Drumheller Bell Weather

As I wrote here urbanization and the transformation of rural cities into suburban metropolis vs. the rural roots of the P.C.'s was exposed in the bell weather by-election Tuesday.

Drumheller voted solidly Liberal despite the rest of the rural riding voting Conservative.

The Conservatives comfortably held onto Drumheller-Stettler, the rural former riding of Shirley McClellan, who retired after having served in senior cabinet jobs like finance minister and deputy premier. However, the Liberals finished second there. In 2004, they didn't bother running a candidate against McClellan.

the Liberals winning Drumheller's city vote even as it lost the overall seat, clearly signals "that the Klein era is over," Taft said.

The Stelmach government is relying upon their rural base to hold up their tired old party. In fact they even went as far as to sic their California Golden Boy Republican rabid right whingnut Ted Morton on the urban complainers.

Sustainable Resource Development Minister Ted Morton spoke to municipal leaders in Banff -- an address the mayor says included a deliberate slight at Calgary.

According to Morton's speaking notes, he said: "Calgary by itself is a good, but not a great, city. What makes Calgary a great city -- the best in Canada as far as I'm concerned -- is what surrounds it. The working farms and ranches, the Foothills, mountains and rivers."

While there was no tape of the speech, Morton provided a copy of his speaking notes

With no apology or remonstration from Stelmach, Morton supplied his notes to the media day's before the by-election. This from a government with a fetish for secrecy.

Morton like Stelmach relied upon the rural vote for his run for Party Leader. Morton's base came from the south where a strong American/Republican tradition exist's in the Mormon population and among other big ranchers and farmers who are evangelical Christians.

With a boom in the province, rapid development of bedroom communities, urban sprawl in Fort McMurray, and the million person populations in Edmonton and Calgary spill over into rural communities making them the new suburbs.

Thus the fall of Calgary Elbow, Ralph's old seat, to the new Alberta Voter.

"It's not the byelection I would put as much stock into. It's the trend line," said Duane Bratt, a political scientist at Calgary's Mount Royal College. "There's been a series of little steps, all going down."

After losing three Calgary ridings to the Liberals in 2004's election, Tory fortunes in Calgary took a turn for the worse in December's leadership race. The city's pick, former treasurer Jim Dinning, sewed up every riding in town but lost the race to Ed Stelmach, a farmer from up north and the last choice of Calgary voters. And according to some rural Stelmach supporters - who gloated afterward that they had properly stuck a thumb in the eye of the big city - that was exactly the point.

Then came Mr. Stelmach's Cabinet choices - dominantly rural, with just three Calgarians of 18 (even though the city represents a third of the province's population).

Stelmach and Morton and their rural PC base see this as a threat to their vision of "Conservative" Alberta. That rural base was originally Social Credit, and transfered its loyalty to the PC's after the Lougheed era. Ralph Kleins victory as Leader was the result of the dissident rural Social Credit base voting PC and Calgary voting PC merging in a campaign opposing the candidate, Nancy Betkowski, from Edmonton.

The old riding of Buffalo-Stettler was also the exiled home of former Premier Don Getty when he lost his Edmonton Whitemud riding to Liberal Percy Wickman. Having the Premier as your MLA meant as usual lots of government largess.

And as a result Stettler has become another urbanized suburb, complete with a Burger Baron and nice paved highways. The Burger Baron phenomena in Northern Alberta, reflects the integration of immigrants, in this case the chain is owned by Lebanese Canadians,into Alberta's white Christian rural culture.

Stettler remains a solidly Tory stronghold, as it was once a Socred stronghold. But it also suffered a low voter turn out which does not show the real intention of voters.

But the sea change in Drumheller shows that come the next provincial election, the split in the province will be between the urban centres and the rural hinterland.

And like the regime of Harry Strom, the last time that scenario was played out the Socreds went down to defeat in 1971 to the Lougheed PC's.

In 1968, Earnest Manning stepped down as leader of the Social Credit party after winning a massive majority on a very small popular vote, and he was replaced as leader and premiere by Strom in that same year. The following year, in 1969, the seat Manning had held for decades, Calgary Strathcona, fell to Progressive Conservative William Yurko.

While Ralph Klein’s history is quite different from Manning, the progress of events since he stepped down as leader is eerily familiar. In 2004, Klein won a large majority on a fairly shaky popular vote (under 50% when he’d won nearly 70% in the 2001 election). He then announced his retirement, and by the end of 2006, had stepped down in favour of his replacement, Ed Stelmach. The following year (that would be 2007, this year), Klein’s old seat in Calgary-Elbow fell to Liberal representative Craig Cheffins (in the by-election this past Tuesday).

