Alberta Media and Politics

Historically, it is not unusual for provinces to be governed by a single party for decades at a time. Some of these dynastic governments delivered great and positive change not just to their province, but the country itself. Saskatchewan's NDP dynasty inspired our modern health care system. Ontario's Conservative dynasty of the 19th century established the power of the provinces over the federal government. Many others had delivered good economic and social growth. They won elections because they were good governments.

Alberta's 44 year PC government (1971-2015) was not of the same calibre. I have already castigated this government on previous posts, but I think its impossible to say that the PCs ever inspired a wise action inside or outside the province, at least after Lougheed. So, that said, I do not believe that the PC dynasty started off badly. Peter Lougheed was probably the best premier the province had. Conveniently, he left government during the depths of Alberta's 1980s recession; the premiership was then picked up by fellow Edmonton Eskimos alumni Don Getty. Lougheed died only a few years ago, his funeral attended by all his successors who had made a living ignoring  his advice on development.

Now, by 1993 it was not clear that the PC dynasty would survive. Alberta, like the rest of Canada, became terrified of its debt levels. The Liberals looked like they could win the election that year, promising deep cuts to the budget, but were narrowly defeated by Ralph Klein's PC team. His first four years were hardly free of scandal, but Klein's 1997 victory, I believe, can be considered the beginning of the end for the PC dynasty. In the absence of a real opposition, poor government and corruption became hallmarks of his administration; however, not only did people not care, he became the evermore popular "King Ralph."

Why was this?

My family has lived in Alberta for over 100 years. From them, and from my own experience, I can speak to one alarming phenomenon: the monopoly of mass-market media by right wing interests. This monopoly began, at least in Calgary, in 1980 with the demise of The Albertan newspaper. I would say this monopoly has only ended recently thanks to online citizen journalism, and in a physical sense, by the publishing of the Metro by the Toronto Star and Albertaviews magazine. These things have only had an effect in the past 10 years at most, so we can say that the Right dominated Alberta's mass media from 1980 to around 2005/2010.

This domination was embodied in the newspapers, in the talk radio stations, in local TV, and in magazines like Alberta Report and later, the Western Standard. In cities with more than one newspaper, the editorial angle ranged from soft-right to far-right (in both Edmonton and Calgary, represented by the Sun). Even the Universities, contrary to popular belief, presented a right-wing perspective, as they continue to do today, with various representatives of the "Calgary School" presenting their dubious arguments in favour of the neoconservative perspective. The disreputable Fraser Institute and its supply of titled minions is usually a conspicuously regular presence in the media, and so merits my honourable mention as a source of right-wing claptrap. Alternate views were limited, if at all, to the letters to the editor.

The only alternative to the mountain of neoconservative rhetoric that dominated the province for a quarter century lay in the province's publishing industry. There are many titles published during this period which illuminate the dubious successes of the province's leadership. However, the market for such books never proved significant enough to affect debate within the province. I suspect some books, like William Marsden's "Stupid to the Last Drop," sold better outside Alberta than within it.

The effect this monolithic media presence in Alberta can be seen in the ways Albertans remember the past. The National Energy Program is a misunderstood boogieman invoked to crush debate and fuel hate towards the East. Ralph Klein squandered the province's wealth, squandered its crown corporations, and acted like a buffoon, but is remembered as our lovable saviour. In contrast, the Federal Liberal government of Chretien is not remembered for slaying the deficit, but is thought to have increased it. Stephen Harper apparently never ran a deficit, either. The Sponsorship Scandal, which cost the country $150M and became another reason to hate the Liberals, had nothing on contemporary provincial scandals. but those remained forgotten or ignored.

Indeed, the province exhibits a memory of events almost totally at variance with history and reality. Why this is so can only be considered a product of the province's partisan press. All media sources slavishly promoted conservative interests and parties, and if it wasn't conservative - it wasn't good. The NDP were blamed for "ruining provinces" even though the Saskatchewan NDP government was probably the most effective in Canada in the 1990s, and almost certainly saved it (after the Conservatives had gone off to jail). The Liberals hated the west. Quebec steals our money. The Atlantic provinces do too. Alberta was the model for the whole country, damn the facts and damn reality! It's just everybody who voted against the Conservatives from 1993 on was too stupid to notice.

