Many thanks to Naheed Nenshi for his shout out in the Alberta Legislature Tuesday.
Mind you, the NDP Opposition Leader was kind of complaining about me, but as Oscar Wilde famously observed, “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”
This can be recast for the 21st Century’s digital era by noting that it’s better to be spoken of badly than not to be spoken of at all. Especially if one publishes an obscure political blog.
During debate on the United Conservative Party intention to guarantee its re-election by tossing out the recommendations of the bipartisan Electoral Boundaries Commission and setting up a stacked MLA committee to gerrymander the heck out of Alberta’s electoral districts, Mr. Nenshi declared that “there is not one person in public who has actually said that they’re in support of what the UCP is doing.”
“It’s remarkable, this incredible, wide range of folks who’ve written letters to the editor and op-eds and done interviews about why this is wrong,” Mr. Nenshi continued. “You know, David Climenhaga from St. Albert, who is always mad at me because I’m not left enough, says that this is just a plan to cheat, pure and simple.”
And so it is. You’re welcome!
To be fair, we have to do politics with the politicians we have, and there isn’t a single elected politician in Alberta that can be fairly described as “left” in their political inclination. Many of us would just be happy if Mr. Nenshi would take on the UCP more aggressively and do a little more than simply brand the NDP as the party that’s not the UCP.
However, that’s a discussion for another day – like, maybe, tomorrow, or the day after that.
Just now, I’d like to return to the only other time I have been mentioned in the Alberta Legislature and note that, even though almost 35 years have passed since that personal landmark, no one has yet proved me wrong.
Let us cast our minds back to May 7, 1991, when Ray Speaker, minister of municipal affairs in the Progressive Conservative government of Alberta, rose in the provincial Legislature in response to a member’s question about a story that had appeared the morning before in The Calgary Herald.
I’ll digress for a moment to note that despite a storied political career that included being a Social Credit and Progressive Conservative Alberta MLA, provincial cabinet member, and Reform Party Member of Parliament, Mr. Speaker, now 90, was never the speaker of a legislature. Pity.
Anyway, the question was asked by Ed Ewasiuk, New Democrat MLA for Edmonton-Beverly from 1986 to 1993, who was well known as an aggressive advocate for the rights of the poor and the working class.
“Yesterday the minister and his colleagues announced that they’ve finally started initiatives to provide housing in the inner cities, which of course are very necessary, although, I submit, inadequate to meet the immediate needs of the homeless in Alberta,” Mr. Ewasiuk said by way of introduction to his question to the minister.
Mr. Ewasiuk, who died in 2006, went on: “Behind the cautious optimism of housing advocates is the serious concern that the commitment to housing is only a shell game. While the minister was able to find $15 million for inner-city housing, he did so by robbing $14 million from the rural and native housing program of his department. … How can the minister say that social housing is a priority for this government when it has cut from one needy group to help another?”
Mr. Speaker got up on his hind legs – an impressive sight, as he was not a short man – adjusted the button on his suit coat, and responded, more in sadness than in anger as I recall the tone of his voice over my TV set, where that evening I happened to be watching the previous afternoon’s goings on in the Legislature.
“One or two days ago I raised the fact that often my research in this Legislature when I sat on that side of the House was from the daily papers,” Mr. Speaker said. “Often I found even as a member of the Opposition that that research was based on false information and I was misled in the House. We find that here again today…”
“I want to make it very clear,” he went on a few moments later, after a mild shot at “our learned colleagues that sit in the upper gallery,” a sly suggestion that those who toiled for what was still known in those days as The Press might not actually be all that learned, “that the article that was written by Mr. David Climenhaga of The Calgary Herald has more than one inaccuracy, and it is my intent to address those by direct letter to the author.” (Emphasis added.)
For the sake of time management, I will summarize the rest of Mr. Speaker’s argument more briefly than he did: It was simply a matter of priorities. Some things are priorities, and some things are not, especially when the principal object of a government is to balance the budget – as it was mostly agreed then in Alberta it should be, still is apparently, and no doubt ever shall be, world without end, Amen.
To facilitate such decision making, he explained, the government of the day drafted a priority list and it was from that list the necessary decisions were made. “There was not a loss of the dollars, just a proper priority reallocation, and I think that should be clear in this Legislature,” he concluded, and the story duly died.
In other words, I argued then and still do, the story was correct. Nevertheless, I waited for my letter from Mr. Speaker, and waited, and waited … and, indeed, I am still waiting.
I suppose this could all be laid at the feet of Canada Post, but I rather suspect there never was a letter, and there never was a letter because the story was right, just as Mr. Speaker’s backhanded admission illustrated, presumably unintentionally.
Naturally, I was and remain prepared to publish a correction should the missing letter show up and its arguments prove to be persuasive. As readers of these columns know, I am serious about that sort of thing. This is why, every dozen years or so, I find an excuse to repeat this offer – notwithstanding the risk of being sniffily called self-referential by a member of the Canadian Senate.
In the meantime, though, as we used to say back in the days of The Press, “David Climenhaga stands by his story: the Progressive Conservative government of Alberta, grown lazy and arrogant after 20 years in power, robbed Peter to pay Paul, and put out a press release to mislead the public.”
The Alberta New Democrats called them on it.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
