Back in the days Sandra Jansen was one of the few Progressive Conservatives to have survived the debacle of the May 5, 2015, provincial election, the Calgary-North West MLA was savaged by the right-wing rage machine for daring to express support for Liberal candidates Kent Hehr and Nirmala Naidoo in the October 2015 federal election.
You just don’t publicly support a Liberal if you’re a Tory in Alberta, she learned, not if you want to avoid a vicious public hazing.
It’s been said it wasn’t any better behind the closed doors of the PC Caucus where, Alberta political legend has it, interim Leader Ric McIver excoriated her like a schoolgirl in front of her fellow Tory MLAs, demanding that she not even indicate she was stumping for a couple of federal Grits.
Alas for McIver, the former broadcaster is said to have given it back as good as she got it in a caucus session described as profane and angry — and which may have marked the day the PC members in the Legislature pretty much stopped working as a team.
So isn’t it funny how there’s been nary a peep of protest from the Usual Suspects on the Alberta Right about newly elected Progressive Conservative Leader Jason Kenney’s foray into British Columbia politics where, of all things, he was overheard stumping at a federal Conservative clambake in a chichi Vancouver restaurant for B.C. Premier Christy Clark — who is, of course, a Liberal.
Not just a Liberal either, but one that dares to set conditions on Alberta’s all-party plans for more pipelines to the West Coast.
It would seem that in Alberta conservative circles, what’s sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander, especially if the gander is the fellow the big money boys in Calgary have chosen to lead Alberta’s Conservatives back to the promised land of power.
That certainly wasn’t going to be Jansen, who got another lesson in how things really work in Alberta conservative circles when she ran for the PC Party’s leadership as a candidate who put the progressive back in Progressive Conservative.
She was soon hounded from the race by Kenney supporters — the topic of her support for Liberal federal candidates came up again, bien sur! — and today sits as a New Democrat MLA in Premier Rachel Notley’s government.
This week includes anniversaries of Fort Mac Fire and NDP victory
Two important anniversaries in recent Alberta history will occur this week — and there’s always the possibility of another event of historical significance.
Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the day the devastating Fort McMurray Fire swept into the northern oilsands city and began destroying houses — a disaster that eventually saw virtually the entire population of the city of 90,000 forced to leave and destroyed about 2,400 structures, roughly 15 per cent of the city’s housing.
Friday marks the second anniversary of the general election that brought the NDP to power under Premier Notley, an astonishing development in a place the prevailing narrative had always insisted was Canada’s most-conservative province. Alberta’s conservatives, who had run the place for most of the previous 80 years and had apparently concluded they ruled by divine right, have been in a state of sustained and inconsolable fury ever since.
The possible event of historical significance mooted above, is a public gesture symbolizing if not quite delivering union of the province’s two principal conservative political parties — the PCs under Kenney and the Wildrose Party under Opposition Leader Brian Jean — that Kenney was reportedly dropping broad hints about in Vancouver last weekend.
Not all PCs and Wildrosers may be enthusiastic just yet about the union of their parties’ legislative caucuses, especially if Kenney is in the lead. But there’s been a fairly constant buzz for a few days that something may be cooking, possibly along the lines of some sort of mass shift by four or five Wildrosers and/or a similar number of PC MLAs in the Legislature.
Certainly, sooner or later, Kenney is going to want to engineer a grand gesture to demonstrate not only that the right is uniting, but that he’s in charge of the union — an impression Jean, presumably, would very much like to avoid.
Dumpster fire continues to blaze at Edmonton Catholic Schools
Speaking of fires, the dumpster fire that is Edmonton Catholic Schools continued to rage yesterday with the public firing of a trustee as vice-chair and a knuckle-rap for another who dared suggest something was wrong with refusing to let students who have completed their required credits attend a graduation ceremony if they haven’t also finished their religion classes.
The Catholic board canned Marilyn Bergstra as vice chair, and rapped Patricia Grell on the knuckles, metaphorically speaking, for “blatant disrespect” and lacking Catholic values. Neither were told in advance what was coming.
Students who opt out of religion classes but complete their required Alberta Education curriculum can receive their diplomas in the mail, thank you very much. Catholic schools all over Alberta, however, continue to court non-Catholic students and the generous per-student grants that come with them.
Bergstra told the CBC she thought she was also in trouble with the majority on the board for calling for medically accurate sex-education and showing sympathy for LGBTQ students.
If this all seems rather unchristian, the constitutional right of Alberta’s Catholics to run their own school system is unquestioned. However, if a recent court decision in Saskatchewan is anything to go by, that provincial system’s right to expect public funding for non-Catholic students is not nearly as clear.
Faced with a court ruling saying such funding is unconstitutional in his province, Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall came up with a plan yesterday to ignore the courts by using use Section 33 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the notorious “Notwithstanding Clause.”
It will be very interesting to see how this shakes out. If past experience in Alberta during Ralph Klein’s premiership is an indicator, the Saskatchewan Premier’s Office might want to hire some thick-skinned temps to man the telephones for the rest of the week.
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.
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