“It’s just a jump to the left….
“…And then a step to the right!”
We’re in a time warp, people! And Ron Liepert, Tory Riff-Raff personified, is back, bigger and uglier than ever!
Progressively minded Albertans of the naïve sort who, full of hope, bought Progressive Conservative Party memberships so they could vote for the most liberally minded candidate were wailing and gnashing their teeth yesterday. A few of them may even have been, as they say in the media, choking back tears.
Back during the PC leadership race, these nice folks pinned their hopes on candidate Alison Redford, a one-term MLA and former human rights lawyer and who served as Justice Minister in departed premier Ed Stelmach’s cabinet.
Their votes were probably what pushed Redford over the top on Oct. 1, when the Tories counted the final ballots in their eight-month leadership campaign and she edged out former front-runner Gary Mar, who had foolishly announced he favoured some forms of private health care.
And so Redford became the leader of the multi-generational ruling PC dynasty and was sworn in as premier last Friday. Today, she revealed her cabinet picks.
It is now apparent (cue the musicians) that if during the campaign she took a jump to the left — far enough to give the far-right Wildrose Alliance something to wail about — today she took a lurch to the right.
In addition to vowing to preserve public health care, she had promised to get rid of some of the “household names” in Stelmach’s ministry — and tout le monde political Alberta simply assumed this meant Ron Liepert, the perennially unpopular bull in the provincial china shop.
Liepert was the guy who tried to re-reform Ralph Klein’s “Third Way” when that premier’s attempt to Americanize Alberta public health care went south in the face of voter resistance. Liepert was the famously short-tempered fellow on whose watch Alberta tried its catastrophic experiment in health care centralization, moved seniors’ care increasingly toward a high-cost private model, saw the crisis in the province’s Emergency Rooms boil over, and brought us Stephen Duckett, the famously undiplomatic Australian, to stir the pot as CEO of AHS.
Liepert got so unpopular seniors booed him spontaneously when he walked into a room, and Stelmach eventually shuffled him off to the Energy Ministry to get him out of harm’s way. Stelmach replaced him with the smooth and competent Gene Zwozdesky, who quickly restored the appearance at least of order in Alberta’s troubled health care system.
Not only that, but Liepert was among Mar’s most enthusiastic supporters and, after Mar lost, loudly proclaimed that he didn’t support Redford’s promised public inquiry into the sorry state of health care under his gentle hand.
But today Premier Redford astonished everyone by skidding the competent and pleasant Zwozdesky and making Ron Liepert the Minister of Finance. Thanks to the premier, he now has even more power and greater opportunity to wreak havoc with public services.
As Alberta NDP Leader Brian Mason warned the Edmonton Journal yesterday afternoon, having Liepert around in this important job means there will soon be a “rockem-sockem attack” on public spending.
And as Alberta Liberal Leader Dr. Raj Sherman, himself a former Tory Parliamentary Assistant for Health, accurately added, the return of the “one man wrecking ball” illustrates that “you can change the leader, but the party is much stronger than the leader.”
Apparently everyone had forgotten that Liepert and Redford also had a political history — when he helped her unsuccessful attempt to knock off nutty uber-right Calgary MP Rob Anders.
Meanwhile, Redford made health policy consultant Fred Horne the minister of health. Horne, another former Parliamentary Assistant for Health, is well known as a friend of private health care, and was also mixed up in accusations a year ago he’d made inappropriate comments about the state of Sherman’s mental health.
So if progressive voters who supported Redford on the strength of her pledges to preserve public health care were having trouble breathing yesterday morning, they could be forgiven.
Indeed, it looks like we have our very own Rocky Mountain Cabinet Horror Show with Redford playing the role of Dr. Frank N. Furter, who dresses as one thing (in this case a squishy liberal) but frankly appears to be quite another.
Redford’s entire cabinet has that Transylvanian Tory time warp feel, with numerous PC retreads such as loony right-wing ideologue Ted Morton (back as energy minister charged with defending tar sands petroleum extraction and low royalty rates), lightweight Stelmach loyalist Tom Lukaszuk (promoted to the heavy-duty education ministry) and Dave Hancock as minister of the massive new Human Services super-ministry — which seems to have been created mainly so that the number of cabinet seats can be dramatically reduced in the months before a general election. Also, of course, she named leadership candidate Doug Horner deputy premier and Treasury Board president.
So much for the power of sisterhood, Redford only named two additional women to the testosterone-drenched 20-member cabinet.
In fairness, there were some new faces — including several predicted in this space — but none that would startle a reader as voices of moderate progressivism. There are few other than Morton, Hancock and Horner who could be called heavyweights.
As the always useful Daveberta blog observed, at least Premier Redford avoided one of Stelmach’s first egregious errors by achieving “a respectable geographic balance.”
However, two grimmer conclusions can be drawn immediately from today’s cabinet choices:
1) With Morton as energy minister, there will be no meaningful revision of the royalty rates structure, ever, other than possibly to give even more money to petroleum extraction companies.
2) With Liepert and Horne as key gatekeepers in cabinet, the public inquiry into abuses in the health care system will never happen in any meaningful way.
So it’s really pretty simple people: If you want progressive policies, you have to vote for a progressive political party.
This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, Alberta Diary.
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