information requests that had the potential to make the government look bad.

Despite Redford's Departure, the Petro State Marches On

Alberta's political queen and pipeline champion, Alison Redford, has abdicated.

The media seems stunned: why would the premier, who in 2012 beat the odds and won a majority government, only serve half her term?

But personal vanities and the difficult political chore of running a petro state ruled by one party for 43 years simply got to be too much.

And so the lawyer, ever fond of pearls and expensive air travel, departed from the petroleum honeypot of Alberta as unceremoniously as her predecessor, Ed Stelmach.

If Alison Redford won't voluntarily step aside, Alberta's Tories are likely finished

The departure yesterday morning of Donna Kennedy-Glans from the Alberta Progressive Conservative caucus makes it pretty obvious the message is sinking in with disaffected PC MLAs that casting Alison Redford as Premier Cruella de Vil and then putting her ondouble-secret probation may not have been the most astute strategy for re-election.

With a sense of timing worthy of a thespian, the associate minister of electricity and renewable energy announced at about the hour of the morning PC caucus meeting that she's pulling the plug on her cabinet portfolio and quitting the Tory benches to sit as an Independent.

The Calgary-Varsity MLA said she was doing it "with great regret but also great optimism" -- leaving to door open to a swift return after a change of leadership.

Alison Redford Should Resign, Says Riding President

EDMONTON - Alberta Premier Alison Redford is facing more criticism from within her party ahead of a weekend meeting of Tory executives.

The president of a Progressive Conservative riding association in northeast Edmonton said Friday that Redford has to resign or the party will lose the next election.

Payment of $45,000 travel bill by Alberta Premier raises as many questions as it answers

Fresh from her public relations triumph in Edmonton's Churchill LRT station Tuesday, Alberta Premier Alison Redford announced yesterday she has personally paid back the $45,000 cost of her trip to South Africa in December, and that of the young aide who went along with her.

"My hope is that we can now get back to the work Albertans asked us to do," the premier told a hastily organized afternoon news conference -- whatever that work is, since it's not at all clear her government is following anything remotely like the agenda the people who elected her in 2012 expected.

In other words, Shut up and leave me alone!

A $10,000 flight to save half an afternoon: Alison Redford’s lavish travel irks critics

The funeral of Nelson Mandela behind her, Alberta Premier Alison Redford needed to get back to Edmonton, where a new cabinet would be awaiting a swearing-in ceremony.

Ms. Redford travelled to South Africa on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s aging Airbus A310, along with other Canadian dignitaries. On the way back, however, she chose to save herself a few hours by opting for commercial travel instead.

She booked a flight to Alberta from South Africa — at a cost of about $10,000.

Opposition parties say broken Redford promises leave an opening

EDMONTON - With a trail of broken promises from Alberta’s premier and a backlash over two widely-criticized labour bills, a vacuum has opened in the province’s political landscape that the NDP and Liberals say they’re ready to fill.

Despite sweeping to an election victory with a promise to balance the province’s budget and remain debt free, Premier Alison Redford delivered a deficit in a budget that included billions in borrowing for infrastructure such as roads and schools.

Hotel almost $900 a night: Alberta premier on taxpayer group’s ‘naughty’ list

EDMONTON - The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has put Alberta Premier Alison Redford at the top of its provincial government “naughty” list for staying in a Washington hotel that charged $876 a night.

The federation says Redford’s posted expense claims also show she charged taxpayers for $22 coffees and a $31 hamburger while in the U.S. capital.

The CTF later said on its website that Redford's office had clarified that the $22 claimed for coffees was for pots of coffee.

Other Redford expenses in 2013 included an almost $8,000 airfare to New Brunswick and a $6,000 flight to Chicago.

The taxpayers group also singled out Thomas Lukaszuk (loo-KAH’-zuhk), who was deputy premier and advanced education minister until a recent cabinet shuffle.

It points out he spent more than $9,000 on a trip to Europe and claimed 17 flights between Edmonton and Calgary.

Justice Minister Jonathan Denis heads the “nice” list for _ quote _ “having the most boring expense claim two years’ running.”

Alberta has an expense disclosure policy which directs senior government officials to post their expenses online.