A very good example of the provincial media's lingering double standard is blatantly apparent at the moment. First, there is the Purchase Power Agreement scandal. If what the NDP alleges is true, which we have little reason yet to doubt, then the scandal should be yet another example of PC corruption. Instead, we have series after series of articles in all the Alberta papers trying to establish the incompetence, corruption, and bad faith of the current government. The Calgary Sun typically picked and chose its sources quoting people saying the government has little chance to win its lawsuit, when its Siamese twin, the Herald acknowledged other claims that its actually 50-50, or better. I can only assume the papers are looking out for our best interests, and not the interests of their corporate overlords.

On the other hand, Jason Kenney recently began his travelling tour of the province. His speech from the Legislature grounds was broadcast live across the province, and all the talk was about the possibilities in store for him, us, and ultimately, the defeat of the NDP. In other words, the return of our Golden Future. What went totally unsaid was the question of why a taxpayer paid Member of Parliament is spending all of his time campaigning outside of his riding, outside of election time, and in a different level of government altogether. That this is a basic ethics violation should not come as a surprise to the editors of Alberta's remaining newspapers (which are all basically the same one at this point), but remember, these were the people who endorsed the Wildrose Party and the Conservatives in the last provincial and federal elections, regardless of the effect on their readers.

While I have already mentioned how new forms of media, and new entities like Albertaviews helped break the right-wing monopoly in Alberta, I believe the real nail in the coffin was something much more ironic. While the PCs remained the sole right-wing option (of repute) in the province, there could be no criticism of them. This all changed after Premier Stelmach's royalty review. The province's oil industry turned the Wildrose Alliance from a southern, regional, rural fringe party to competitor. Now that there was a more corporate friendly party on the scene, Alberta's mass media began to do its job and hold the government to account. Stelmach is rather demeaned in provincial memory as an incompetent nincompoop sort of Premier. Alison Redford was basically the Antichrist.

However, the long awaited return to form was not without its issues. I found especially dubious the U of C economics professors using their lectures to tell students to vote Wildrose. But more significantly, Danielle Smith, former leader of the WRP and member of the "Calgary School," was married to the head editor of the Calgary Sun, coincidentally the party's biggest cheerleader. Such a conflict of interest remained unnoted, though I noted that they were the first news source to publicize a Wildrose lead in the 2012 election polls. Following her disastrous decision to abort the WRP in 2014, Danielle Smith found employment as a talk show host on Calgary's QR77. You can imagine her take on events.

During its heyday, the neoconservative leaders of the Province were able to effect a near-total echo chamber in Alberta discourse. Its effect on public memory can still be seen in the bizarre myths that still pervade and pervert the province's population. I do mean pervert: there is ample evidence both on the internet and on people's cars and shirts that don't just reflect a distaste for the new governments, but a vitriolic hate for them, and democracy itself. Unfortunately, it will be a long time indeed before the damage to our consciousness is healed, but I am hopeful. After all, Albertans rejected the "no new tax" and "big cuts" of the Wildrose Party in favour of reasoned answers and acknowledged realities with the NDP. That really is a sign of something to be celebrated.

Now all I can recommend from this point is to go read some history.

Thanks for reading.

Alberta's Perfect Storm, Part 2

Last time I looked at some of the ways Alberta's economic pillar, the fossil fuel industry, was recently affected negatively by a combination of technological change, competition and strategic interference. However, to understand the present economic bust more fully, we need consider more than the industrial side of things, but the human side, too. Unfortunately, much of the province's suffering today is result of poor choices made by people in government, and in their private lives, as it is a matter of circumstance. Accordingly, I believe much of what has happened was avoidable, as our predicament was predictable, but our leaders, and our selves, failed us.

To be gentle, we should start by considering the failings of the PC government.

The most common complaint about the past government is that they failed to plan for the future. This is a big charge, made up of two major components. The first is that they failed to save for days like this. Another component is that they failed to diversify the economy.

On the first charge, that they failed to save, rings all too true. The PCs, from Klein to Redford will forever be condemned as both reckless and irresponsible. The Province's Heritage fund was left to stagnate, left undisturbed since the downturn of the 1980s. Since that downturn, Alberta had paid off its debt, and was in the position, I remember, "to pay off the debt of other provinces, so long as they promised never to go into debt again" (this was actually argued in the National Post over a decade ago). Instead, the government cut taxes on the rich, on corporations, and on royalties.

