God, no. An airport-sized truck!

Just when you thought the Edmonton International Airport couldn’t get any tackier than its neon ‘art’ and Oilers/Eskimos carousel displays in the international arrivals area, they’ve outdone even themselves!

On Monday, we delivered our daughter to EIA departures. Driving up the ramp, we were assaulted by a multi-storey high, whole-building wide ‘wrap’ advertisement for a half-ton truck. No kidding, the whole damn building was an ad!

How very Albertan of them. In-your-face, crass commercialism ramming a half ton in our faces on a public building that (at least now in a negative sense) represents far more than an administration centre.

Is that what Edmonton has become? If so, then how about ‘wrap’ ads on City Hall and Muttart pyramids? Why not hang ads from the High Level Bridge, from overpasses, or every 5 meters from the ceilings of LRT stations?

Schools need fixing, so why not pay for it by wrapping them in Tim Horton’s ads? Hey, hospitals are real BIG buildings, so let’s cover them with huge ads for pain relievers and antiseptic creams!

Am I the only person in this city who is disgusted by the decision the EIA has made that so grossly offends this city’s image? Surely, other people are also embarrassed on our collective behalf.

Ah, well, maybe it is just me.

After all, this is the city that gave Oprah a set of truck testicles.

Where was your voice, Dr. Samarasekera ?

 

When Indira Samarasekera first became the President of the University of Alberta, she spoke in visionary terms of the value of liberal arts.

I remember her musing that someday, every student at the U of A would have to study out of the country for at least one term.

Enlightened, I thought. I had high hopes that she could bring magnitude back to the perceived purpose of post-secondary education, and in the process open up the eyes of a provincial government that was, and still is, muscularly anti-academic.

Alas, apparently her vision was not accompanied by bravery.

When Thomas Lukasuk, Premier Redford’s Cabinet bully, wrote letters to all post-secondary institutions essentially forbidding them from competing with each other in their course offerings, and steered them toward becoming career factories for in-demand occupations…and THEN cut $150 million out of their budgets after they had been told to expect a 2% increase…well, that’s when the cause of higher education really needed a champion.

In Alberta, the most obvious champion would have been the President of the U of A.

Week after week, I looked to Dr. Samarasekera to say “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!!”. I waited for her to rally her fellow Presidents to collectively stand tall against the Redford PCs and say NO, YOU CAN’T DO THIS!

Students used to be the political voices you heard when education was under attack. But these days, what with rising tuitions and costly student loans, they’re all too busy attending classes and working two jobs in-between just to minimize their post-grad debt load.

No, these days it’s the top people who need courage to lead, even in the face of a bully backed by an omnipotent force like the provincial Cabinet.

So where was your voice, Dr. Samarasekera ? 

What did you do to fight the cuts, to protect those brilliant people that you eventually had to fire or retire, to stand up for the liberal arts and to defend the value of young people pursuing their own dreams, even if those dreams don’t fit into the occupational demand projections of the Alberta economy.

From you, I heard nothing, saw nothing except a meek acceptance.

I understand there’s only a year left in your contract.

Good.

Maybe next time, the University can acquire a President with vision, the ability to lead, a healthy dose of courage AND a very loud voice.

Maybe next time, we’ll get someone who doesn’t go out with a whimper.

Alison Redord issues a public 'selfie' with Mandela

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Alison Redford should be shriveling in shame after her public exploitation of her past involvement with Nelson Mandela in the creation of a post-apartheid legal system for South Africa.

Redford's comments came during the same week that her Alberta Progressive Conservative government rammed through two last-minute bills that imposed a collective agreement on provincial employees, and zapped Peter Lougheed’s long-ago promise to send contract disputes to binding arbitration.

Nelson Mandela would be outraged at Redford’s attack on public sector employee unions.

In 1990, in a triumphant tour of the United States following his release after 27 years in jail, Mandela, a die-hard supporter of labour unions, personally visited the United Auto Workers union in Detroit.

He claimed kinship with them.

Here’s what he told them:  “Sisters and brothers, friends and comrades, the man who is speaking is not a stranger here,” he said. “The man who is speaking is a member of the UAW. I am your flesh and blood.” 

Kicking business the heck out of Alberta politics

Almost everything wrong with Alberta politics can be traced back to the fact that for more than a decade, the Progressive Conservative government has governed NOT for the people, but for business and the rich instead.

And the answer to many of the province’s problems is to kick business right out of politics and restore the rightful influence of individual voters in the political process.

