Welcome to the Orwellian world of Wildrose, where keeping your promises makes you a liar

Is Alberta ready for democracy?

Notwithstanding the unexpected election of a New Democratic Party majority government in Alberta last May 5, it's pretty obvious a lot of Albertans -- especially the business crowd in Calgary -- still don't really get this democracy thing.

Consider the stunned reaction Friday from the Calgary Chamber of Commerce to the shocking revelation by NDP Premier Rachel Notley -- leader of the Alberta NDP, raised by committed NDP parents and well known for her NDP convictions -- that she intends to vote … just wait for it … for the NDP in the Oct. 19 federal election. Shock! Horror! Bewilderment!

How Preston Manning convinced Wildrose MLAs to join mass defection

A whirlwind three weeks of negotiations to set the terms for one of the most dramatic mass defections in Canadian political history ended in the Edmonton apartment of a Wildrose MLA on Tuesday night.

Pizza, pretzels and “beverages” were served as the “Wildrose Nine” — the collection of MLAs who crossed the floor on Wednesday to join Alberta’s long-governing Progressive Conservatives — held an emotional meeting with Premier Jim Prentice.

Mr. Prentice spelled out his plan to improve the Alberta government, everything from the pending oil bust, to the fiscal crisis, to a creeping culture of entitlement.

Wildrose To PC Floor Crossing Left Federal Conservatives Gobsmacked

OTTAWA - Federal Conservatives say they're gobsmacked over the political tectonic shifts in Alberta this week, but they don't have to reach too far into their own history to see parallels with the political pragmatism that's at play.

Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith crossed the floor this week with eight MLAs to join the majority Progressive Conservative government. Federal members of Parliament — many of whom supported Wildrose — were caught off guard by the move.

PC-Wildrose provincial feud ‘a big deal’ in federal Tory nomination races

As Rob Anders faces a new battle to carry the Tory flag in Calgary’s west end, the controversial Conservative MP says there’s an X factor in the race: provincial politics.

Anders — who has characterized himself as a true conservative beset by “Red Tories” — said his vocal support for the Wildrose party, along with his past jousting with Premier Alison Redford, has made him a target for provincial Progressive Conservatives.

Hell freezes over in Alberta: Right-wing Wildrose Party sides with unions, sort of

With blizzard conditions prevailing throughout most of Alberta today, it was still a surprise when the right-wing Wildrose Party issued a news release supporting the province's largest union and promising if it is elected it will undo much of the damage done by the Redford Government's unconstitutional Bills 45 and 46.

Talk about the proverbial strange political bedfellows!

There was considerable discussion in some of Alberta's more cynical quarters late yesterday about whether Hell actually had frozen over, or if it was merely the perfect (snow) storm that led to this unusual alliance. Of course, the most deeply cynical ventured the opinion it was all a snow job.

Evil twins: Alberta Tories assail Wildrosers, and vice versa

I'll admit I laughed out loud when I read in the Calgary Herald that Alberta Premier Alison Redford had accused her far-right opposition, the Wildrose Party, of being an organization ready to break any rule to win.

Not that I doubt Redford for a moment on this one, which she delivered in a speech Friday night at the start of her Progressive Conservative Party's policy conference in Edmonton. Indeed, I reckon she pretty much nailed it as far as the Wildrose Party and Opposition Leader Danielle Smith are concerned.

Wildrose deftly defuses robo-call crisis while federal Cons suffer Scotch verdict

You don't have to agree with Alberta’s right-wing Wildrose Party to admire the skill with which it stick-handled yesterday's revelation it had been fined $90,000 by the federal broadcast regulator for a series of improperly identified robo-calls made to voters during the 2012 election campaign.

Compared to the federal Conservative Party's blundering response to its various recent troubles, it seems mildly astonishing the two parties are essentially the provincial and federal branches of the same organization.

Slapped with the significant fine by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, Wildrose Party officials responded deftly.

Ironies abound in Alberta's agitated politics as Alison Redford cranks up the postage meter

Am I the only one who sees irony in the leader of Alberta's ultra-conservative Wildrose Party working up a full head of steam because the merely very conservative government of Premier Alison Redford plans to mail a colourful budget brochure to every household in the province -- at taxpayer expense, of course?

After all, the Wildrose Party of Danielle Smith is effectively the Alberta provincial branch of Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative Party of Canada -- the one mailing out those federal Tory flyers attacking Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau's substance as well as his masculinity.

One Province, Two Guvnors … Wildrose and PCs eye reuniting the right

The Alberta Progressive Conservative Party under Premier Alison Redford and the Wildrose Party under Opposition Leader Danielle Smith plan to schedule an initial meeting on "reuniting the right" sometime this summer.

