The short, underwhelming history of pie-throwing

By Claire Ward - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 2:14 PM - 0 Comments

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The short, underwhelming history of pie-throwing

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Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter (but they missed her)

Assailants: Two University of Arizona students, allegedly of the group 'Al Pieda'

Weapon of choice: Cream pies

Outcome: The two students are reportedly arrested. Coulter continues to gives speeches and appear on television and radio shows across the U.S.

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Newsmakers: June 9 – 16, 2011

By Nicholas Köhler and Ken MacQueen - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Isaac Brekken/Getty Images

Done in by the velluvial matrix

Grads from the University of Alberta’s faculty of medicine were enjoying an after-dinner speech at their banquet last week when the words of Dr. Philip Baker, dean of the medical school, sounded vaguely familiar. “A couple of students recognized the term ‘velluvial matrix,’ ” class president Brittany Barber told the Edmonton Sun. “They googled it on their phones.” It showed Baker has borrowed heavily from a speech delivered last year at Stanford by Dr. Atul Gawande, a Boston surgeon and a writer for the New Yorker magazine. Accusations of plagiarism prompted an apology from Baker, who said he was inspired by Gawande’s speech, which “resonated with my experiences.” Baker added that he’s since spoken to Gawande, who “was flattered by my use of his text, took no offence and readily accepted my apology.” The university is investigating.

Dementia’s painful toll

It’s only been a few weeks since Ralph Klein and his wife, Colleen, revealed that the former Alberta premier is suffering from progressive dementia. Although the couple is said to be heartened by the good wishes they’ve received from across the country since then, Ralph’s decline, at age 68, has been rapid and devastating. “He’s starting to get a little bit worse,” Colleen told Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid. “I’m not sure he always recognizes me anymore. He never says my name.”

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Harper on health care: hard to make it a vote-driving issue

By John Geddes - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 12:31 PM - 23 Comments

The Liberals have been making a late-campaign push to turn Stephen Harper’s past remarks about health care into a big election issue, and it’s hard to blame them. Those painstakingly selected quotes from Harper are certainly more germane to an actual policy file than any of miscellaneous old Michael Ignatieff lines the Conservatives creatively cut and paste into their attack ads.

Still, I doubt dredging up Harper’s past pronouncements on health is doing him much harm. He has a solid track record of not tampering with the status quo. His calls for Ottawa to step away from dictating health policy and let the provinces overhaul the system date from back before his creation of the new, more cautious Conservative party in 2003.

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A final public service in a long, distinguished career

By macleans.ca - Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 2 Comments

Nathan Denette/CP Andy Clark/Reuters

Ralph Klein always tackled problems head-on. And he generally got the last word.

As a crusading journalist in Calgary, he took frequent and deliberate aim at city hall. After an improbable victory as mayor, there were numerous tussles with balky bureaucrats. As provincial environment minister, he had many memorable scraps over government policy and finally, as premier of Alberta, he battled countless interest groups and unions—he once joked that his “day was not complete without a protest or two, or three”—while bringing fiscal rectitude to the province. His repeated electoral successes, and defeat of Alberta’s deficit, are the stuff of Canadian political legend.

That same determination held for his personal trials as well: when his drinking became an issue in 2001, he promptly admitted he had a problem and quit cold turkey.

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Software for your Alberta politics B.S. detector

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 3, 2011 at 7:35 PM - 103 Comments

Some of you will be reading my column on the resignation of Ed Stelmach as Alberta premier as early as today; some of you will have to wait until next week. In the meantime, I’ll give you some principles you can use to filter the hypotheses of other observers.

First of all, don’t believe anyone who tells you that Alberta politics is governed by some mystical tidal pattern of stagnation punctuated by revolution. Anybody who’s been here for the past 20 or 30 years should have learned to tune out the “massive change is just around the corner!” refrain by now, if only because advancing age has made him half-deaf. Preston Manning alone has been guilty of a dozen or so end-times prophecies of this sort (though, in fairness, prophecy is sort of a family tradition with him). News flash: pretty much everybody who voted here in 1935 is underground, and not because a basement suite was all they could afford. The Alberta electorate of 2011 in no way resembles that even of 1981; not ethnically, not culturally, not spiritually, not ideologically.

And the political spectrum itself has changed. As much as there might be a casual longing for a revival of “Peter Lougheed Conservatism”, Lougheed’s style of state corporatism, which led to budget disaster in the 1980s after his suspiciously timely exit, would probably now put any candidate who embraced it on the left wing of the federal NDP. Don’t believe anyone who tells you there is some unexploited, powerful hidden welter of Red Toryism in Alberta, waiting to spew forth into an appropriate channel. Even the reds aren’t that Red anymore.

