Thomson: Giddy with relief.
Government MLAs giddy as gruelling session nears end
After almost five weeks of legislative misery, Alberta government MLAs finally seem to be enjoying themselves during question period.
They’re smiling, even wisecracking with the opposition. When Liberal Leader Raj Sherman followed the lead of the Wildrose and NDP to press Premier Alison Redford on Wednesday over the so-called tobacco-gate scandal, Redford mocked his johnny-come-lately questions.
“I’m glad to see the leader of the Liberal Party has finally caught up,” Redford said with a smile.
So, what’s going on? Have government MLAs finally figured out how to counter relentless opposition attacks during the fall sitting of the legislature?
Hardly. Government MLAs are giddy because, if all goes according to plan, the session will end today. They’ve had five weeks of beating their head against the wall — or, more to the point, having the wall tossed at them brick by brick. Sweet relief is just around the corner.
There’s also the relief they no doubt felt on Tuesday when the public inquiry into queuejumping in the health-care system came up empty-handed following testimony from two star witnesses: former Alberta Health Services head Stephen Duckett and a top AHS executive, Dr. David Megran.
Government MLAs might not be laughing but they’re no doubt smiling at the inquiry’s dearth of damaging evidence to date.
These two men, perhaps more than anybody else, are responsible for sparking the inquiry through their earlier whistle-blowing activity. The only trouble is that when it came to testifying under oath, neither had any first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing. In fact, they offered conflicting testimony, with Megran saying he couldn’t remember why he wrote a memo in 2009 saying queue-jumping was “not uncommon.”
Keep in mind it was Duckett’s complaints in 2011 about queue-jumping that led to Redford calling the inquiry. But when Duckett took the stand, via a video conference link from Australia, he provided no proof, no evidence and no drama.
On Wednesday, Dr. Paul Park testified he’d heard secondhand in 2007 that an unnamed executive at the University of Alberta Hospital ordered emergency room staff to place an unnamed “VIP” at the head of the queue. The staff refused.
This is not to say that queuejumping has never taken place — and it’s still the early days for the inquiry — but at this rate you begin to wonder why we’re going down this road. If the inquiry wasn’t costing taxpayers $10 million, this whole exercise would be laughable.
Government MLAs might not be laughing but they’re no doubt smiling at the inquiry’s dearth of damaging evidence to date.
Something else happened this week in Alberta politics that should make everybody smile.
MLAs from all parties showed up at the legislature on Tuesday and did something they are supposed to do but so rarely seem to pull off — they actually had a debate. Not a hair-pulling, face-slapping slugfest but an honest-togoodness respectful debate.
The topic was the government’s Bill 7 — the Election Accountability Amendment Act — that will, among other things, require the province’s chief electoral officer to make public his investigations into illegal contributions to political parties.
Unfortunately, what it doesn’t do is overhaul the province’s finance rules to bring them in line with other jurisdictions that have lower limits on fundraising and spending during election campaigns. Both the Wildrose and the NDP, for example, think the province should follow the example set at the federal level and outlaw contributions from corporations and unions.
“The evidence is just simply such that big money, big corporate money, influences not only the result of elections but influences the decisions of government,” said Wildrose MLA Rob Anderson, whose comments were echoed by NDP MLA Rachel Notley.
“We have the most Wild West election financing laws in the country,” said Notley. “Votes should decide elections, not dollars, and ideas should impact votes, not advertising budgets. That’s what should happen, but that’s not what happens in this province.”
Liberal MLA David Swann said he’s been fighting for years to end corporate and union donations “to regain some sense of integrity and some sense that democracy matters.”
The debate ran for hours. Actually, to be honest, there really wasn’t much of a debate. Opposition members agreed with each other and government MLAs stayed relatively silent, relying on their sheer power in numbers, not eloquence, to carry the day.
Government MLA Rick Fraser could muster only a lacklustre defence of the status quo, saying “if there is ever a time that somebody feels that this government or any government has been bought, prove it.”
That is to ignore the unseemliness of corporate owners shelling out $300,000 and more worth of donations to the governing party. It also ignores the more stringent rules that apply in other jurisdictions.
Bill 7 will pass by the end of today, along with nine other pieces of legislation. That’s another reason why government MLAs are so happy.
However, given the performance of the opposition parties this fall, particularly in defence of their spirited amendments to Bill 7 and other pieces of legislation, those members should be feeling happy about themselves as well.