This article proposes a plan to do just that, but first, some background:

Business control of government is a problem the world around, and it has been a problem for far longer than a couple of decades, but it was exacerbated by 1980s Reganomics, the mantra that said ‘cut government programs so you can reduce taxes so you leave more money in the economy so it trickles down to average people in the form of employment’…yadda, yadda.

The problem with Reganomics was – and still is – that cutting programs to keep taxes low deprives people in need of the services they need, at the same time as leaving enormous piles of cash in the hands of corporations and the rich…cash they usually KEEP rather than spend. That’s why international bankers decry what they call ‘dead money’ (an estimated $600 billion in Canada alone). When businesses are rich, but refuse to spend, people are left both poorly off and incredibly underserviced by government.
 
The Root of the Problem

Let’s focus on Alberta, where businesses and/or anyone with enough money, can donate up to $15,000 to a political party every year, and $30,000 in election years.

That kind of money buys a heck of a lot of attention from the elected government, to the extent in this province where the government has initiated huge changes that favour business. Privatization of long term care institutions and home care services, drug policy changes that benefit huge pharmaceutical companies and are killing off the small independents, a major move to PPP funding for infrastructure, muscling universities to become cookie-cutter assembly lines for major industrial occupations…there are so many examples.

The worst of it began with Ralph Klein, who in very short order killed the progressive income tax that is universally recognized as a social instrument to have the rich pay a greater share of society’s costs. He dropped the personal income tax to a flat 10% for all, leaving huge gobs of money in the hands of the rich.

Klein slashed the large-business tax from 15.5% to 10%, again leaving billions in the hands of corporate Alberta. Then he dropped the small business tax from 6% to 3%, and far more than doubled the amount of profit a business, like a doctor’s or lawyer’s professional corporation, could earn and still be considered ‘small’.

And THEN! he blamed Albertans for the fact that government did not have enough money to provide services. He said we had a spending problem, when in fact he had created a revenue problem.

Wealthy people loved Klein. He made them even richer, even as he cut or killed program after program that helped the homeless, protected single unemployed moms, took care of seniors, kept us healthy, educated our kids and funded critical municipal services.

What’s truly astounding is that Klein had the gall to do all of this under the smokescreen of creating The Alberta Advantage, which, he said, would end up making us all richer.

In reality, however, the Alberta Advantage was nothing but the greatest tax giveaway to the rich and their corporations that North America has even seen.

That’s why in this province, what business wants, business gets. That’s why we still have a government that wants to cut, cut, cut so it can even further reduce taxes.

This has to change. But how?

Here’s a four-point plan for kicking business the heck out of Alberta politics and reducing their enormous political status level from absolute control to that of simple equality-of-participation.

Step One:  Ban all political contributions by business during, and in-between elections. No more donations. Period.

Step Two:  pay for provincial party election campaigns with public money, including the constituency campaigns of candidates representing each legitimate political party.

This keeps the rich and corporations out of political campaigns, preventing them from buying the future loyalties and attentions of government. Because equal amounts of public funding will go to all legitimate parties, and to each of their candidates, this change will also balance the strength of each party’s voice in the campaign. No longer will the party with the best business connections (the best fundraising apparatus) be able to dominate the airwaves. Every party’s election budget, and every candidate’s budget, will be equal.

This won’t be expensive. At $5 million for each of 4 provincial parties, and $75,000 for each of their candidates in the 87 ridings, the cost of this change works out to something like $46 million every five years, or 1/5000th of the government’s spending during a 5-year electoral term.

Small price to completely remove the strings from the business puppeteers’ hands, don’t you think?

Step Three:  In-between elections, in order to fund their ongoing operations, political parties would have to rely solely on small donations from large numbers of people.

An annual donation limit of $250 would absolutely prevent any one person from buying influence with his or her donation.

To encourage healthy, active parties, the tax credit regime that now gives 75% of the first $200 back to the donor at tax time would be sweetened. In the new regime, everything up to the maximum $250 donation would be fully tax refundable. This would only be marginally more expensive than the current system.

The great benefit here is that it would be to all parties’ benefit to assertively reach out to the average citizen to solicit their support. The greater the number of citizens that parties contact, and the more they relate to average people, the more money they’ll raise. No more enormous effort being put into corporate fundraisers where 3,000 of the 1% fork out $500 to schmooze with the Premier and her Cabinet.

Step Four: issue all government contracts over something like $100,000 in full public view.

We must put an end to the nudge-nudge, wink-wink cronyism that pervades the way government does billions of dollars worth of business.

No longer should people be prevented from doing work for the government because of their politics, or because of who they don’t know.

This reform would see an all-party committee of MLAs, chaired by an Opposition member, meeting in open public session to hear the recommendations of senior civil servants, to question them, to deliberate and decide on contract awards.