There is no particular reason for Alberta politics to seek the same equilibrium in which our federal government is trapped, so don’t believe anyone who argues for realignment as some kind of cosmic axiom. Yes, I’m looking at Jeffrey Simpson here. Simpson is described endearingly by his employer as “a regular visitor to Alberta”, which seems like a deliberate invitation to scorn, but the man obviously is well-informed about the place. His characterization of the Alberta Liberal Party can only have come from someone familiar with it.

Simpson, however, believes Alberta politics is reverting to a “normal” shape (one it has never had) because the province no longer has any reason for hostility and suspicion toward a federal government led by a Calgarian. (With the bonus, one presumes, of a chief justice from Pincher Creek.) I think our visitor underestimates the ease of Ottawa-bashing in a world where Alberta farmers can still be jailed for defying the Wheat Board; where Alberta still pays toll upon toll for its presence in Confederation, layering pension and employment-insurance outflows on top of explicit fiscal equalization; where, as finance minister Ted Morton recently pointed out, Albertans are being billed specifically for the provincial sales tax liabilities of Ontarians and British Columbians. Morton’s a smart guy! He can find reasons to be upset with Ottawa almost as fast as Ottawa can come up with ways to screw Alberta!

I would tell you not to believe anyone who sees no difference between Ted Morton and Danielle Smith, but then, you barely have any choice aside from me. My column anticipating a personal tilt between Morton and Smith in the Calgary exurbs has been superseded with embarrassing speed by events, but at least it was written by somebody who can distinguish between various species of “right-winger” if given a pair of field glasses and sent out into the bush. The Morton-Smith personal combat, which already started when Smith announced a candidacy smack-dab in the middle of Morton Country, is more than superficial. Morton, by trifling with property rights as resource minister, has attacked the very principles Smith built her career around. She is physically moving to the rural south because Morton painted a target on himself; his core organizers and financial backers are gone, many directly to her, and they are not coming back. The Globe‘s Josh Wingrove is all over this, and understands it better than most writers for Alberta organs do; he, at least, is no mere visitor.

But, really, is there any realistic doubt that Morton and Smith could stage a pretty interesting political battle? Forget even the intriguing stylistic contrast: one of them has been a rights advocate for her entire career and the other is the country’s leading intellectual opponent of liberal “rights” rhetoric. One of them is pro-choice and pro-gay marriage; the other made his reputation blowing raspberries at the Morgentaler and Vriend decisions. It’s literally not possible that any reasonable person could be equally comfortable with either of the two as premier.

Other myths to be wary of? Don’t believe anybody who talks up the Alberta Party, at least until it has a leader, some policies, and a history of contesting elections. The idea that an Alberta political movement can go from zero to government in 6.8 seconds, just because Social Credit did it 76 years ago, is just a variant of the “every X years Y happens” myth. (Hasn’t anybody in this province read The Poverty of Historicism?) Don’t believe anything you are told about low Alberta voter turnout unless the province’s young-skewing demographics are factored in; young people don’t vote anywhere in the Western world, and we have more of them than you do.

And don’t put too much stock in the election of Naheed Nenshi as mayor of Calgary. What he accomplished was remarkable, but it also required less than 40% of the vote in a race where the establishment favourite, Barb Higgins, turned out to have a bad case of China Syndrome. The people who got giddy over big bad Calgary electing a relatively liberal mayor apparently haven’t heard that the last time Calgary elected a non-Liberal was 1977.

Sarah Palin is unstoppable

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 196 Comments

Photograph by Sally Ryan/The New York Times/ Redux

John McCain thought he needed to spring one more surprise on America.

In August 2008, his presidential campaign against Barack Obama was listing badly. Some of this was his fault. But after eight years of George W. Bush, anyone representing the Republican party came with a lot of baggage. McCain needed to choose a candidate for vice-president who underlined his reputation as a maverick within the party and who was untainted by close ties to the previous administration. The stakes were high. As John Heilemann and Mark Halperin write in Game Change, their book about the campaign, “If McCain’s running mate selection didn’t fundamentally alter the dynamics of the race, it was lights out.”

McCain’s original plan was to partner with Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic nominee for vice-president. McCain hoped such a choice would prove his bipartisan credentials, steal thunder from his opponents, and back-foot the press­—allowing his campaign to regain some momentum. But when word of the Lieberman plan leaked, much of the Republican party rebelled, and McCain was forced to scramble. “We need to have a transformative, electrifying moment in this campaign,” McCain strategist Steve Schmidt said. No one on the short list of alternative candidates could deliver this. Schmidt suggested a new option: Alaska governor Sarah Palin.

