A familiar mantra returns in Alberta

As the lights begin to flicker out on the stop-Kenney campaign within the Alberta Progressive Conservatives, we recall how often past PC leaders repeated the familiar mantra: socially progressive, fiscally conservative. It’s what everybody says they want in a political party nowadays.

On a related note, late last week Postmedia’s James Wood rounded up the annual totals for Alberta ministerial travel spending. What he was found that in 2016 the reigning New Democrats had cut the typical travel expenses of their predecessors almost in half. So... maybe we already have a “progressive-conservative” government?

Don’t laugh too hard. Travel budgets, as politicians will always be quick to tell you, amount to nickels and dimes in the context of a provincial budget. But they are symbolically enormous nickels and dimes. They are easy for newspapermen to report on. Voters notice them. And Alberta voters, especially, know how our provincial politicians and civil servants have traditionally abused them as career sweeteners.

There is even an arguable justification for it. Alberta’s assembly and its public service have to compete for managerial talent, implicitly, with swashbuckling, cash-rich oil companies. If the odd conference junket helps give us successful government (perhaps this is the place for the disgusting neologism “governance”) who could object?

It’s that “if” that is the problem. Ludicrous travel expenses ruined Alison Redford because she was too dazed or detached to notice that the mandate of heaven had been silently withdrawn from the PC party. Alberta dislikes most anything that smacks of socialism, but the post-socialist New Democrats had a big opportunity, coming into office here for the first time, to demonstrate the personal rectitude and austerity that we associate with organized socialists. Particularly the better “prairie socialists.”

By and large, they seem to have succeeded. Rachel Notley’s New Democrats could have defended a relatively vigorous orgy of travel in 2016, on the grounds that their regime is predicated on selling Alberta’s environmental reputation abroad and trying to win overseas market access for Alberta petro products.

They did some preaching, but as inexpensively as possible. Premier Notley left the province just twice on the public dime, going to New York and Washington. The trade minister, Deron Bilous, made a couple of efficient swings through the U.S. and Asia. Energy Minister Marg McCuaig-Boyd was in oil-biz capitals Houston and Mexico City. Enviro Minister Shannon Phillips hit two important climate conferences; Finance Minister Joe Ceci visited NYC and Toronto, where finance lives.

Among the cabinet members who did travel, the trips are all very obvious, ordinary public business. The people who don’t really need to go anywhere didn’t.

So... hooray for a government of workers, and down with the bosses? Well, let’s not go goofy. In what it hopes will be its first of many terms in office, the NDP kicked the Treasury can down the road, running up debt and enlarging the public service on fiscal-stimulus grounds. It was able to invoke expert opinion that Alberta had lots of room to borrow at a time of comatose interest rates. Alberta’s earth-scorching recession gave it a further excuse.

But this year will be pivotal. PC-legacy labour deals with the public sector are beginning to lapse, and labour lawyer Rachel Notley must learn to play defence rather than offence in salary negotiations. Oil prices are crawling upward and job hemorrhaging has ceased. Economists are starting to get jittery about the provinces and the federal government getting hooked on debt at the same time.

If you can’t rein in budgets because the benchmark oil price is at $30, people will start asking questions if you don’t do anything when it goes to $60. Albertans remember how the post-Klein PCs slept when it went to $100. Which is why the “continuity PCs” who want to save their discredited, exhausted political brand are having such a hard time stopping rogue outsider Jason Kenney.

If you are outside the province you may have heard about last week’s mini-comedy in which the head fundraiser for a Kenney rival, Richard Starke, tried to have the PC board smother Kenney’s leadership candidacy. The board told the objector, lawyer Jeffrey Rath, to shove off. At more or less at the same moment, Starke fired him and pleaded that the whole thing had in no way been his idea.

Rath’s complaint was that Kenney wants to unite with the Wildrose schismatics and thus destroy Alberta’s natural governing party. Kenney, running on an explicit “unity” platform, has already won a near-certain majority of delegates for the PCs’ March 18 leadership vote — so it was definitely late in the game to ask the referee to move the goalposts.

Unlike the Alberta PCs, Kenney was part of a government, a federal one, that earned some “fiscal conservative” credentials. Considering that said government also left abortion and same-sex marriage alone, and that Kenney was an immigration minister who broke records for both admitting and personally hanging out with immigrants, even his “social progressive” credentials may look pretty good. Some continuity PCs are still carping about the rejection of Rath’s complaint. But it turns out that there just aren’t that many of them, for all the noise that they create.