Silly me. I simply assumed that Alberta Premier Danielle Smith didn’t pick Jason Stephan as her justice minister because he showed signs of being too much of a wingnut.
Turns out that probably wasn’t it. He may have been one of the few lawyers in her United Conservative Party Caucus, but he just wasn’t available when Smith needed him to start!
Leastways, in another entry for the rapidly thickening This-Could-Only-Happen-in-Alberta File, the MLA for Red Deer South didn’t bother to show up last week to be sworn in with most other MLAs for his second term.
No matter, though, after the brief June 20 sitting, the House won’t assemble again until the day before Halloween anyway, so there really isn’t much for MLAs not in Smith’s huge cabinet to do anyway. I mean, how many constituent barbecues can a representative’s arteries stand?
Local media tried to contact the missing MLA to find out what was going on without success. But eventually someone in the United Conservative Party Caucus thought to put out a statement explaining that Stephan wasn’t available to be sworn in because he is taking “a previously planned trip out-of-province with family.”
Tim Gerwing, the UCP Caucus communications director, “did not specify the exact nature of the trip,” Red Deer News Now solemnly reported.
“He will be sworn in before the Legislature sits again in the fall,” Gerwing assured the Red Deer Advocate. “Being sworn in allows an MLA to take his or her seat in the chamber. MLA Stephan will not miss any of his legislative duties because of this trip.”
The timing is interesting, though, since it’s been known since early November 2021 that the next provincial election was scheduled to take place on May 29 this year.
Perhaps Stephan really thought the NDP was going to beat him on May 29. It was always a longshot, but Red Deer South was rumoured to be one of the few ridings outside Calgary and Edmonton where the opposition party imagined it might have a chance.
More likely, though, Stephan just views the constituents who metronomically vote for him with genial contempt and sees no reason to hang around to represent them when he has better stuff to do just because they re-elected him.
Stephan was also left off the Legislative Assembly’s official seating chart, but presumably someone will be able to scare up a desk for him by Halloween.
The NDP, naturally, put out a statement about Stephan’s mysterious pre-planned absence.
“The fact that Jason Stephan chose to be travelling outside the province rather than fulfilling his duties to the people of Red Deer is extremely disrespectful, not just to his constituents but all Albertans,” NDP House Leader Christina Gray complained.
“Jason Stephan is not a rookie,” she also said. “He knows the process for swearing-in. Choosing to leave your constituents without representation is a shameful display of contempt for the Albertans who voted for him. The people of Red Deer deserve better.”
Well, fair enough, I guess. Nevertheless, I hope readers will forgive me if I say that I’m inclined to think his constituents got exactly what they deserve. One could even make the argument they will be better served by Stephan in his absence. So, no harm, no foul!
With Stephan out of the province, someone else from the UCP Caucus will have to complain about how the NDP government from 2015 to 2019 was, despite behaving remarkably like some of the Progressive Conservative governments that preceded it, “a socialist occupation.”
As Dave Cournoyer pointed out in 2020, there are several UCP MLAs now in Smith’s cabinet with the necessary red-baiting credentials to carry on Stephan’s calling in his absence.
He was also known as a relentless critic of COVID-19 mitigation measures and is said to be a strong supporter of Smith’s unconstitutional Sovereignty Something-Something Act.
This is not Stephan’s first travel controversy. He was booted off the Treasury Board in January 2021 during the Kenney government’s first mid-pandemic travel scandal, one of several MLAs and staff members demoted for travelling when the rest of us were supposed to be hunkered down at home doing our civic duty to avoid the virus.
“By travelling abroad over the holidays, these individuals demonstrated extremely poor judgment,” then-premier Jason Kenney said at the time. “Albertans have every right to expect that people in positions of public trust be held to a higher standard of conduct during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Well, those days are certainly over in Alberta!
Stephan declined to apologize for his 2021 Arizona holiday.
“There is already too much contention in our society and I regret if my actions have contributed to that,” he said. “I look forward to moving past this experience.”
“I support individuals and families having the freedom to choose for themselves whether they travel or not, provided they are respectful of others in doing so,” he also said. “International travel, in and of itself, does not negatively impact Alberta’s COVID curve if it is done responsibly.”
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Nick Seebruch, editor
