In a somewhat surprising move, Alberta premier Alison Redford resigned last night, effective Sunday evening. It sounds like she’ll be staying on as MLA for the time being, but man, that’ll be a tough gig. Jen Gerson notes that for all of her skill at policy, Redford lacked political instincts and was in fact the victim of her own transparency laws as her own spending came to light. Colby Cosh reminds us that this really had little to do with the cost of the South Africa trip, but was a long simmering series of problems that kept building until Redford finally collapsed under the weight of them.
It’s official – Joe Oliver is our new finance minister, with Greg Rickford taking over at Natural Resources, and Ed Holder taking the spot of minister of state for science and technology. Of course, with Oliver now in Finance, people are saying things like “oh, he’ll get to decide how to spend the surplus,” except that there really won’t be much of a surplus going forward because the government’s whole agenda has been to starve be beast, lowering revenues so that any future surpluses are small and used to pay down debt – not implement new spending programmes. Thomas Mulcair took the classy move of basically calling Oliver a racist in his reaction to the appointment, which is totally about adding more decorum in politics. Rickford, meanwhile, is hoped will be less abrasive than Oliver was on the Keystone XL or Northern Gateway files, especially as Rickford has more connections with northern First Nations communities from his previous career. What did mark the whole affair was the secrecy – no announcement was made as to when the swearing-in was happening, there was no press release, no media availability, nobody took questions before or after, and the press was shut out. But hey, that’s another day in the world of Harper media control. Michael Den Tandt says that the choice of promotions cements the government is doubling down on the commitment to resource extraction as the centrepiece of its economic agenda.
With Flaherty now gone from cabinet, the reviews of his legacy are now going full bore, with his ostensibly lower-tax lower-spending legacy, a letter from Kevin Page, and ten charts that sum up his time as finance minister. Emmett Macfarlane says that Flaherty’s biggest flaw was how opaque his approach to policy was, while Andrew Coyne feels that Flaherty’s real legacy will be a record of political expediency.
Here’s a look at how Stephen Harper hid behind layers of security and kept the media away at his stop at the BC Chamber of Commerce in Vancouver last week.
Aaron Wherry muses about importing primary systems here in Canada, and while he notes my own objections because it makes a hell of a mess of accountability, I’m not sure that he took the lesson enough because he thinks that a widely chosen leader might limit the amount of control they have over the caucus when it’s the opposite that’s happened, with leaders centralizing more power without any accountability.
As the government’s new medical marijuana framework is ready to commence, users currently growing their own are concerned that there won’t be enough supply in the system, that it’ll cost something on the order of seven times as much to access, and that there won’t be the availability for the best strain for their particular illnesses. But hey, I’m sure that these were all thought out before the changeover happened, right?
Alberta’s plans for the Athabasca River and how it relates to oilsands development are not winning much applause.
Down in Australia, their parliament is facing the prospect of double dissolution. Because that’s exactly the kind of thing we want to start happening up here if we get an elected Senate.
And Speaker Scheer is bringing the Magna Carta – one of the most important foundational documents of our democratic system – to Canada next year as part of its 800th anniversary tour.
Shameless self-promotion alert: I was on Sun TV yesterday to talk about my column on Alison Redford and her caucus/leadership dynamics, all before her resignation happened.