Although the calendar reads September 2014 some Calgarians would be forgiven for thinking it was June 2013.
Since Jim Prentice was anointed as this province’s new leader the latest in the 43-year Conservative dynasty there has been a flood of promises and policies including sudden decisions on flood mitigation itself.
The government is going to work on a water management agreement with TransAlta and is planning to dam a section of Springbank for a dry reservoir which has residents a little miffed and garnered one hell of a passive-aggressive response from Mayor Naheed Nenshi. “With respect to the two flood mitigation measures for Calgary that were announced by Premier Prentice today — namely the dry reservoir in Springbank and the direction to negotiate a permanent water management agreement with TransAlta — it is difficult for us to comment in detail since the City of Calgary has not yet been consulted with respect to either proposal and our experts have not yet seen any engineering studies” wrote the mayor.
In addition to pointing out the possible failings of the plan due in large part to other elements and agreements not being in place Nenshi’s posting highlighted the continued maltreatment of cities by a paternalistic provincial government that still governs as though we’re an agrarian society. This does not bode well for the much-discussed city charters that I’ve heard are effectively dead.
But the flood of words isn’t just about shoring up the banks of Alison Redford’s old riding of Calgary-Elbow where residents are still fighting with the government for flood relief and where Gordon Dirks the so-far unelected minister of education is running for a seat.
The torrent from the premier’s office is reaching biblical proportions — something preacher Dirks can understand — with Prentice desperately trying to prove to a skeptical public that the PC party has changed and that all those promises of accountability and openness will totally happen this time. Swear. Starting with not giving away sole-source contracts to friends to deal with communications during events like the flood.
The premier has outlined five priorities that someone should fact check to make sure they weren’t plagiarized from any of the hundreds of conservative campaigns fought across North America in a given year. Conservative fiscal policies? Check. End entitlements and restore public trust? Roger that. Maximize value for our natural resources and respect property rights? Yup. Quality of life including leading in health care education and skills training (but not something silly like social sciences)? That’s there too. And then down at the bottom hey what’s that? Oh “establish our province as an environmental leader.”
It’s worth digging into that last outlier. Fortunately it’s just a click on the Prentice website before we read: “we will not damage the competitiveness of our oil and gas industry by unilaterally imposing costs and regulations.” That’s under the “environmental leader” banner. His whole rationale for environmental protection is to get more oil to market. Other harmful activities appear not to exist in Prentice’s world.
Like a tailings pond breach spewing its toxins into a waterway we can expect a strong push from Prentice to get our oil out the door. He mimics his old boss Stephen Harper calling for Alberta to be a global superpower in energy which should prove challenging given rising global stockpiles U.S. supply increasing exponentially forecasted increases in Mexico and no efficient way for our glut of production to reach the markets.
Prentice’s first weeks in office have produced the same flood of words we hear whenever a new Progressive Conservative takes the provincial reins and all these years later people are starting to tire of the debris built up from the empty words. Our access to information is a joke and so too is the treatment of our cities. Dissent is considered dirtier than a barrel of bitumen and there’s never really been a plan to wean us off the oily teat. We’re wholly dependent locked in to a volatile market at a time of profound societal shift. Just look to the treatment of our colleges and universities if you want any indication of how the government views education outside of science and technology.
But here’s the thing: floods aren’t all bad; they flush a system. Last year’s flood cleansed the Elbow and the Bow of the rock snot clinging to our waterways’ pebbles and stones providing a hopeful metaphor for the upcoming byelections and eventual provincial contest. There’s no telling just how a flood will play out but we all know there’s plenty of muck to get rid of in this province and after 43 years it’s pretty easy to see who’s to blame.
