See Graham Thomson.
New schools can’t divert attention from Redford’s tab
If the Alberta government got to write newspaper headlines, here’s what you’d find in today’s edition: “Promise made, promise kept, Redford announces 50th new school.”
A more accurate headline would be, “Promise made, promise kept? Redford announces 50th new school.”
The question mark is all important to this story.
Yes, Premier Alison Redford has indeed named 50 new schools, the 50th being announced on Wednesday in Grande Prairie, where she pointed out, “Last spring, I committed to building 50 schools and modernizing 70 others and that is exactly what we have done.”
The total price tag on school construction and renovations will be $2 billion, according to the government, with students to be in their new or renovated classes by fall 2016.
Yet, we don’t know if that goal is realistic, how much each school will cost or how much it will then cost to operate the new schools each year.
In other words, we won’t know if Redford has kept her promise until the schools are actually constructed, staffed and opened.
But, of course, building schools is expensive; talking about building them is cheap. And you can expect the government to keep talking about building schools for the next two years, right up to and during the next provincial election.
By then, the government hopes, we will have stopped talking about the big issue on everybody’s mind these days: Redford’s $45,000 trip to South Africa.
The government might want us to focus on the flurry of new school announcements, but the fact of political life in Alberta is that people continue to focus on the price tag for that wildly expensive trip that even Redford has admitted was a “mistake.”
This is the issue that just won’t go away, the issue government MLAs keep hearing on doorsteps, in coffee shops, on radio phone-in shows.
It is the issue that is expected to be raised at today’s government caucus in Edmonton where MLAs can vent their frustration with Redford after weeks of grumbling among themselves.
“It’s certainly the topic of conversation among my colleagues,” is how MLA Steve Young diplomatically put it to the Calgary Herald’s Don Braid. “I don’t know how I could say I’m happy about it,” Young said.
Journalists have jumped on Young’s comments as evidence that Redford is facing a caucus revolt today, but Young has chosen his words carefully. He is not overtly criticizing Redford and in fact is subtly echoing her “mistakes were made” comments from last week.
Same with comments from Edmonton MLA David Xiao, who continues to flirt with the idea of quitting provincial politics to run federally and who is hardly a Redford booster (he refused to say if he supported her in last November’s leadership vote and even now refuses to say if he supports her as leader).
On Wednesday, Xiao acknowledged that his constituents are unhappy about the South Africa trip, but he refused to step outside the limited mea culpa lines drawn by Redford.
“This is not the right way to travel,” says Xiao. “She says she’s disappointed and people were surprised by how much the trip cost.”
Xiao might yet abandon Redford’s ship, but he and others are still rowing in the same direction.
The question for the MLAs: how do they kill this issue? Do they simply keep their heads down and wait for the storm to subside? Do they convince her to symbolically pay back some of the money?
MLAs are desperate to change the channel but they’ve lost the remote control. The channel is stuck on government travel expenses as journalists sift through the latest release of spending receipts and discover, for example, that Redford’s Calgary-based executive assistant stays at the upscale Fairmont Hotel Macdonald whenever he’s in Edmonton — at a cost of $9,000 in the past year.
MLAs would rather focus on the government’s Building Alberta campaign and its upcoming $40-billion-plus provincial budget. However, the reality of politics is that any potential good from a $40-billion budget is being undermined by a $45,000 travel “mistake.”
The travel expense issue will not die. Neither will the sunshine list that handily proves we have some of the highest-paid government workers in the country.
Then there’s the optics of the premier spending so much money on travel when she’s trying to legislate a wage freeze on 22,000 frontline members of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees. Redford has promised to fight for that wage freeze in court, ensuring this issue won’t die, either.
There are so many undead issues, it’s like a zombie apocalypse at the legislature. Now that would make for a great headline.