Ed Stelmach - Meet Steve Harper, You've Got a Lot In Common

Ed Stelmach and Steve Harper both know how to govern - when they're awash in cash. What neither of them understood was that the good days don't last so you use them to prepare for the bad days to come.

When the RCMP installed Steve as prime monster he got more than a bigger, free house. He got a government with a balance budget and hefty surpluses. The first thing Steve did was get rid of those safety net surpluses. He trimmed two cents off the GST. Steve must've been looking down when he did that because he sure didn't see what was coming.

Special Ed Stelmach has just announced that the bestest, richest province in the whole damn country has fallen on its arse to the tune of a $4.7 billion deficit this year. Edward the Dim thought that he could go through Alberta's windfall because, after all, what could possibly happen to the world's dirtiest, most expensive oil? Dumb and Dumber, all in the same body.

When I saw pictures of Ed in the past I always had this urge to sort of pat him on the head and tell him to go outside to play. Now Ed's turned that goofy smile upside down. Apparently it has something to do with a $6.4-billion drop in oil revenues. So smokes are going up - three bucks a carton - and beer will cost an extra $1.30 a dozen. Worse yet, if you need a visit to the chiropractor or sex-change surgery (they aren't the same thing?) you're on your own.

It's tough Ed but, as Steve says, who could've seen it coming? I mean it's not like Alberta has gone through this before - is it?

Riding the Wild Hog in Alberta

For three years, steadily rising oil prices have allowed the Alberta government to spend like there's no tomorrow. And then tomorrow showed up.

"Special Ed" Stelmach is running into the same problem as Harper. After riding high on the hog, plummeting oil prices are leaving Ed with a lot of unfunded expectations. It's gotten Ed musing about having to introduce a repeat of the old Klein "slash and burn" cost cutting. According to the Calgary Herald, forces are massing to oppose such a move:

Opposition parties, labour unions and other interest groups said the province's social and environmental programs can't handle another round of 1990s style budget slashing, which Stelmach floated Thursday as a potential way to deal with a revenue shortfall in the coming fiscal year.

The Alberta Liberals accused the government of panicking in a cyclical economy and turning to the only strategy they know.

"This shows a complete lack of imagination," deputy leader Laurie Blakeman said. "Albertans feel that they made their sacrifices, they tightened their belt in the '90s to get out of this and many of them feel that they're now being asked to do that again."

The province's revenues are in free fall, with oil trading Friday around $36 US a barrel, down from a high of $147 this summer. With the economic downtown, corporate and personal income taxes are also expected to be much lower than previous years.

Compounding the revenue dip is the fact government spending has increased almost 30 per cent over the past two years to $38 billion. Yet, legislation passed by former premier Ralph Klein prevents the government from running a budget deficit.

Dead Ducks All In a Row

Special Ed Stelmach has a problem and it's one that's not going away.

Ed's problem, or at least his latest problem, is the toxic waste dump also known as the Athabasca Tar Sands. Getting ersatz oil out of Athabasca's bitumen tar uses an awful lot of water - fresh water that's turned into a black, oily waste that has to be pumped into tailing ponds built out of earthen walls.

These tailing ponds are big. They can be seen from the shuttle as it orbits in space. And they're not getting any smaller because no one, it seems, has any plan for dealing with this toxic sludge. Now I don't know what the lifespan of an earthen wall may be but I'm pretty sure it's not all that long. No one's really sure how much of this stuff may seep into the groundwater or when or just who may be effected by it eventually.

When it comes to the Tar Sands and the rich array of environmental threats associated with that boondoggle, Special Ed clings to the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" school of environmentalism. When native villages downstream get swept with cancer or migratory birds die in the tailing ponds, he proclaims the Tar Sands an environmental triumph and brands his critics as outsiders, sh*t disturbers.

So now Ed has five or six hundred dead ducks on his hands and, of course, it's not really about the ducks at all but where they died - the tailing ponds. That defeats the "out of sight, out of mind" firewall on which people like Ed rely so heavily. The timing couldn't have been worse, coming at the same time as Ed had dispatched his Number Two to the US to promote the Tar Sands. How did Ed react? Predictably. Ed tried to set up the province of Alberta as the underdog, the David to the environmentalists' Goliath. Why not? That kind of bullshit has worked great for the White House for the past eight years. Who cares whether the statement is utterly ridiculous so long as your target audience is willing to swallow.

Now it turns out that a Seattle scientist is calling "bullshit" on Ed Stemcell's claims that the normal, annual loss from the Tar Sands ponds is only 20-birds. Jeff Wells belongs to a group that conducted research at just one operation in 2003 that found, even with bird-deterrence programmes in place, 705 birds died in just a four week span. That's one operation, the Albian Sands project, and just four weeks. Albian Sands is a joint venture of Shell and Chevron-Texaco, operator of the Muskeg River mind about 75-kms. north of Fort McMurray.

Makes you wonder. If Ed's going to deceive the public about a few hundred migratory birds, when it comes to his cherished Tar Sands, what else is he willing to hide and bury and lie about? My guess is that he'll do whatever he thinks it takes.

No one seems to be asking why these tailing ponds are being left to grow and spread? The wealth associated with those tailings is leaving Athabasca and much of it is leaving Canada with the American oil companies running these mines. Simply leaving these tailings unresolved as a future threat to the region doesn't sound like much of a plan.

The National Spot ran the predictible opinion piece dismissing the incident as just a few hundred birds that otherwise would have fallen to hunters anyway. What was interesting was the furor that sparked in readers' letters. People were uniformly incensed with the Post's whitewash. Maybe there is hope yet.

The satellite picture at the top shows the Albian Sands project. I expect you can figure out for yourself what those black objects are at the top left.

Stelmach Tucks Tail Between Legs and Splits

Special Ed has announced he'll jump on the short bus and split for Edmonton this afternoon while the gettin's good.

The Alberta premier has decided to head for the foothills before his fellow premiers begin their summit on climate change tomorrow. Stelmach, whose otherwise modest little province churns out a third of Canada's greenhouse gas emissions, has apparently been stampeded out of Vancouver by the representatives of every other province in the country.

Instead of explaining and defending his feeble greenhouse gas plan, Ed seems to have figured that what's good enough for Dick Cheney is good enough for him and for Alberta and for Canada.