Albertans almost defeated the lame duck PC's in 1993, Ralph's first term as premier was a race between him and Laurence Decore of the Liberals. Hindered by the lame duck premiership of Don Getty, the party was soundly thrashed at the polls, but still won. Like the defeat of the Socreds before them, they saw the 1993 election as a warning.

Today we have another lame duck premier, and one whose charisma and leadership screams Harry Strom. Lucky for him the Liberals also suffer from the same lame duck leadership.

SEE

• Stelmach Blames Eastern Bums
• Terrror In Tory Town
• Calgary Elbow Goes Liberal
• It's A Sweep
• Alberta Election Results
• Where's The NDP?
• Election Day In Alberta

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Terrror In Tory Town

The Party of Calgary is kaput. As the by-election in Ralph Kleins riding of Calgary Elbow shows.

said one senior Tory strategist. "Here's the [former] premier's riding and nobody wanted to run."

So instead their candidate ran as a Liberal.

And once on the hustings, things were evidently hostile enough that local reporters observed Mr. Heninger on one doorstep remarking that he would personally like to "choke" Mr. Stelmach for crimes against Calgary.

With even their own candidate unable to defend the government record, several Tories admitted ahead of the byelection that the bigger surprise would be if Mr. Heninger somehow managed to prevail.

Why vote for a disgruntled Tory when you can vote for a real Liberal.

Having dominated the province under King Ralph, the Party of Calgary saw a political sea change with the loss of the leadership race by Jim Dinning, the 'liberal' Calgary candidate.

Now the next election portends a Liberal sweep in Calgary and an Opposition sweep in Edmonton between them and the NDP.

Leaving the PC's with the rural ridings. Just like what happened to Harry Strom.




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Writing On The Wall

Our lame duck premier Ed Stelmach continues to prove he is the political heir of Harry Strom.

a growing number of urban Albertans are unhappy with the rookie premier's performance.

Mr. Stelmach was responding to a poll in which fewer than half of those surveyed this month said he was leading Alberta in the right direction.

The poll also suggests the overall number of people in the province who felt Mr. Stelmach was leading the province in the wrong direction has tripled to 30 per cent since January.

The Cameron Strategy poll found Tory support in rural areas has increased slightly to 58 per cent, while support in Calgary and Edmonton is down to roughly 40 per cent over the last five months.

The Cameron Strategy poll provided to the Calgary Herald shows disapproval of the premier's performance in Calgary at 39 per cent, more than double what it was in January. In Edmonton, 29 per cent of people disapprove of Stelmach's performance, again, more than double what it was in January.

"It's the doubling of the disapproval that should be worrying," said pollster Bruce Cameron. "It's the first shoe dropping."

Also, more Calgarians (41 per cent) believe the premier is leading Alberta in the wrong direction than those who think he's taking it down the right path (35 per cent).

Stelmach noted that during the race for leadership of the PC party, polls consistently showed him behind the other candidates. For him, the real test is yet to come. "The big poll for me, judgment day, is the next general election."

Which is why he is afraid to call one.


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So Long Ed Been Good To Know Ya

Nice to see other folks have noticed the similarity between Ed Stelmach and Harry Strom.

The next Harry Strom?

I have been saying the same thing for six months;

Rural Roots

Strom's Curse

Ed Stelmach=Harry Strom

And you know its bad when the guy running for ya in the Calgary Elbow by-election claims not to know ya....

Brian Heninger, that's right, of Heninger Toyota, pins his hopes on being seen as the best for the job. He knows the premier has no coattails to ride. Brian says he doesn't know the premier, hasn't been alone in a room with him and doesn't know many of the Tory MLAs

After five months in power, promising to change his stale dated government from the callous clueless regime of King Ralph, to a more open, friendlier one, all we get from Ed is more of the same callousness; full steam ahead, we have no plan, except to sell off the province to the cheapest bidder....

Alberta, BC to meet over public-private partnerships

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Karl Marx

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Our Pal Ed

Lame duck Premier Ed Stelmach is our pal says the Biggest Landlord in Canada....

"We are extremely pleased," whooped Boardwalk president Roberto Geremia.

"Though confronted with intense pressure from the media and opposition parties," he continued, "the provincial government has remained steadfast in its stand against legislated rent controls."