Media would be free to attend. Committee sessions would be livecast on the web, and contract bidders would be informed in advance when the contracts they bid on are to be discussed.

A great side-benefit of this reform is that civil servants would be restored to their historical role of informed, independent advisors, a great relief to some very good people who for more than a decade have been ignored, strong-armed or bullied into submission by the Progressive Conservative government.

It’s time that logic, reason and fact-based decision-making are restored to a proper balance with political ideology. Placing civil servants in positions where they can bring those qualities to bear on politicians is a great way to begin the process.


Conclusion

This is not an anti-business diatribe. Let’s be clear that business is good and profits are good. Business hires you, me and our friends; it allows us to pursue our dreams. 

While business has that critical role to play in our society, we need to remember that we enable business, and not the other way around. Without us, there would be no profits for business. WE are the starting point.

To operationalize that outlook, we must (re)develop the conviction that government governs for the people above all other things. Government’s primary purpose is not to make things great for business. It’s to make things great for people.

It’s time to put people back in control of the Alberta government.

And the only way to do that is to sever business’ ability to buy political influence, so politicians can once again turn their focus to the people.

EIA: humiliation by association

The new Edmonton International Airport addition is impressive, especially as you leave in the morning for the US.

Returning at night, however, is an exercise in humiliation by association.

You are forced to walk a long corridor beside which an endless series of vertical red light bars flash, supposedly in synch with bad music. I'm a public art fan. But this is not art. If the lights flashed to ABBA instead, it would at least be a  memorabilia kind of experience.

Then you arrive at Canada Customs, where all the officers are dressed in black and grossly bulked out with bulletproof vests. They look like ads for steroids. This is strange, given the fact that since everyone they process has already gone through full security, there is zero chance of them ever seeing a gun or a knife. Their impression is one of wilful intimidation. Contrast this image with the US customs people, who wear shirts and no bulletproof vests, and who actually smile at you.

Next you arrive at a baggage carousel bedecked with lame, lame, lame silver mannequins of generic Oilers' torsos, or maybe at the other carousel with lame, lame, lame Eskimo mannequins.

For heavens sake, this city is so much more than two sports teams and bad taste in art. You should see the public art in the airports in Houston and Tampa. It's beautiful, often fun, sometimes even kinky. Those airports are SO much classier!

Bottom line: we spent nearly a billion dollars on a spanking new airport expansion, and we still both look and act like we're still a bush league, regional city with zero flair. 

Robert Redford: Don't lose your balance!

Robert Redford, I love your movies, but please give us a balanced break when it comes to the Alberta oilsands.

Redford says the oilsands are producing 'enough carbon pollution to wreak havoc with our climate for decades to come'.

Well, Bob, before you throw stones, let's look at your own country's glass house.

There are several states in the US, each of whose coal-fired electrical generation greenhouse gas output far exceeds the Alberta oilsands' collective annual output.

West Virginia's 3 largest coal-fired power plants produce the same amount of CO2 as Alberta's 3 largest oilsands plants, and one of those produces more than Alberta's largest oilsands operation (2006 figs for US, 2010 for Alberta).

In fact, West Virginia's 20 power plants alone produce 75% as much greenhouse gas emissions as Alberta's 153 largest emitters in all industries (and believe me, when you get down the list as far as 153 in Alberta, you're into peanuts in terms of annual emissions, like 50,000 tons compared to 15,000,000 tons!).

And finally, the 7 largest-emitting power plants in the US collectively out-pollute Alberta's 153 largest emitters hands-down!

So go ahead, have at it, Bob. Make your arguments against the oilsands industry, but for heaven's sake keep things in perspective and stop acting like an NRA advocate speaking to Fox News about gun control!

Take a look in your own back yard before you let your rage loose on people who don't deserve it as much as your own country's citizens, corporations and governments.

Withdrawal Speech - ALP VP Communications

Following is the complete text of a speech I prepared for delivery at the June 15, 2013 Alberta Liberal Party Annual General Meeting. I regret that I was unaware of a 2-minute time limit for speeches. I had been given to understand I had longer.


First, I want to say something about communications in the high-tech era.

It’s easy to get sidetracked by the technology….you know, twitter, facebook, email blasts, data-based micro-targeting and, God help us all…robo-calling.

Anyway, all those are just tools to deliver messages to identified target groups.
  
What people too often ignore is that all the technology in the world won’t help you if you don’t have the right MESSAGE to deliver in the first place.

Getting the MESSAGE right is the brainpower-and-experience part of communications. The technology? Hey, lots of people know how to access the toolbox.

