Monday, December 23

Health

Grassy, not Shaun, of the Dead
27Oct By Bob AscahNo Comments
Energy, Environment, Health, Politics

Grassy, not Shaun, of the Dead

Updated 28 October 2024 This post is contributed by Ian Urquhart who taught political science at the University of Alberta for over thirty years. He is the author of Costly Fix:   Power, Politics and the Nature of the Tar Sands.       You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. - Margaret Thatcher   Zombies. The Undead. They’re in neighbourhoods everywhere now – part of the ghoul fun of Halloween. Most will be dragged back to their crypts in a few weeks. Not the Grassy Mountain coal project. This zombie still will be lurching through the corridors of provincial power and the Crowsnest Pass at least until well into 2025. Grassy Mountain’s First Death Sentence Many will recall Benga Mining’s Grassy Mountain venture. Benga proposed ...
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NDP Leadership campaign- policies compared
31May By Bob AscahNo Comments
Education, Energy, Environment, Health, Opinion/Research, Politics

NDP Leadership campaign- policies compared

Introduction Every voter in Alberta’s NDP leadership race has their own set of public policy interests. Some of these voters have few if any interest in politics and have few policy issues except those involving their pocketbooks.  Pocketbook issues include being able to eat, own a cell phone, have a place to call home, access a family doctor and affordable transportation.  Whether this is the typical NDP voter is another question, but at the end of the day if the successor to Rachel Notley is to defeat Danielle Smith’s UCP they will need to understand these pocketbook issues. NDP leadership policies can be found at these websites: ·         https://voteforjodi.ca/jodis-leadership/# ·         https://teamganley.ca/policies ·         https://www.sarahhoffman.ca/priorities ...
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Spotlight on Year-end Orders -in-Council
1Jan By Bob AscahNo Comments
Health, Opinion/Research, Politics

Spotlight on Year-end Orders -in-Council

Background Government is a complex business and assemblies of elected politicians can not make every decision a modern government must make. So besides passing legislation which sets out very general policies, prescriptions on behaviour, and offences for breaking the law, they delegate the details and decisions to the provincial cabinet.  There is also a very practical reason for doing this since the legislative body is not continuously sitting. Examples of such details or decisions include the Alberta cabinet choosing who sits on the boards of governors of Alberta’s universities and colleges, appointments based on the recommendation and advice of the Minister of Advanced Education. In addition to Orders, legislative assemblies delegate to cabinets the fleshing out the details of ho...
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Draft federal methane regulations- Hostile response from Alberta
7Dec By Bob AscahNo Comments
Energy, Environment, Health, Politics

Draft federal methane regulations- Hostile response from Alberta

Albertans and Canadian are getting used to conflict between the Alberta and federal governments over the future of fossil fuels and emissions regulations.  However, in the latest exchange from Premier Smith and her lieutenant, Environment minister Rebecca Schulz is a nasty personal attack on the integrity on the personal integrity of Environment minister Stephen Guilbeault.In a particularly nasty statement, Smith and Schulz seem to project their own ideas about post office careers, but not necessarily in the same line of work as Guilbeault. The federal government has unilaterally established new methane emissions rules and targets to help win international headlines. Instead of building on Alberta’s award-winning approach, Ottawa wants to replace it with costly, dangerous and unconsti...
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7Aug By Bob AscahNo Comments
Education, Environment, Health

Mandate letters- Education, Environment and Health

Accountability Mandate letters are incredibly valuable instruments giving interested members of the public and policy analysts a more informed view of what cabinet ministers and their senior officials are expected to do. The degree of transparency and accountability that goes with it give the Premier (and the public) a ready way to assess performance of ministers and their departments.  Whether the policy initiatives cited in these letters correspond to what the public thought they were going to get is, of course, another matter.  For instance, the Alberta Revenue Agency and the resurrection of the Alberta Pension Plan and Health Spending Accounts were non-issues during the campaign for the UCP at least. In this post, I explore the mandates for the ministries of Education, Environment and...
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Lou Hyndman’s reply to Preston Manning’s proposal
19Jul By Bob AscahNo Comments
Budget, Capital Spending, Fiscal History, Government Finances, Health, Politics

Lou Hyndman’s reply to Preston Manning’s proposal

In an earlier post,  in the fall of 1983, Preston Manning, then President of Manning Consultants a firm his father established wished push fiscal policy changes. The timing may be significant because by that time Peter Lougheed had been in office for 12 years and there was speculation growing about when her would exit.  Lou Hyndman's somewhat testy reply to Preston Manning's circulation of his groups report to all M.L.A.'s and to Progressive Conservative delegates at the annual convention was especially cool. The displeasure is evident in Manning's courageous and naive proposal to reduce the size of the Alberta Legislative Assembly consistent with principles that fiscal discipline should begin at the top. His reference to the earlier Social Credit government allowing the civil service to r...
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The Conversation-Will Danielle Smith stay moderate or move back to the right — and towards Alberta separatism?
15Jun By Bob AscahNo Comments
Credit Ratings, Environment, Health, Intergovernmental, Opinion/Research

The Conversation-Will Danielle Smith stay moderate or move back to the right — and towards Alberta separatism?

This article was published on 15 June 2023 in The Conversation. Reproduced with permission from The Conversation.    With a fresh and workable majority, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is facing the choice of conforming to her moderate election stance or pushing the strategies of various quasi-separatist groups like Take Back Alberta and Project Confederation. If she opts to move from the centre to the far right again, controversies involving the federal government, government workers and environmentalists will ensue. As a political scientist, former Alberta public servant, financial institution executive and university administrator and researcher, I have been watching politics in Alberta for more than 40 years. At the present time, political pundits are contemplating how Smith, with a fre...
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28Mar By Bob AscahNo Comments
Budget, Energy, Environment, Government Finances, Health, Opinion/Research, Politics

Solutions-based policy development and Some Modest Recommendations

There are major issues confronting Alberta- a massive understatement if there ever was!   As a student, practitioner, and teacher of public policy for over 40 years, the following ideas are in a germination phase and readers are encouraged to comment and add their suggestions on the central germ of this idea. A solutions-based approach to government policy-making offers a means of identifying a small number of “problems” which require immediate attention and on which there is a consensus on the need for action. This approach starts with Problem identification. The government’s prerogative, but our current government arguably sees things much differently than a majority of Albertans- (e.g. the visceral hate of the federal government as represented by Mr. Trudeau.) In this blogpost, I set o...
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What does Danielle Smith think?
12Nov By Bob Ascah2 Comments
Budget, Energy, Health, Opinion/Research

What does Danielle Smith think?

Updated and corrected 3 December 2022   See also a related BlogPost for the Parkland Institute What Was She Thinking? A Glimpse Into Danielle Smith’s Mind published 2 December 2022 Perhaps the best glimpse into Premier Smith’s thinking on a whole range of critical public policy issues is contained in a 20-page paper entitled “Alberta’s Key Challenges and Opportunities.”   This paper was part of the School of Public Policy’s pre-publication series called the Alberta Futures Project. This paper was published in June 2021 before oil and gas prices rose substantially changing the province’s fiscal picture. What is surprising is the absence of a discussion of a sovereignty act and confronting federal overreach central to her winning the UCP leadership. In this article, I examine fundamental v...
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