Original Article
Source: nationalnewswatch.com/
Author: CP

Shining you on: Alison Redford calls for a little selective sunshine on civil service salaries

Have the calls Alberta's Progressive Conservative MLAs are getting from modestly paid unionized civil servants, furious about having their salaries frozen by unconstitutional legislation and their pensions diminished, rattled the Redford Government?

PC MLAs should be rattled -- seeing as a lot of those modestly paid low- and mid-level public employees live in ridings that Redford's PC Party hung onto by extremely narrow margins in the face of the Wildrose Party tide in the April 2012 general election.

So the announcement yesterday by Don Scott, Alberta's "associate minister of accountability, transparency and transformation," that the Redford Government has plans to shine a little highly selective sunshine on senior public service salaries suggests they may indeed be worried.

Wither human rights in Alberta? Premier Alison Redford supports the passing of anti-union bills

That Nelson Mandela's memorial be celebrated on International Human Rights Day is destiny; a more poignant coupling of events cannot be imagined. It seems unusually cruel then to sully the tributes to this great man with grumblings of suppression and abuse, but the irony of the day's events coinciding with anti-union legislation passed in Alberta demands comment. At the same time that her government pushed Bill 45 through the Alberta Legislature, Premier Alison Redford was paying tribute to Nelson Mandela.

Who gets muzzled next by unconstitutional Redford Government laws? Environmentalists?

Now that the Redford Government's unconstitutional attack on free collective bargaining and free speech is in full swing, we have to ask ourselves who’s next?

Environmentalists?

Quite possibly.

I mean, who else would they like to shut up right now as much as they want to muzzle those pesky public sector unions -- which are always noisily defending public services Alberta Premier Alison Redford's government would really prefer to privatize?

Redford Government set to impose wage freeze on public employees, blowing winning coalition to smithereens

The Redford Government is expected to introduce legislation later today to impose a three-year wage freeze on public employees like the civil servants and health care workers who saved Premier Alison Redford's Progressive Conservative Party from all-but-certain destruction in the April 2012 Alberta election.

Rumours the move was impending have been circulating in Alberta government circles for weeks, but were deemed too silly by sensible observers to warrant serious consideration, even though the government is palpably desperate to find an excuse to post at least one annual budget surplus before the next election in 2016.

But surely, we putatively sensible observers concluded, it wouldn't help the government to balance its budget on the backs of the people who pulled Premier Redford's fat from the fire a year and a half ago!

Alison Redford and Christy Clark may agree, but the public is wary

Alison Redford and Christy Clark agreed this week on B.C.’s conditions for supporting pipeline development in the province.

That the two premiers finally are singing from the same song book marks progress but means little in terms of broadening popular support for the pipeline megaprojects being planned for B.C.

Enbridge continues struggling to sell its Northern Gateway project and Kinder Morgan soon will face long odds in pitching its Trans Mountain pipeline expansion.

Christy Clark and Alison Redford choose short-term politics over future generations

Just this morning, B.C. Premier Christy Clark and Alberta Premier Allison Redford have announced that they have penned a deal to ram a pipeline from Northern Alberta's oil sands fields to the West Coast. And according to news reports, there is "tentative" support for other pipelines.

In Canada we are at a major cross-roads, with some big government leaders pushing pipelines that will lock the country permanently into the "petro-state" column, while at the same time scientists, environmental experts and economists saying that we are lighting a "carbon bomb" for the long term.

Give Us a Referendum on Northern Gateway

Aux Barricades!

We are witnesses to the greatest acts of political cynicism I have seen. Two of them, in fact, made all the more cynical by the amazing timing of their commission.

Last month the provincial Liberals let us in on a document -- you might call it a peace treaty turned into an alliance -- from Premier Clark and Premier Redford of Alberta concerning pipelines and tanker traffic. The "pith and substance," as we lawyers say, is that the pipelines (plural) and tanker traffic will go ahead based on the "certainty" that no pipelines will burst and no tankers will spill. And on the remote chance that an accident does occur, we'll have "world class" cleanup all ready to make things right.

Redford signals more public-private partnerships on horizon for province

EDMONTON - Premier Alison Redford opened the door Saturday to major changes in the Heritage Savings Trust Fund to fuel economic investment opportunities for the province.

At an economic summit Saturday at the University of Alberta, Redford told delegates she wants to “be innovative” and move away from the savings-fund model adopted by the Klein government in the 1990s.