The parties are said to have agreed the time to reunite Alberta's right is now, before Alberta faces the prospect of an NDP takeover like those anticipated later this year in British Columbia and Ontario.

Wildrose rink lotto scheme: A new tax on the prodigal and the poor

It was almost a relief yesterday when Danielle Smith, leader of Alberta's right-wing Wildrose Opposition, announced the scheme her party had come up with to finance the millionaires and billionaires of professional hockey through the use of … wait for it … keno!

Alert readers will recall that the Wildrose Party stands against all tax increases but in favour of big breaks for billionaires, so the desire by Edmonton's mayor and council to spend half a billion or so of public funds to help out a needy billionaire, drugs and hockey magnate Daryl Katz, must have just about driven them 'round the bend.

The Stephen Harper model for Wildrose power: Promise free votes and deliver the Borg Hive

Alberta's Wildrose Party blossomed at the edges of the same muddy spring whence sprang the federal Reform Party of Preston Manning and Stephen Harper.

As is well known, the Reform Party went on to engineer the hostile takeover in 2003 of the old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada, after renaming but not successfully re-branding itself as the Canadian Alliance.

A Wildrose Party Coup D'Etat

While the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties of Alberta were duking it out in the Legislature over the past ten days, and with the mainstream media focused on the Daryl Katz "One Cheque to Rule Them All" election donation controversy, something took place on social media that went unnoticed by most armchair politicos and online party supporters. How it went unnoticed remains a mystery because the accusation that was made is shocking enough to be deserving of both our attention and our concern.

Environics poll shows Tories in full flower, Wildrose withering on the vine

From the perspective of Alberta’s market-fundamentalist Wildrose Party Opposition, yesterday's Environics Research Group poll of voter support for the province's political parties did not contain particularly good news.

The survey -- the first major Alberta opinion poll to be published since the April 23 provincial election -- shows support for Premier Alison Redford's Progressive Conservative government remains at a commanding level almost identical to where it was on the day of the election.

As for the Wildrose Party, which saw its support peak a few days ahead of the spring election, the Environics numbers indicate the right-wing opposition party's support is slumping, possibly quite seriously give or take the margin of error. (Note that at least one other poll, which will be published very soon, has produced similar results.)

Anti-union Wildrose Party's fund-raising pitch piggybacks on union's heavy lifting

Is it just me, or is there a certain irony in the spectacle of a political party dedicated to the proposition that trade unions are bad trying to raise money by taking credit for the good work done by a union?

I refer, of course, to the Wildrose Party's recent exploitation of the brilliant exposure by the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees of the appalling menu fed to helpless seniors in the province's continuing care facilities -- which even the mainstream media seems to think was the main reason Health Minister Fred Horne ordered 73 such residences to return to home cooking by Christmastime.

Alert readers will recall that nothing was done about Alberta Health Services' so-called 21-day menu -- the unpalatable tinfoil- and plastic-wrapped meals that have been trucked in, reheated and fed to helpless nursing home residents for months now -- until AUPE created a video that cleverly asked a food critic to say what he thought of the culinary qualities of the frozen meals.

Wedge politics, not religious freedom, behind Wildrose Leader's refusal to apologize

Since she won't apologize for remarks made by one of her candidates during the recent election campaign that many Albertans thought were offensive and anti-gay, Wildrose Party Leader Danielle Smith found herself trapped this week between a rock and a hard place.

The leader of Alberta's Opposition party desperately wants to leave behind the brouhaha created by unsuccessful Edmonton-South West candidate Alan Hunsperger, who imprudently left a blog post lying around the Internet before last April's election that expressed the view all gays are doomed to spend eternity in the Lake of Fire if they don't repent.

To do so, Smith tried Tuesday to "mend fences," in the words of a local newspaper, with Alberta's gay community by attending the Edmonton Pride Festival Police Chief's Reception, a low-key event that involved the kind of imagery the Wildrose Party is comfortable with -- squad cars and people in uniform.

Alberta Election: Danielle Smith, Wildrose Party Leader, Downed By Climate Change Denial, Says Former Premier

EDMONTON - Former Alberta premier Ed Stelmach says Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith's refusal to admit climate change exists cost her party a shot at victory in last month's election.

"I was confident we were going to win," Stelmach said Wednesday when asked about the election by reporters following a legislature social function.

"(But) as with any election you wait for the other team to do something that I'm quite sure today they're questioning, (which were) some of the comments about climate change."

