UCP admits to war room’s flaws
Twitter critic dubs public-relations project ‘George Orwell meets the Three Stooges’
Disappointed in the Canadian Energy Centre (CEC), better known as the war room?
You have plenty of company there — including the Alberta government.
UCP patience is fading, although not yet exhausted, over slips involving logos and clumsy attacks on Alberta critics.
“We obviously would have preferred for things to go more smoothly,” says Christine Myatt, Premier Jason Kenney’s deputy communications director.
“It clearly hasn’t been smooth sailing. But this is a new thing we’re doing.
“Right now, it’s just about smoothing out the bumps.
“This was a major election promise by the premier and at this point we see no reason to make any changes.”
The CEC itself is hiring Deborah Jaremko, senior editor of the Daily Oil Bulletin, apparently as content editor.
This further loads up the outfit with former journos — five by the latest count.
On Monday, NDP energy critic Irfan Sabir called for the government to disband the centre and put its $30-million annual budget to better use.
Sabir said the NDP agrees with promoting the oil and gas industry, but it’s really a job for the energy department, not a quasi-private company flush with government funds.
“What we have seen so far is just a list of blunders,” he said. “That’s why we call on the premier to scrap this. It would be funny if it wasn’t costing Albertans $82,000 per day.”
Sabir gets that figure by dividing $30 million by 365.
He calls it a “slush fund” for donors and failed candidates, including CEO Tom Olsen.
Sabir offers no evidence, but the suspicion can stick because of CEC’S partial immunity to freedom of information requests.
The UCP points out that twothirds of the funding comes from the industry carbon tax, and the rest is money the NDP had planned to spend, “re-profiled” to the CEC budget.
The CEC was conceived by Kenney at a huge UCP rally on May 5, 2018, as a tool to rebut unfair critics and provide accurate information.
But so far, there have been two attempts to launch a logo without offending somebody already using it. There was the imbroglio over an environmental speaker at a school. CEC employees have called themselves reporters, without revealing their real mission.
Less than a month after its launch, the CEC is widely derided and satirized (“George Orwell meets the Three Stooges,” one wit said on Twitter).
This kind of focused counterattack was probably inevitable after Kenney touted the war room in bellicose language.
At the launch on Dec. 11, Kenney said: “We were not doing nearly enough to tell the truth in response to a campaign of lies, of defamation and disinformation based on torqued, dated and incomplete and out of context attacks on our energy sector.”
He and Olsen also promised the agency will act with “respect, civility and professionalism.”
There’s no question that the industry is often unfairly portrayed and attacked. Many critics will never have a kind word to say. The government has every right to respond.
But by creating an agency solely for that purpose, the UCP has handed the opposing forces a single, cash-rich, high-profile target.
The CEC compounds its troubles in odd ways. For instance, it doesn’t even stand behind the many stories on its own website.
The website Terms of Use includes this remarkable statement:
“We do not warrant the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of this information.
“Any reliance you place on such information is strictly at your own risk.
“We disclaim all liability and responsibility arising from any reliance placed on such materials by you or any other visitor to the website, or by anyone who may be informed of any of its contents.”
Most big commercial and organization websites publish general terms of use, but it’s unique for any agency to call BS on itself.
The UCP can hardly ditch the war room. That would bring a massive loss of face.
But it surely can’t go on for four years. Not like this.