Notley sounding like the ghosts of premiers past
On Friday, the Alberta government issued a news release under the wonderfully optimistic headline: “Premier Notley concludes successful economic mission.”
I say optimistic because nobody can tell whether her five-day trip to Montreal, New York and Toronto was, in fact, a success. It’s too early.
The news release printed a quote from Notley that included this: “I’m confident we’ve opened doors that will encourage investment and grow our economy.”
If this quote sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve heard similar cheerful pronouncements from premiers of the past after they’ve spent $10,000 or $20,000 on an outof-province trade mission.
Remember this? “I’m very optimistic. There is strong bipartisan support for this project.”
That was then-Premier Alison Redford in 2013, predicting an imminent approval for the Keystone XL pipeline after her trip to Washington, D.C.
Alberta premiers routinely returned from their trips with little concrete to show for them, other than an optimistically worded memorandum of agreement, after which they’d be routinely chastised by the opposition for wasting taxpayers money.
Now the shoes are on the other feet.
It’s the NDP government defending a reconnaissance business trip by the premier, while the PC opposition sit at home complaining.
Interim PC leader Ric McIver grumbled that Notley “came home empty-handed from her $24,000 trip.”
That’s a bit rich considering how many times PC premiers seemed to come home with little in their hands but something picked up at duty free.
In 2013, PC cabinet ministers, including Redford, spent almost $750,000 in international travel.
At the time, then-NDP Leader Brian Mason harrumphed: “They have spent in the last two years well over $1 million dollars in travel at the same time they’re asking provincial employees to take zero per cent over the next three years. That really smacks of hypocrisy.”
But, of course, it’s easy to complain about these trips and difficult to defend them. That’s the lesson both the PCs and NDP are learning in their newly switched roles where they have begun to sound uncannily like the other used to do.
The learning curve, naturally, is much steeper for the NDP, as we saw just this week alone.
In the past five days, the NDP has found itself in all kinds of awkward political positions, some of them selfimposed.
On Monday, Notley seemed to get herself cross-threaded with federal NDP Leader Tom Mulcair over his proposed federal cap-and-trade plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
She then spent the next few days trying to clarify her position, but continued to muddy the waters because she didn’t want to be seen dismissing Mulcair’s plan in the middle of a federal election campaign, even though there’s no way Alberta will sign on to any emissions reduction plan that would transfer money out of the province.
On Tuesday, the NDP was forced to make an embarrassing flip-flop over a salary hike for independent officers of the legislature.
On Wednesday, Environment and Parks Minister Shannon Phillips reluctantly admitted the government is in the golf business after announcing it’s contractually obligated to spend millions of taxpayers’ dollars to repair the Kananaskis Country Golf Course.
Also on Wednesday, Alberta’s departing agent in Washington, D.C., Rob Merrifield, fired an undiplomatic salvo at Notley for sending “mixed messages” over Keystone XL.
On Thursday, a reporter misquoted Notley, saying Keystone was a “threat” to Alberta. The story may have been wrong, but it offered ammunition to her critics to attack her for two days.
On Friday, some civic politicians in British Columbia took a shot at Notley for presuming to suggest, without consulting with them first, that Kinder Morgan could move its Trans Mountain pipeline terminus from Burnaby to Delta.
It wasn’t a stellar week for the NDP. Maybe that’s why Notley felt the need to give herself a pat on the back for a “successful” mission, whether or not it actually was.