You missed two scandals: the cancellation/ halt of a burgeoning alternative energy industry in Alberta, and the selling off of our mountains to an Australian coal mine
Mildred Thill: If you think that's all the scandals the UCP did, it's incorrect. The UCP did more scandals than can be counted on your fingers and toes.
The UCP are trying very hard to reframe this right now. Smith is trying to shift it to AHS incompetence, casting herself as the solution. LaGrange is trying to make it about a disgruntled and lying former CEO. There's more to come of course, and the slow news drip isn't helping them, but my current take is that there's just enough complexity to make it hard to follow, and they might pull it off.
There's one other thing a controversy needs to stick: a media that's willing to pursue it, report it, and willing to keep on after the lies, the denials, and the partisan accusations and attacks. TBH, other than the CBC, I'm not optimistic the media in AB is up to the job. The print media is dominated by the voice of the UCP and monolithic right wing ownership of the 4 major papers. TV? Maybe CBC, until Polievre shuts them down (encouraged by the UCP, see partisan attacks), Global is farm league Fox, and there's a reason I call the CTV news the Happy Talk. No one else has the resources to investigate and report province wide.
Sadly, I'm willing to be by the end of next week, this story will have disappeared. I really hope I'm wrong, but history says I'm probably not.
Paul Childs: A weak and complacent media is part of the problem in Alberta, and in Canada. Conservative blunders of epic proportions are never given the attention they deserve, and these columnists lie.
Gentle correction re: Senate scandals. The orange juice was Cabinet minister Bev Oda, not a senator (and the real scandal there was that she changed hotels to a more expensive one so that she could smoke in her room), and the camembert was a joke that credulous reporters took seriously. The actual Senate scandals largely involved Mike Duffy doing things like billing his personal trainer to the Senate, and claiming he asked him to write a report about "seniors' fitness."
The worst part of the Duffy affair was the Nigel Wright payoff, undertaken without (cough) the knowledge of (cough cough) Stephen Harper. It stretched credulity to think that Harper couldn't have known, but we've never had evidence to contradict their story.
That same lack of believability is core to the current scandal in AB: is it fathomable that Danielle Smith, who is involved in EVERY file in EVERY ministry, could somehow not have known what was going on with her CoS concerning such a massive project at AHS?
There have always been a very lage number of very bad scandals in Alberta for many years, done by the Conservatives, and it's puzzling how they are let off the hook. One newspaper columnist, circa 1993, called them the most costliest in Canada's history. He was referring to things such as the NovaTel affair, which was in between $600 million - $700 million, and a whole bunch of others, that threw millions, and even billions of dollars down the drain.
The way that the Alberta PCs tried to hide them, was quite crafty. For example, the West Edmonton Mall lawsuit scandal, was cunningly revealed around Christmas time, around 2002. It was close to $500 million. Albertans didn't care what Ralph Klein did for scandals, including that one, and anything else he did.They'd brush it off, because they treated him like a saint. BSE was at least $420 million. Swan Hills was $180 million. Electricity deregulation and the Enron Clause, exceeded $40 billion. It didn't stop with those. AISH was $100 million. On an on it went. It didn't end with Ralph Klein either. Billions more were wasted on other serious scandals.
Yet, when the measly $100 million Adscam from Jean Chretien and Paul Martin came to light, Albertans had a big fit. Can't say a darn thing about major league scandals from the Alberta Conservatives, but the less severe varieties at the federal level, from the Liberals are a cause for long lasting outrage.
It hasn't changed with the UCP. They also do scandals, which often cost billions of dollars. KXL was $7.5 billion, or more. $20 billion was forked over to oil companies to deal with what they should be dealing with out of their own pockets. $1.6 billion is gone from poor accounting skills. The Heritage Savings Trust Fund had over $3 billion lost. $4 billion of pension money has vanished. Lawsuits from coal companies is around $30 billion in total. A moratorium on renewables is well above $30 billion. A very shady trick by power companies to blatantly rip power consumers off, which was termed economic witholding, has been a whopping $30 billion a year, since the summer of 2020. It can go on, because there has been a whole lot more than these from the UCP.
Ethics breaches galore, very undemocratic behavior too, as well as numerous conflicts of interest violations happened with the UCP.
Again, it's not a concern for many Albertans. Yet, whatever Justin Trudeau has done, which doesn't even compare in scope, gets long lasting condemnation from the people in this province. Quite frankly, it's disgusting and hypocritical for having the Conservatives cleared of anything they do wrong, which is much worse in magnitude.
It's obvious that there is a big problem with the media in Alberta, when columnists like Cam Tait, now praise the UCP, for their shortsighted policies (AISH) when he used to oppose what they did. What's equally appalling is that there is nobody from these newspapers who can correct these newspaper columnists, and expose the errors they publish. It has taken university professors to do that.
