Former Alberta NDP environment minister Shannon Phillips announced on social media today she is joining a policy advisory firm with Conservative political advisor Ken Boessenkool and his Liberal equivalent Tyler Meredith.
The firm is to be called Meredith, Boessenkool & Phillips.
All three are smart policy-oriented political operators with lots of experience, so they’ll probably do quite nicely, thank you very much.
That said, at first glance, there’s a certain discomfort seeing a principled New Democrat joining a couple of representatives of what Dippers way back in the day used to call the “old line parties.” (This line has now been co-opted by the far-right Peoples Party of Canada, not without some justice.)
But why the hell not? As things stand, at the actual policy level there’s essentially no light between the New Democrats at either the provincial or federal level and the Liberals, and very little, notwithstanding the MAGA delusions and red-baiting rhetoric by the UCP base in Alberta, between the NDP and the Conservatives.
All have fully adopted the neoliberal program of the past 40 years, which obviously does not work for working Canadians, and that is why working Canadians like the working class in other modern Western democracies has in despair moved to the right and will likely continue to do so.
If, as is widely assumed, Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party of Canada forms the next federal government and, as expected here at AlbertaPolitics.ca, proceeds not to address the problems the leader has promised to fix because of the party’s obvious deep commitment to neoliberal economics, lacking any alternative on the left working people will probably seek alternatives even farther to the right.
One of the obvious symptoms of this shift toward the right in Canada has been the increasingly harsh, even hateful, tone of political discourse, particularly by parties like Alberta’s United Conservatives.
As environment minister in Rachel Notley’s NDP government from 2015 to 2019, Phillips was viciously and relentlessly attacked by UCP propagandists as if she were some kind of radical environmental extremist bent on destroying the oil and gas industry.
This was the kind of nonsense we came to expect from the UCP under Jason Kenney and which has continued under his successor, Premier Danielle Smith.
But while Phillips had been an advocate before entering politics of views on the environment stronger than any policy position likely ever to be taken by the NDP, she was hardly an outlier in Notley’s government, which could fairly be described as either centre-right or progressive conservative for the policies it delivered.
Phillips was in cabinet when the NDP moved to eliminate coal-fired electricity generation, a policy that sounds radical only in the most MAGAfied corners of the UCP base. Of course, Ms. Phillips also speaks plainly and forcefully, a quality not much admired among social conservatives if the speaker is a woman.
She announced in The Globe and Mail on June 9 that she was quitting politics and resigning as the MLA for Lethbridge-West directly because of the kind of harassment and disinformation women are habitually subjected to in Canadian politics today.
The harassment to which Phillips was subjected included being illegally spied upon and photographed by members of the Lethbridge Police Service, an activity that was clearly influenced by the overheated rhetoric of the UCP. Her inability to do anything about it despite her position as an MLA undoubtedly influenced her decision.
Now, none of this is intended as a criticism of Phillips and Meredith and Boessenkool. The situation is what it is, as the annoying folk saying goes, and folks have to make a living.
Phillips is said to get along with NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi, so perhaps when he is premier he can send a little business in the unlikely trio’s direction.
Late last month Phillips also announced she was taking a part-time adjunct teaching position with the University of Lethbridge’s political science department.
Readers will recall that Boessenkool entered into a partnership similar to this a decade ago, with New Democrat Brian Topp and Liberal strategist Don Guy.
That firm – which had the excellent and memorable name of Kool Topp & Guy – boasted that it was the political equivalent of “Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux and Sidney Crosby playing together, all the time.”
In that imagining, Topp played left wing; Boesenkool, right wing; and Guy, centre. In reality, notwithstanding Topp’s unsuccessful candidacy in 2011 and 2012 to lead the federal NDP, one could argue that they all played right wing.
Thomas Mulcair was the victor in that NDP race, by the way, and we all know how that ended: Not well for Mulcair, and not well for the NDP either.
It would appear the order of names in the new firm was selected so that its initials would align with its slogan, “Make Better Policy.”
Readers are invited to come up with alternatives by placing the initials in any order. Be nice, though!
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