When word leaked out in the spring of 2014 about a plan by the Progressive Conservatives to build a penthouse suite for premier Alison Redford atop a government office building in downtown Edmonton, Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith excoriated the scheme dubbed the Sky Palace by its critics.
Five days after Redford resigned on March 23, pushed out by her own caucus, a CBC story revealed details of the project to remodel the 11th floor of the Queen Elizabeth II Building, then confusingly known as the Federal Building, as a secure Edmonton premiers’ residence.
Smith was quoted in the story calling the idea “an absolute disgrace.”
In early May, as leader of the Opposition in the Legislature, she was still assailing the project.
“The Sky Palace has become the ultimate symbol of this current PC era,” she fumed in the House, calling the plan “duplicitous, entitled, secretive, wasteful, and completely out of touch with the priorities of everyday Albertans.”
But that was then.
This is now.
When some of the many rumours about free skybox seats at Oilers playoff games in Edmonton and Vancouver provided by well-connected friends of the government that have been dogging the United Conservative Party on social media were confirmed By The Globe and Mail on Thursday, Smith, now Alberta’s premier, had a quite different response.
“As I understand it, all of the rules have been followed,” she told reporters at a news conference on Friday.
The cases are not identical – one was a significant public project with a legitimate purpose and arguably a public benefit; the other involves gifts and favours from people who can be fairly described as having an interest in keeping the government sweet.
Still, many of the same criticisms can be levelled fairly at the Skybox affair as were used in the spring of 2014 to attack the PCs, who the same day Redford resigned as premier had replaced her with the stalwart cabinet veteran Dave Hancock until a new permanent leader could be found.
That new leader, Jim Prentice, eventually persuaded Smith and eight of her Wildrose MLAs to cross the floor and join his PC caucus. They did in December 2014. Partly as a result, on May 5, 2015, the PCs lost dramatically to the NDP, ending nearly 44 years of unbroken PC rule and appearing to crater Ms. Smith’s political career.
While it remains far from clear that no rules have been broken in this year’s Skybox fiasco, despite the UCP having changed the rules to make it easier for elected officials to receive expensive gifts including sports tickets, all the legal niceties were in fact observed in the Sky Palace Affair.
The problem in 2014 was that some unwritten political rules were not.
The most serious political rule broken by the PCs while the $2-million-plus premier’s residence was being planned was the unwritten one that a government long in the tooth ought not to do things that seriously irritate voters who are already tired of it. That of course includes withholding information about expensive projects that are bound to be controversial when they leak, as they soon did in the case of the Sky Palace.
Arguably, though, the Sky Palace was in fact a good idea that could have been sold to the public. After all, it would have saved money on expenses and security.
It would have provided a temporary residence for all premiers whose homes were not in Edmonton. (Since 1905, only five of Alberta’s 19 premiers represented Edmonton ridings.) So, instead of paying for a hotel, rental, or mortgage as well as high security costs as we do now, there would have been a secure suite within a government building adjacent to the Legislature for any premier’s use.
As for keeping the Sky Palace a secret – that appears to have been a dumb idea cooked up by Wayne Drysdale, the infrastructure minister when the plan was launched, and foolishly continued by Ric McIver, who served briefly in the portfolio in the same time period. PC caucus members and even cabinet ministers have complained they were never told about the project.
One thing Smith did get right back in 2014 is that Sky Palace in fact became an enduring symbol of the entitled and out-of-touch final years of the Progressive Conservative Era.
It remains to be seen if the web of apparent sleaze reported by the Globe on Thursday will come to be how the public remembers the UCP’s time in office.
Certainly the optics of cabinet members going to expensive playoff games as guests of a guy whose company was involved in the their party’s $100-million-adjacent scheme to own the Libs by importing hard-to-use bottles of bad-tasting Turkish-made children’s “Tylenot” are horrible.
The same can be said of the spectacle of a director of an Alberta Crown corporation, owned by the province, buying tickets for the premier and her staff to go to a playoff game in Vancouver.
As Charles Rusnell, the former CBC investigative reporter who broke the story about expensive changes to the Sky Palace plan in 2014, said of the Skybox affair on social media Friday: “Usually, it takes a couple terms before politicians and govts become so blinded by power that they take freebies from rich supporters. @abdaniellesmith’s government bellied up to the trough after 13 months.”
In a statement on various social media platforms, newly chosen NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said “the revelations about multiple ministers, staff members, and the Premier herself attending playoff hockey games on lobbyists’ dimes should come as no surprise to Albertans given the level of cronyism shown by this government.”
“Last year, the Premier complained publicly that she wasn’t allowed to go to hockey games with lobbyists and proceeded to change the rules so that she could,” he continued. “So, it’s no surprise that her staff went to a game paid for by the company she awarded the nearly $100 million failed Turkish Tylenol scheme.”
Sounding not unlike the Danielle Smith of a decade ago, Nenshi observed: “Having ministers and staff sit in lobbyists’ luxury boxes while we are facing an affordability crisis in this province not only looks bad, it shows they’re living in a different world than the average Albertan.”
But – who knows? – maybe average Albertans will buy Smith’s explanation that “people wanted to see us support our team” instead of, say, seeing her visit Fort McMurray where residents were facing the need to evacuate their homes in the face of wildfires.
After all, as they say, the past is a foreign country.
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