Robin Campbell

Who leaked Alberta's budget details? And who plugged the leak?

| February 11, 2013

It's a whodunit, a little like the one about the dog that didn't bark.

Why didn't the Calgary Herald create a huge front-page brouhaha when its columnist Don Braid ferreted out some pretty startling facts about Alberta's March 7 budget?

Alberta MLAs get down to work -- sort of -- tomorrow

David J. Climenhaga

| May 23, 2012

It’s great work if you can find it!

The first session of the 28th Legislature of Alberta opens tomorrow and will sit for … hold onto your hats, people … all of six days.

In their defence, sort of, that's about all Premier Alison Redford and the rest of the Legislature's 87 MLAs are going to need anyway, because they only plan to deal with one piece of legislation, something called, appropriately enough, Bill 1.

Bill 1 is … well, actually, Bill 1 is a secret. You'll find out what it’s about tomorrow at the same time as the rest of us.

Calculating the odds in the race for Alberta's Legislative Speaker

David J. Climenhaga

| April 27, 2012

JASPER, Alberta

Just when you thought it was safe to go out of the house again, there's another election!

But you don’t get to vote in this one, even though it’s pretty important to Alberta just the same.

Next on the agenda for the Alberta Legislature: the 87 newly elected MLAs need to elect a Speaker to preside over their … er … deliberations.

Sounds routine, but in a funny inside-baseball way, the Speaker's job is almost as important as the premier's. The Speaker, after all, is the person who gets to set the tone of debate in the Legislature and can go a long way to make it civilized, or hyper-partisan.

Glenn Taylor quits his day job -- now he has a few weeks to save the Alberta Party

David J. Climenhaga

| January 5, 2012

With an election looming, it's nice to see that Alberta Party Leader Glenn Taylor has finally cleared the decks for action and is about to start campaigning seriously for the job of MLA in the West Yellowhead riding.

When government MLAs start blowing whistles, who rats them out? Their legislative assistants, of course!

David J. Climenhaga

| July 21, 2011

"When in doubt, tell the truth," Mark Twain famously advised. "It will confound your enemies and astound your friends!"

New Alberta Party leader's challenge is to turn a New Age blip into lasting political phenomenon

David J. Climenhaga

| May 29, 2011

In the end, the Alberta Party's leadership vote yesterday came down to a choice between old-style plebeian NDP politics and old-style patrician Liberal politics.

Tweet! Character counts in Alberta Party leadership race, and not just the way you're thinking...

David J. Climenhaga

| February 10, 2011

OK, people, if Tweets can win an election, maybe Glenn Taylor will be the next premier of Alberta.

"Glen Who," you wonder?

@TWEET: "You know, Glenn Taylor, the Mayor of Hinton… He's running for the leadership of the new Alberta Party!" (85 characters)

"Oh, I thought he would. He's already their only MLA…"

Alberta's ER crisis moves from full-blown swivet to three-ring circus!

David J. Climenhaga

| November 29, 2010

Can Ed Stelmach's Conservative government really be so vindictive they'd go after a high-profile critic's medical license?

That kind of thing was being said in Alberta last week by people who didn't appear to be joking.

The province is in enough of an uproar over the government's spectacular mishandling of the health care file that plenty of Albertans are inclined to believe it. You can't go into a restaurant, a hair salon or a Tim Horton's in Alberta these days without hearing things like this said aloud by ordinary folks for whom politics and health care policy are normally a foreign country.

Even a week ago, most people who noticed would have said impossible. After all, nobody's that dumb!

Robin Campbell

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