"When you're going to put somebody on an international stage to sell this province, you better listen to your customers around the world before you draw a line in the sand."

Stelmach, premier from 2006 until he retired and was replaced late last year by Alison Redford, didn't run in the past election but helped out candidates by knocking on doors.

Redford’s debt to Alberta’s left

hereHow did the Alberta PCs win a majority in Monday’s election when every poll for a month showed them behind the upstart Wildrose Party?

Simple: They united the left and scared the middle.

The Wildrose won 34% in the election — almost all of it from the carcass of the PCs. Those voters were the C in the PC party — the true conservatives.

But instead of trying to win those voters back, PC leader Alison Redford invited new voters into her party — the P’s in PC. Progressives. Or, as they’re usually called, Liberals.

In the last Alberta election, the Liberals received a hearty 26.4%. (By contrast, Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals got less than 19% nationwide.)

Redford spoke to those 26.4% with a compelling argument: You’ll never elect a Liberal government in Alberta. So why not vote for a party that believes in the same things, but just calls itself PC?

Redford said she would consider a coalition government with the Liberals or NDP, but not with the Wildrose. She couldn’t have been plainer — she wanted Liberals to vote for her, and those frightening Albertans considering the Wildrose? Well, good riddance to them.

Climate change denial should be a deal breaker

My brother, Jerry, is a genius. He will, I’m sure, be upset that I have publicly described him as such. But, brother, it’s true. He showed the world that ancient oceans once existed on Mars. Don’t ask me how, but he, and the group of scientists that work for and with him, did it.

He has made a lot of other important discoveries during his long scientific career. My brother has won many prestigious awards for his work. But true to his nature, he doesn’t put them on display or talk much about them. He’s a humble genius.

My brother is a world-renowned geophysicist at Harvard University. He studies the internal dynamics of the Earth. In recent years, he has examined the impact of climate change on sea levels. My brother takes his painstaking work seriously. He doesn’t cut corners. He’s certainly not motivated by ideology. Other scientists rigorously challenge his work before it is published in top-flight scientific publications like Nature and Science.

This is all to say that when my brother assures me, my children and the rest of world that the vast preponderance of scientific evidence supports the finding that climate change is real and a man-made phenomenon, I believe him. I believe him not because he is my brother, but because I know first-hand how hard he and his colleagues around the globe have worked to reach that evidence-backed conclusion.

Why Alberta's Wildrose Party is not long for this world

The Wildrose phenomenon will disappear from the Alberta political scene almost as quickly as the party's leader took a powder after her concession speech at the golf club in Okotoks on Tuesday night.

Sure, we've all heard the promises about what a great opposition the Wildrose Party is going to make, how well leader Danielle Smith did to build it out of nothing in jig time, and how they'll be back in 2016 to really kick Tory ass. All talk, of course.

There are several reasons why the Wildrose is likely to quickly wither on the vine -- an appropriate enough metaphor for such a delicate little flower in Alberta's harsh climate. The principal one is simply this: Uniting the right has worked too long and too well for the people who bankroll right-wing governments to allow this to continue.

Oh, sure, they might think about letting Wildrose strategist Tom Flanagan have one more kick at the cat before he retires to Palm Springs -- but he'll be what in 2016, a hundred and two?

Seriously, people, if the Wildrose Party can't make any inroads as the opposition, and that seems unlikely in the unforgiving new world of Alison Redford's huge and smart Progressive Conservative majority, it'll blow away on the Prairie wind for the simple reason its funds will dry up.

Indifference is the new intolerance

Forget Ottawa when it comes to political turpitude. The action is in two provincial capitals, one east, one west, where two very different villains are stirring up trouble. Both are suspected of harbouring, or at least enabling, backward beliefs. The eastern villain is Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, who raised the ire of the ever-uppity gay community when he announced that he’s once again going to skip the annual Gay Pride Parade in favour of a weekend at his family cottage. The western bad guy (girl) is Danielle Smith, the leader of Alberta’s Wildrose party (now the official Opposition to the 41-year-old PC majority), who during the recent election campaign refused to chastise a party member and former pastor for his interpretation of the gay afterlife. (Hint: it involves a lake of fire and a lot of pain.) For these sins, Ford is branded a bigot, and Smith a willing defender of them.

However, they aren’t under attack because they’ve expressed an interest in revoking gay rights—but because they’ve expressed nothing at all; it appears that indifference is the new intolerance in Canada. Ford won’t attend Pride and Smith won’t apologize for her colleague’s remarks. Neither has really done anything yet. And consequently both, it seems, are equally benign—albeit distasteful to some.