But finding the message – the one that gets deep into people’s emotions, that penetrates and fills their hearts …makes them wake up and say YES!!! I LIKE that! That’s what I want for me, for my kids, for my society…convincing people to BELIEVE…THAT’S the TOUGH part of communications.

Government USED to be exciting, creative, enlightened. When Peter Lougheed was fresh, I remember hearing about new government programs and saying WOW, what a GREAT idea!

It was a time when the civil service (in which I was a communications director) was respected.

It was a time when government was THIRSTY for fresh ideas and innovative people.

It was a time when the government said YES…not NO all the time!

It was a time when people BELIEVED.

Now, my wife calls me Mr. Happy-Face, because I’m so painfully optimistic.

So when Raj asked me to join him as an advisor, I was elated at the opportunity, once again, to help build our party from scratch into a real powerhouse, just like I had the honour of doing with Laurence Decore.

Raj’s call gave me one more shot at helping to create the kind of enlightened government I always dreamed of.

What we needed to do was pretty basic.

We needed the Leader first to focus INSIDE the party…reaching out to develop a closer mutual relationship with us.

We needed to develop a clear, powerful, long-term VISION of what kind of Alberta we want.

This vision had to be creative, enlightened and very LI-BER-AL!!. It had to be BOLD enough to attract Red Tories, turn on people who had quit voting, and appeal to a big chunk of the NDs.

We needed newly-motivated Liberals, fueled by their BELIEF in this vision, to then reach out to their neighbours, to spread the word, and in the process pull in tens of thousands of new people.

What we needed was simple, actually – an internal focus to re-energize ourselves, a powerful LIBERAL vision for marketing, and a secondary strategy to market our vision outside the party to people who are hungry as heck for something FRESH to BELIEVE in.

Well, friends, I have learned a lot during the last couple of years – and I’m no longer Mr. Happy-Face.

The conditions that we enjoyed when I worked with Laurence to help achieve a budget of $2 million in today’s dollars just aren’t here in today’s ALP.

We have been stymied in focusing internally to reach out to our members, explain our plans and get comfortable with each other.

Our leadership has ordered us to stop trying to define a big-picture core vision that we can use to get into the HEARTS of Albertans, and they’ve ordered us instead to stick to simple administration.

Our leaders, in the Caucus and the Party, have in too many ways ignored the advice and the wisdom of our incredibly competent Executive Director.

Our leaders have demeaned more than 1,500 volunteer hours of excellent work that Gerald’s wife Sharon did on our website renewal, and the integration of our database with the web and our financial system.

But the biggest warning sign to me given my experience in building parties – is that there is still no REAL, ACTUAL BUY-IN by our leadership to the need to define a core LIBERAL…VISION for the Alberta we want to create.

Without that vision, we can’t sell ourselves, no matter how well we use twitter and blogs, no matter how hard we ask members to get out there and sell memberships.

Without the vision, there’s no message.

You see, in the end, a party grows on BELIEF, not on tweets and robocalls.

Relationships, feelings, emotions, hopes and dreams…THEY’RE the essential fuel.

Early this morning, I realized that my most valuable communications  skills – which focus on stimulating emotions and building relationships with people and which absolutely depend on that core message…are NOT skills that our leadership is ready to use.

By now you will have deduced that I am withdrawing from candidacy for the VP Communications position on our executive.
This is a decision I agonized over until early this morning, when I re-wrote my speech.

If I failed so completely in the last couple of years to convince our party’s leadership of the critical need for a core VISION, for a bold message we can SELL, the reality is that there’s no way that I could succeed between now and the next election.

The wise thing to do is step aside, and clear the path for a new VP Comms who can give the leadership what it will accept.

Thank you so much Karen Sevcik for nominating me. You’ve hung in faithfully for so many years, through so many Leaders, because you are a true Liberal. 

Thank you Michael Dawe for seconding my nomination. Hang in there, my friend, for next time you’ll become a truly great MLA for Red Deer North. 

Thank you, Gerald. I hate to pull away as you keep trying..and trying…and trying to wake everyone up to the inescapable realities and the urgent needs.

Thank you Sharon McEachern for your light-hearted, POSITIVE spirit, and for all those hours of brilliant, critically-important web and IT work that have made you the Alberta Liberal Party’s largest single personal donor. And please convey my thanks to your children.

Spencer, Chuck, Keegan, Jane, Rick, Dave Biltek and so many others, thank you for the pleasure I have found in working together with you.

This is MY party.

It’s the LIBERAL party!

I’ll never stop working for liberal principles…to keep them alive.

I’ll just have to find other ways to do that than seeking re-election as VP Comms.

Thanks, everybody.