There wasn’t time to vet Palin properly, or to probe her thoughts on foreign and domestic policy. Picking Palin was a Hail Mary pass in the dying seconds of a championship game. But McCain met and liked her. She was confident and calm. She wasn’t afraid to burn bridges and upset people, even in the Republican party. She was an outsider, like him. Steve Schmidt told McCain choosing Palin could hurt him. But a safer candidate, he said, wouldn’t help. It would be better to go for the win and lose big than to tiptoe to a narrow defeat. “High risk, high reward,” another one of McCain’s advisers cautioned. “You shouldn’t have told me that,” McCain replied. “I’ve been a risk taker all my life.”

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Palin, the final word

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 12:38 AM - 145 Comments

Sarah Palin failed to tackle an esoteric problem tonight: how does a natural motormouth keep herself in check in front of a friendly audience? It’s an accepted part of a politician’s work to say what she has already said in other venues a million times. About the only way in which tonight’s Calgary speech varied from Palin’s standard post-gubernatorial drama of media persecution and conservative values was that every time she said the equivalent of “We built a pipeline”, it became “We built a pipeline with our super terrific Canadian partner TCPL, which just goes ta show ya.”

The problem was that Palin clued into the audience’s unconditional agreement with her worldview pretty quickly, and grew impatient; as fast as she was speeding through the statistics and the chuck-on-the-shoulder good-for-yous for Canada, many of us probably would have preferred it ten times faster. To me, the audience in the foyer after the speech seemed to be talking themselves into having had a good time.

It occurs to me that the Calgary mayoralty is up for grabs; maybe someone should see if Palin’s interested? In no other Canadian city of equal size would her denunciation of “snake-oil” climate science have been greeted with such unrestrained, joyous roars by a very elite, very wealthy audience. (The Palomino Room was saturated with old Reformers, including Stockwell Day. At the end of the festivities, Ralph Klein, perhaps eager for refreshment, came blasting down the aisle in my direction at the approximate speed of a maglev train.) I’m not sure there is even an American city where Palin’s climate skepticism and drill-or-be-damned pro-fossil stance would have been so well-received. Certainly there can’t be one where an appearance by Palin would be beset by a grand total of one (1) poor sad-sack anarchist protester. I know in Edmonton there’d be 20. (It’s the same 20 every time no matter what’s being protested.)

At the end of the night, as the attendees were filing out, some elderly contessa saw me typing furiously, leaned over, and said “Be kind to her.” It seems Palin, who will doubtless retain a strong streak of the exuberant bubbleheaded teenager to the end of her days, is as good as appealing to motherly and grandmotherly instincts as she is to male ones. I considered for a moment that it might not be for me to say that Palin was not a success, since I didn’t pay $150 for my seat. On the other hand, for those who did shell out, it was a sunk cost; the poor bastards on professional duty, like me, were the ones who weren’t allowed to leave. Sorry, but it’s hard to like someone who makes you suffer like that.

The rebels gather

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, November 6, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 3 Comments

Not long ago, after a Fraser Institute dinner at a Calgary hotel, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach strolled into the bar to find Rod Love, Ralph Klein’s one-time chief of staff, huddled with some friends drinking. “Is this the conspiracy table?” Stelmach, grinning broadly, asked the group. The gallows humour got a laugh. Still, there’s truth in jest. Love and one of his drinking buddies that night, Alan Hallman, a one-time campaign manager to Klein, had been rumoured to back a political challenger who could soon sweep Stelmach aside.

For weeks, the Tories’ annual general meeting in Red Deer, with its mandatory Nov. 7 leadership review, has promised to be good theatre, equal parts fun and intrigue (Duck Soup meets CPAC). Ordinarily a routine feature of party governance, this vote, wherein 1,000 delegates cast secret ballots for or against a leadership race, is now important business. Stelmach could go, and everywhere observers have delighted in identifying pretenders in the shadows—former leadership hopefuls Jim Dinning and Ted Morton, Calgary entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den panellist Brett Wilson, even federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice. Continue…

The readable Harper

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 4:29 PM - 37 Comments

Interestingly enough, Stephen Harper’s Parliamentary bio does not list him as minivan-driving middle class hockey dad, but as an “author, economist, lecturer.” Unfortunately, the Prime Minister lacks the easily accessible paper trail of his primary rival. Though there are a few good reads to be found.

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