CEO Sam Kolias said Boardwalk was now "poised to generate significant gains," and reminded unitholders that "today's most exciting investment story surrounds our Alberta portfolio," which he described as "really hot."

And Edmonton in particular, where 32% of Boardwalk's apartment units are concentrated and the vacancy rate is running under 1%, is "poised to generate significant gains over the next coming months."

Then Kolias rolled out the happy numbers for the cheerleading stockies listening on the conference call.

Funds from operations were up 25% over the same three months in 2006. Distributable income per unit was up 27%. Rental revenues were up 15%, while net operating income of $51 million was up 19%.

Happy days are here again. And probably the most important stat of all was Boardwalk's "outlook and guidance" prediction that distributable income will climb from $1.87 to as high as $2.04 per unit in 2007.

"We're being thoughtful in the amount we are increasing rents," he continued.

"Although the market can bear more," Kolias sighed, "we do realize that our customers are the most important thing that we have."

H/T to West of the Fourth who discovered Neil Waugh is as Socialist.

Something I have pointed out over the past couple of years about Neil.

After you suffer thirty five years of an incompetent One Party State, socialism actually looks good.

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Stelmach the Perfect Strom

As I have said before our new Alberta CEO Ed Stelmach is haunted by the ghost of a Premier past; the lame duck Harry Strom.

Edmonton Sun columnist Neil Waugh knows this too and gloating with glee likes to rub it in;

Listen up on land

Last week Premier Ed Stelmach finally gave Albertans a peek under the tent flaps about his plans to stop the insanity of Ralph Klein's flawed oilsands policy, which sees energy companies pay a penny-on-the-dollar in royalties while at the same time shipping raw bitumen and jobs down the pipeline to Illinois and Texas and turning 48 townships of pristine boreal forest around Fort McMurray into a vast industrial zone.

"My government is committed to ensuring there will never again be a major downturn like we saw in the 1980s," Stelmach boomed to the Canadian Energy Research Institute.

He plans to thwart any National Energy Program rerun by "developing and diversifying" the energy industry.

During the Alberta PC leadership campaign last fall Stelmach compared pipelining raw bitumen to Texas as selling the "topsoil" from a farm.

"This includes encouraging more upgrading and value-added activities in the province," he told the oilmen. "Our government will encourage that to happen."

He has a strange way of doing it. The latest jobs-down-the-pipeline dust-up happens before the National Energy Board in Calgary on June 4 when TransCanada Pipelines pitches its ultra-controversial Keystone bitumen pipeline to the States.

Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan has already filed an intervention describing the dubious line as a "devil's bargain".

NEB documents reveal the Alberta government is intervening too. But instead of a blizzard of submissions backing up the premier's pledge, Alberta taxpayers will be represented by one lowly "regulatory analyst" who is only there to "monitor" the hearings on behalf of his Edmonton bosses.

Spare us any more goofy speeches, Ed.

Tories drop ball on housing problem

They recommended the premier consider "limited, short-term market intervention." In short, they proposed the province impose "rent stability guidelines" consisting of once-a-year rent increases of no more than 2% above inflation. Also proposed was a one-year notice for condo conversions with no lease-busting rent increases in the meantime.

The task force report described this recommendation as a "very difficult one."

The Alberta Tories obviously had a difficult time of it as well. Because when the smoke cleared and Housing Minister Ray Danyluk released his $285-million response this week, rent controls were mysteriously missing.

In their place were a series of half-hearted attempts to rein in runaway accommodation costs.

The proposed condo conversion restrictions have been accepted. But landlords can impose once-a-year hikes with no ceiling.

Instead of responding boldly and constructively to a problem that's creating economic hardship for large numbers of Albertans and employment problems for many Alberta businesses trying to compete with the oilsands developers for workers, the Tories tried to dodge the bullet. They're attempting to buy a little more time.

In the meantime, apartment owners will continue to record huge profits, the affordable housing crisis will continue and the whole problem will blow up again next spring.

This is not leadership.

Boom's deadly toll

The blood spilled and the body count wasn't as high as in the tragic Diversified 690 bus crash. Thank God for that. But the cause of the death of two Chinese temporary foreign workers at Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.'s Horizon oilsands plant this week can be traced back to same source.

And that's the Alberta Tories' botched - and now extremely deadly - oilsands policy, which triggered a massive oilsands building boom without first putting in place the necessary infrastructure.

The Tories then conspired with the developers to tear up the labour peace treaty that ruled the oilsands for more than a decade.

