Edmonton-Mill Woods Conservative MLA Carl Benito

Now that the far-right Wildrose Party is poaching Alberta NDP policy, could we trust them to carry it out?

Doubtful, but you can hardly blame Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith for trying to exploit the near-universal outrage throughout Alberta at the province’s shocking electricity prices.

These prices, cripplingly high now and showing no sign of abating thanks to the misconceived and hard-to-understand “deregulation” implemented by the catastrophic Ralph Klein government in the mid-1990s, nevertheless seem unable to inspire any subsequent Progressive Conservative government to do anything about them.

Part of the problem is pretty clearly the reluctance of the post-Klein Conservatives, whether led by Ed Stelmach or Alison Redford, to say no to anything described by anyone with a PR department on their payroll as an open market — no matter how little true competition there may be in that market, or how open it is to manipulation and abuse.

Meanwhile, one can’t shake the feeling that another part of the PCs’ unwillingness to act has to do with who benefits from the current situation, which has resulted in far higher prices for consumers than in the bad old days of market regulation, but, presumably, bigger profits for some of the government’s deep-pocketed friends.

Just after New Year, New Democrat Leader Brian Mason floated the sensible idea of freezing electricity prices while some form of regulation was re-imposed on the province’s small number of electricity producers. “I don’t believe the families and the businesses of Alberta should be subjected to a system that cannot produce reliable power at a reliable price and at an affordable price,” Mason stated on Jan. 5. “Frankly, I don’t know why Albertans are willing to put up with this crap.”

The Alberta Liberals are also on record as supporting a return to a regulated price regime.

Yesterday, Smith jumped on the electricity bandwagon with a promise, summarized by a local newspaper, “to reform electricity market price-setting mechanisms,” whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean.

The problem with believing the Wildrose Party’s proposals for getting electricity prices under control is that just like the Redford Tories, the Stelmach Tories and the Klein Tories, they’re knee-jerk market fundamentalists, and anything they come up with is therefore bound to have many of the same structural flaws as the disastrous Klein-Stelmach-Redford approach.

Indeed, as the Edmonton Journal vaguely summarized Smith’s proposal, “her party wouldn’t eliminate the wholesale electricity market, (but) would look at ‘the possible introduction’ of a system where prices were set a day ahead, rather than hourly, to reduce price spikes.” Huh?

Ask yourself, can you trust the market fundamentalist Wildrose Party to actually do something about a problem that calls out for government regulation of any market?

What the arrival of Smith and her Wildrose posse at this unlikely place for them is just how big a problem electricity prices have become in the minds of ordinary Albertans. As Smith pointed out, “absolutely it will be a campaign issue… Every time I go to a rural town hall, it is the No. 1 issue.”

Indeed, one suspects this has the potential to be big enough to upset Redford’s apple cart if the Conservatives aren’t prepared to say something about pulling the plug on the problem. This week, however, they were silent, leaving it to the chair of the Alberta Utilities Commission to justify their inaction.

Bye-bye Benito

Regardless of ideological stripe, opponents of the Alberta government were broken-hearted yesterday to learn Edmonton-Mill Woods MLA Carl Benito had lost the Progressive Conservative nomination in his riding.

Benito, a former real estate agent and passionate martial artist, was the first Philippine-born MLA to grace the Alberta Legislature. Alas, he was better known for his promises than his other qualities. Specifically, he got into the news for a spectacular 2008 promise that was imperfectly kept.

While running for office, Benito told his constituents he would donate his entire salary to create a scholarship fund for students in his southeast Edmonton riding, which is home to hundreds of new Canadian families. Alas, circumstances must have changed, and in the event he donated only $500 each to 12 high school students from his riding.

In November 2010, Benito was back in the news columns for failing to pay thousands in taxes on rental properties he owned. When the news leaked, he blamed his wife and paid the bill.

In the event, voters in the riding made the unusual decision to turf a sitting MLA and chose businessman Sohail Quadri as their standard-bearer to go up against NDP candidate Sandra Azocar, a vice-president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, Former Liberal MLA Weslyn Mather and Wildrose candidate Joanne Autio, a businesswoman.

For his part, Benito blamed ethnic politics in his community for his defeat. No official word on what the premier’s office made of all this.

Sell advisory issued on Ukrainian gas?

Investors who own shares in energy companies eyeing new gas fields in the Ukraine might want to reconsider their investments in the wake of yesterday’s news former Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is “using his expertise on the energy industry to help the Ukrainian government improve development of its gas resources.”

Say what? Apparently Stelmach traveled last month to the former Soviet republic, the birthplace of his grandparents, to advise its government on such topics as shale gas technology, coal-bed methane extraction and squeezing the last gigajoule of gas from existing wells.

Investors are said to be wary of involvement in Ukraine because of the policies of its big next-door neighbour and its regulatory process, described in a Ukrainian newspaper as unpredictable and difficult to understand — which, come to think of it, sounds a lot like electricity back in Stelmach’s native Alberta!

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...