When Alberta Information and Privacy Commissioner Frank Work nailed him with a right hook (metaphorically speaking) late last week, it must have felt to Premier Ed Stelmach as if everyone was piling on.
By now, presumably, Alberta’s premier is almost getting used to taking shots about the catastrophic state of health care, Alberta’s $2-billion “carbon capture” boondoggle, rural outrage over the location of expensive and questionable power lines, Canada’s highest cabinet salaries, the government’s inability to keep its budget promises and all the other issues that bedevil his government.
But the shot from Work about the premier’s secretive governing style must have seemed like it really came out of left field. (And, by the way, for those of you who don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the martial arts, plus readers who object to mixed metaphors, your left side is where a right hook is bound to appear!)
Work, after all, is no screaming radical, and as far as anyone knows he’s not a partisan of any opposition political party. But he is an officer of the Legislature, with an independent streak, and he is known to be jealous of the powers of his office. As his official on-line biography explicitly states of his status, “as such, he is independent of the government.”
So the premier really shouldn’t have been surprised by Work’s critical observations, included in the introduction to his office’s 2009-2010 annual report, which was released to the public on Jan. 13. In the report, Work scolded the government for its failure to deliver on Stelmach’s past ritual promises to be more accountable and transparent.
“People who want our votes, particularly at the provincial and federal levels, espouse accountability and transparency,” Work said, noting that “the first of Premier Stelmach’s five priorities when he ran for election in 2006 was to govern with integrity and transparency.”
Work then chided the premier and his government for “a lack of leadership” regarding the public’s right to timely information about the government activities its taxes pay for. “Compliance with the law is pretty good,” he conceded. “But what I do not see, for the most part, is leadership at the political level in terms of getting information out, being proactive and fostering a culture of openness.”
Fostering a culture of openness is probably too much to ask of any politician, but it is certainly too much to expect from an Alberta Progressive Conservative like Premier Stelmach. Indeed, it’s sort of a truism here in Alberta that Stelmach’s government is among the most secretive in Canada.
From the premier’s continued refusal to name many of his leadership campaign donors, to his energy minister’s secret advisory panel, to a government agency’s use of private detectives to snoop on citizens opposed to a power line, to the widespread (and oft denied) sense the government has a secret health care privatization agenda, to the misleading partly tax-free formula used to disguise the size of politicians’ paycheques, Stelmach’s government is widely suspected by the public of being both opaque and sneaky.
Nonetheless, Work pleaded with Alberta politicians and senior bureaucrats to foster a culture of democratic openness, and fired a shot directly across the premier’s bow, challenging him personally “to appear during the next Right to Know Week and talk specifically about what has been done to further open and transparent government.”
Work’s admonitions, of course, are unlikely to have much impact on the behaviour of either Stelmach or his government’s officials.
But then, as he also pointed out, that’s really up to us. Work’s real challenge was directed to those of us who are not directly involved in government.
“There will be a lot of elections in the coming year,” he said. “I challenge the public to make openness and transparency an election issue for every candidate and then to expect delivery on any promises made.”
We Albertans should really take him up on that!
This post originally appeared as David Climenhaga’s column in Friday’s edition of the Saint City News, a weekly newspaper in St. Albert, Alberta. It is also posted on his blog, Alberta Diary.
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