That the tax cuts favoured the rich is undeniable; a flat tax, set at the relatively high rate of 10%, were you poor, or the incredibly low rate of 10%, were you rich, was a massive giveaway of billions of dollars a year in revenue. It needs be remembered, for all time, that tax cuts for the rich were very much in vogue in the English speaking world of the early 2000s, but that just serves to reinforce how shortsighted these governments were globally. Now tax cuts in general are not necessarily bad things; I would argue though that you can't afford them when people are dying in your hospital waiting rooms, and the insane are being put out on the streets. The only thing that made these tax cuts doable were the high revenues the province received from natural gas, gambling, and oil, the complicity of the province's media, and the wishes of the voters, in that order.

Cutting taxes on corporations remains popular today; probably because all of our news media comes from blatantly self-interested media corporations. However, even I feel that this may have been a good idea at the time. Low taxes do attract new businesses; but it can be seen that this did not happen in Alberta for other reasons, which I will explore later. The companies we did have, those incredibly profitable corporations of Alberta, were able to save their profits, and if you look who owns what, remove them from the country altogether.

The cut in the rate of oil royalties was actually more of an accident than a deliberate giveaway. Still, the story that can be told tells the same story of moral cowardice as before. Royalties dropped because Alberta had two different kinds of royalties: one for conventional oil, and one for the oil sands. Like the rest of Earth, Alberta's conventional oil was cheap to access and of good quality. Accordingly, the government in the distant past effected a decent royalty rate. Cheap access and good quality are two characteristics lacking in the oil sands. The Oil Sands are so inaccessible that for many years the best plan for getting at the stuff was by nuking the ground around Fort McMurray, a plan approved by Premier Manning's government (more amazingly, the Soviet Union actually did this on its own soil). As for quality, the oil sands are so bad they require much refining before even becoming as good as conventional oil; hence the much lower price it fetches internationally. So, to encourage development of the oil sands, the government set royalty rates low, and provided further generous incentives to oil sands companies. The drop in oil royalties basically reflects the historical depletion of Alberta's conventional oil sources, and their replacement by the oil sands.

Now the moral cowardice. Premier Stelmach inherited the government around the time the oil sands displaced the conventional sources as Alberta's economic (and revenue) driver. He proposed a royalty review meant to address the discrepancy between the oil royalties. In those days the price of oil was galloping towards $150US a barrel, and if your Calgary based oil company wasn't insanely profitable, there was something terribly wrong with it, or more likely, you. Nonetheless, the royalty review was aborted, with the specious claim the royalties were fine. The only thing to come from the whole situation was that Alberta's oil companies threw their financial weight behind the offshot of the wilting Social Credit Party: the Wildrose Alliance.

During the Stelmach years, investment poured into the Alberta Oil Sands. The Province's economic growth and population growth were simply stunning. Already, though, problems were becoming apparent. Things were simply too good. The low tax regime adopted by the province undoubtedly encouraged the mass migration and investment we received (reducing regulations also helped, no doubt). It also encouraged massive inflation; at one time, the poverty line in Fort McMurray was an income of over $60,000 a year.

The government lacked the resources to keep up with the growth. Whole neighbourhoods were being built with no schools, community centres, parks. Calgary didn't get a new high school for 15 years, while the population increased by the hundreds of thousands. During the last election, one friend ran in a Northwest Calgary riding. I was astonished that it had as many schools - six - as the 60 year old community I reside in. There was a lack of hospitals, schools, teachers, doctors, nurses - there was a shortage of almost everything necessary for society to run.

There is perhaps a development lesson here. I feel the lesson is don't encourage more development than you can pay for or keep up with. The Alberta governments reckless tax cuts blew up a bubble economy, while reducing its ability to keep pace with it. And all the while, they didn't save a dime. Former Premier Lougheed criticized the government for its haphazard economic development. One think tank went so far as deem Alberta the province with the worst fiscal outlook in the country.

Why did economic diversification fail? Deregulating the electricity markets didn't help. Experts say it has cost the province's people and businesses $20 billion since it was implemented. This alone may not have been fatal to Alberta's other industries, but the massive economic growth in the province drove up rents and leases, too. The last nail in the coffin of Alberta's economic diversification was the success of the Oil Sands itself. One could simply make so much money, so fast, regardless of your passions or qualifications, that almost all the province's energies and talents were sucked into the oil sector. This was not a bad thing at the time, but were something to happen to oil, we would definitely be in an uncomfortable position.

And here we are.

I realize I have spent too long bashing the government. The people of Alberta deserve a shake too. Next time.

Again, thanks for reading.