Avid Alberta emailer Freddy Lee "Ted" Morton

Having been accused of getting up to something with a real government of Alberta email account and a not-quite-so-real name, Progressive Conservative leadership candidate Freddy Lee “Ted” Morton has offered a sort of “rolled-up plea” before the court of public opinion.

First of all, plead the American-born neo-Con ideologue and his key supporters, sure he did it, but everybody does.

Second, even though he did do it, and even though everybody else does it too, he didn’t really do it, because he used his real name.

So, as Morton’s spokesperson, a fellow named Ryan Sparrow recently told my community’s newspaper, the St. Albert Gazette, “the leadership candidate does not believe he did anything wrong … ‘Absolutely not. The minister’s office followed all the rules and guidelines.'”

Indeed, according to the Gazette, Sparrow said that “having one email for public consumption and another for internal communication is not uncommon, and Morton’s secret account was a government one with his name. ‘The premier has said he does the same practice and the deputy premier, who is also a leadership candidate.'” (Emphasis added.)

The idea behind this line of reasoning being, presumably, that if the first part doesn’t succeed, then … the prosecution can just drop dead!

Never mind that everybody doesn’t do it. In fact, I’ll make a gentleman’s wager right now that while Premier Ed Stelmach, just to pluck one political name out of the air, may have a private email account, it’s not in the name of Edward.Michael@ … wherever.

And never mind that using his real name doesn’t get Morton off the hook, because almost nobody knew it was his real name, and Morton knew that.

In other words, Stelmach, who used to be called “Honest Ed” for a reason, would get it that anyone looking at such an address would assume it belonged to someone named Mr. Michael, and that that would be deceptive. (And by the way, people, just in case there’s a real Edward Michael working for the government of Alberta, please don’t go sending the poor guy emails today to find out if he’s really the premier. That’s called collateral damage, and it’s not nice when it happens to you or someone you care about.)

Of course, it’s not at all clear whether this little email imbroglio will hurt Morton. The prevailing opinion among both his neo-Con supporters, who obviously have a dog in the hunt, and cynical lefties who have seen how things operate in Alberta for far too long, is that it won’t make any difference.

Me, I’m not so sure. I think a lot of small-c conservative Albertans are honourable people — even if they hold some ideas about economics that I think are wrongheaded — and it’ll trouble them that their favourite candidate is a sneak. It may not trouble them enough to go back to the Wildrose Party, but it might bother them enough to vote for another right-wing candidate like Rick Orman or Doug Griffiths.

We’ll see on Saturday, I guess. But if I were Morton, I’d be thinking that I needed to change some opinions if I wanted to get my chance at last to take the Progressive out of Conservative in Alberta.

And what do you do when you need to change opinions? Why, “you hire opinion changers,” of course.

Anyway, that’s what the people at a little Ontario-based firm called Crestview Opinion Changes said last June when they welcomed none other than Ryan Sparrow to their team as a vice-president with responsibility for the company’s activities in Western Canada.

Sparrow’s “decade of experience in media relations, strategic communications and public policy will serve Crestview clients well in the areas of public affairs campaigns, provincial government relations and communications,” they said in an announcement that also noted their new VP’s tenure as an advisor to Prime Minister Harper.

And a couple of weeks ago, not long before Morton’s problems managing his email accounts became public thanks to the CBC, Sparrow’s name began turning up at the bottom of press releases published by Freddy Lee.

In fact, Sparrow can probably give some excellent advice to Morton about what to do, and what not to do, with his public email accounts, having had some interesting experiences in that area himself.

Alert readers will recall that back in the 2008 federal election campaign, Sparrow got in a spot of trouble himself for sending an email. Indeed, he was suspended from his role as a senior communications advisor to the prime minister after he sent an email to CTV news suggesting that the father of a Canadian soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2006, who had criticized the PM’s Afghan policy, was a supporter of a Liberal candidate named Michael Ignatieff, who later was that party’s leader for a spell.

The Globe and Mail reported at the time: “‘Note that this guy is an Iggy supporter,’ the e-mail read, followed by a link to a page on Mr. Ignatieff’s website offering condolences on (the father’s) loss.”

This was apparently too much even for some of Harper’s stronger-constitutioned supporters. And who knows, that email may have been one of the reasons why Harper had to wait until 2011 to form a majority government?

Regardless, the Alberta neo-Con candidate and his experienced adviser now have until next Saturday to work on changing enough opinions to ensure that Tory voters remember Dr. Morton and forget Mr. Lee.

This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...