You missed two scandals: the cancellation/ halt of a burgeoning alternative energy industry in Alberta, and the selling off of our mountains to an Australian coal mine
Mildred Thill: If you think that's all the scandals the UCP did, it's incorrect. The UCP did more scandals than can be counted on your fingers and toes.
The latest allegations around AHS need to flesh out a bit but seem to tick all the boxes you listed.
A child could understand this one.
The UCP are trying very hard to reframe this right now. Smith is trying to shift it to AHS incompetence, casting herself as the solution. LaGrange is trying to make it about a disgruntled and lying former CEO. There's more to come of course, and the slow news drip isn't helping them, but my current take is that there's just enough complexity to make it hard to follow, and they might pull it off.
There's one other thing a controversy needs to stick: a media that's willing to pursue it, report it, and willing to keep on after the lies, the denials, and the partisan accusations and attacks. TBH, other than the CBC, I'm not optimistic the media in AB is up to the job. The print media is dominated by the voice of the UCP and monolithic right wing ownership of the 4 major papers. TV? Maybe CBC, until Polievre shuts them down (encouraged by the UCP, see partisan attacks), Global is farm league Fox, and there's a reason I call the CTV news the Happy Talk. No one else has the resources to investigate and report province wide.
Sadly, I'm willing to be by the end of next week, this story will have disappeared. I really hope I'm wrong, but history says I'm probably not.
Paul Childs: A weak and complacent media is part of the problem in Alberta, and in Canada. Conservative blunders of epic proportions are never given the attention they deserve, and these columnists lie.
Good article.
Gentle correction re: Senate scandals. The orange juice was Cabinet minister Bev Oda, not a senator (and the real scandal there was that she changed hotels to a more expensive one so that she could smoke in her room), and the camembert was a joke that credulous reporters took seriously. The actual Senate scandals largely involved Mike Duffy doing things like billing his personal trainer to the Senate, and claiming he asked him to write a report about "seniors' fitness."
The worst part of the Duffy affair was the Nigel Wright payoff, undertaken without (cough) the knowledge of (cough cough) Stephen Harper. It stretched credulity to think that Harper couldn't have known, but we've never had evidence to contradict their story.
That same lack of believability is core to the current scandal in AB: is it fathomable that Danielle Smith, who is involved in EVERY file in EVERY ministry, could somehow not have known what was going on with her CoS concerning such a massive project at AHS?
There have always been a very lage number of very bad scandals in Alberta for many years, done by the Conservatives, and it's puzzling how they are let off the hook. One newspaper columnist, circa 1993, called them the most costliest in Canada's history. He was referring to things such as the NovaTel affair, which was in between $600 million - $700 million, and a whole bunch of others, that threw millions, and even billions of dollars down the drain.
The way that the Alberta PCs tried to hide them, was quite crafty. For example, the West Edmonton Mall lawsuit scandal, was cunningly revealed around Christmas time, around 2002. It was close to $500 million. Albertans didn't care what Ralph Klein did for scandals, including that one, and anything else he did.They'd brush it off, because they treated him like a saint. BSE was at least $420 million. Swan Hills was $180 million. Electricity deregulation and the Enron Clause, exceeded $40 billion. It didn't stop with those. AISH was $100 million. On an on it went. It didn't end with Ralph Klein either. Billions more were wasted on other serious scandals.
Yet, when the measly $100 million Adscam from Jean Chretien and Paul Martin came to light, Albertans had a big fit. Can't say a darn thing about major league scandals from the Alberta Conservatives, but the less severe varieties at the federal level, from the Liberals are a cause for long lasting outrage.
It hasn't changed with the UCP. They also do scandals, which often cost billions of dollars. KXL was $7.5 billion, or more. $20 billion was forked over to oil companies to deal with what they should be dealing with out of their own pockets. $1.6 billion is gone from poor accounting skills. The Heritage Savings Trust Fund had over $3 billion lost. $4 billion of pension money has vanished. Lawsuits from coal companies is around $30 billion in total. A moratorium on renewables is well above $30 billion. A very shady trick by power companies to blatantly rip power consumers off, which was termed economic witholding, has been a whopping $30 billion a year, since the summer of 2020. It can go on, because there has been a whole lot more than these from the UCP.
Ethics breaches galore, very undemocratic behavior too, as well as numerous conflicts of interest violations happened with the UCP.
Again, it's not a concern for many Albertans. Yet, whatever Justin Trudeau has done, which doesn't even compare in scope, gets long lasting condemnation from the people in this province. Quite frankly, it's disgusting and hypocritical for having the Conservatives cleared of anything they do wrong, which is much worse in magnitude.
It's obvious that there is a big problem with the media in Alberta, when columnists like Cam Tait, now praise the UCP, for their shortsighted policies (AISH) when he used to oppose what they did. What's equally appalling is that there is nobody from these newspapers who can correct these newspaper columnists, and expose the errors they publish. It has taken university professors to do that.