Legislative honeymoon in peril
For a brief shining moment Thursday afternoon, the assembly floor in the Alberta Legislature was a place of harmony and goodwill and mutual respect.
You wouldn’t have recognized the place.
I’m not talking about the election of a new Speaker. I’m talking about what happened right before that, when MLAs were in the chambers but had yet to be called to order.
They had arrived through different entrances, the NDP through one, the opposition parties through another and then, like a scene from the First World War’s Christmas in the trenches, the belligerents from each side began to cross into enemy territory and shake hands.
Everybody was in a jubilant mood.
This is what a legislative honeymoon looks like, especially when 70 of the province’s 87 MLAs are brand new. Everybody is just so gosh-darned pleased to be there.
It won’t last. The Wildrose, despite leader Brian Jean’s pledge to be ‘Mr. Sunshine’ in the assembly, is itching to go on the attack when the session gets underway Monday.
Thursday, the Wildrose managed to land a solid jab against the government not in the assembly, but in a news release revealing a curiously troubling fact about Graham Mitchell, the newly appointed chief of staff to Energy Minister Marg McCuaig-Boyd. Turns out Mitchell was a federal lobbyist with a firm fighting against proposed pipeline projects for Alberta’s energy industry.
On its webpage, the lobbying firm—Lead Now—refers to the oilsands as the “toxic tarsands” and says the National Energy Board’s upcoming study of the proposed Energy East pipeline project is a “sham review process.”
Mitchell — who has deep NDP roots going back to his days as assistant to Jack Layton in 2000, when Layton was on Toronto city council — was LeadNow’s executive director from January to April this year.
The Wildrose wanted to know how an anti-pipeline lobbyist could become a senior adviser to Alberta’s energy minister. Didn’t we all. “This sends a troubling message to our energy industry,” Wildrose energy critic Leela Aheer said.
Amazingly, McCuaig-Boyd was caught off-guard when confronted by reporters even though she knew the question was coming hours in advance.
“My leadership is what is going to be what takes us in that direction and my staff will follow my direction in establishing market access,” she said by way of a vague response.
When asked what role she played in hiring Mitchell, she made a beeline into the assembly: “I have to go, I’m sorry, I’m going to be late.”
Realizing just how bad this looked on so many levels, government officials trotted out a better-prepared McCuaig-Boyd a few hours later.
She explained that Mitchell was only with LeadNow for four months and didn’t do any lobbying: “Because he was interim executive director, he had to be on the lobby list. He totally supports the position we have here in Alberta in our energy program.”
So it’s not fair to call Mitchell an “anti-pipeline lobbyist,” according to McCuaigBoyd. He merely worked for a firm lobbying against pipelines.
Understandably, the difference might escape some.
The bottom line, McCuaigBoyd said, is that Mitchell will take his marching orders from the Alberta government and the government looks kindly on the Energy East pipeline.
As to why she ducked the question about his hiring, it turns out she had never met Mitchell before he was brought in as her chief of staff.
The same goes for most of Alberta’s new cabinet ministers who are only now getting to know their new chiefs of staff. All were hired by a premier’s office that was in a hurry to get them in place before the start of session next week.
Most come from outside Alberta and virtually all have a history of work with the NDP and/or unions across the country.
That’s led to critics accusing Premier Rachel Notley, an NDP premier, of hiring political appointees who have strong ties to — good grief — the NDP.
Just to be clear, we’re not talking here of civil service appointments, but political appointments — the kind the old PC government used to fill with those who perhaps had strong ties to the corporate sector or maybe even to the PC party.
As for the NDP recruiting outside the province, that’s largely a result of the NDP — after 44 years of PC governments — not having a particularly robust network of experienced people from which to choose.
Having said that, however, the NDP should have thought through the optics of hiring someone with ties to an antipipeline lobbying firm as the chief of staff to the energy minister.
This is not how you settle the nerves of a jittery energy sector.
This is how you make sure the legislative honeymoon is over even before the session begins.