There followed the airlift of cheap foreign workers, while thousands of Alberta tradesmen and women sit on union dispatch lists.

The collapse of the tank roof structure that killed Genbao Ge and Hong Liang Liu and injured four others working for the Chinese-government-owned contractor was the culmination of this goofy policy.

It's the same one that allows oilsands developers to pay a penny-on-the-dollar royalty until the multi-billion-buck plants are paid out, while at the same time shipping raw bitumen and jobs down the pipeline to Illinois and Texas and leaving behind irreparable environmental damage in the pristine boreal bush north of Fort McMurray.

It wasn't until after the bus crash that killed six construction workers on the Syncrude job that the Alberta PCs finally admitted that Highway 63 was fundamentally dangerous. And they're now playing a desperate game of catch-up to twin the major route to the oilsands.

But only last week, Finance Minister Lyle Oberg was bragging in his budget speech about more offshore workers coming in.

"We will develop an immigration strategy to encourage more skilled workers to come to Alberta." Oberg boomed. Well, how do you like your strategy now, Lyle?

And just how panicked the Stelmach government is to control the damage and deflect the blame has been clearly evident since Tuesday's tragedy.

A limited internal investigation by government bureaucrats - and no public report, but simply a handover to the dubious Alberta Justice Department, which already has the worst record in Canada on bringing boardroom bad guys to justice. (They've yet to get the trucker who crashed into Bus 690 into court - an accident that happened way back on May 20, 2005.)

Worker error

Meanwhile, CNRL is being allowed to do a parallel "full investigation" of the incident, where worker error will be the inevitable conclusion.

Heck, Employment Minister Iris Evans didn't even bother to issue a press release acknowledging the latest oilpatch accident even happened.

Smoke and mirrors

"Alberta intends to borrow $300 million on behalf of its corporations this year," noted CIBC World Markets economist Avery Shenfeld. "With half of that raised in the public debt market."

Shenfeld added that the government-backed Alberta Capital Finance Authority and ATB Financial plan on floating paper worth $2 billion this year.

BMO Capital Markets economist Michael Gregory also determined that the Tories are back in the borrowing business "which will be subsequently lent to other provincial corporations to meet their funding requirements."

Things get even more murky when you dig deep into the budget documents to find the true meaning of P3 (public/private partnerships), like the Anthony Henday and Stoney Trail ring roads in Edmonton and Calgary.

P3 magic, we are told, is that it "allows the government to transfer certain risks that the private sector is better able to manage."

Without getting too specific.

But the background blurb also admits: "contribution of public financing to a P3 project should reduce total project cost."

And under a section called "debt servicing costs," Oberg's documents show a line identified as "financing costs for government-owned capital (P3s)" growing from $8 million this fiscal year to $22 million by 2009-10.

Yup, we're back in debt.

Except the budget book would prefer to call it "alternative financing" or "capital lease liability".

Of course, there's more debt on the books in "debt free" Alberta.

Another $166 million in medium term bonds comes due this year.

That leaves over $1.2 billion of old Don Getty debt on the books to be paid off from the debt retirement account when it comes due. Some of that won't be until 2013.

Sure, there's another $2.2 billion surplus in the forecast this year plus another $7.7 billion ticking over in the Sustainability Fund.

OTHER FUNDS

At the same time, the Tories will pull another $1.4 billion of investment income out of the Alberta Heritage Fund, while other funds will yield an additional $2.1 billion more.

But isn't the HTF supposed to be used for a rainy day?

Don't worry, it could be pouring soon.

The University of Calgary's Institute for Sustainability, Energy, Environment and Economy recently released a paper on Alberta's economic future.

The results of that study are suddenly showing up in government documents.

The "bulk" of the government resource revenue came from gas royalties in recent years.

In 2004, it hit over $8 billion. By 2013, the institute predicts gas royalty revenue will be only $3 billion.

While oilsands revenue is the next big thing, the way the Tories have screwed up the royalty regime with their goofy penny-on-the-dollar giveaway leads the institute to a grim conclusion.

"In general, one would expect significantly lower royalties as a percentage of revenues in the case of oil- sands compared to conventional oil," the paper warns. Expected royalties compared to recent years will be "substantially lower."

And the projected royalty revenues for 2013 are "just over $5 billion" - which the report points out are "about one-half the average levels" over the past five years.

Looks like Oberg is just getting warmed up for when Alberta is back aboard the debt and deficit wagon.

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