Chris Davis, Pincher Creek Voice
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| Danielle Smith and Pat Stier C. Davis photo |
The event was part fundraiser and part meet-and-greet. Smith and Stier gave a press conference before the dinner and speeches were to commence.
With extensive media experience as an editorial writer and columnist for the Calgary Herald for six years and stints on radio and television, Smith is a very poised, quick thinking subject on the other side of the cameras.
"People are concerned about the budget deficits, they're concerned about the lack of savings, they're concerned about the state of health-care system, they're concerned about a number of these land-use bills that impact property rights, and they're concerned about the state of our democracy and the fact that we have a government that's arrogant, out of touch, bullying, and that they have a system where they don't really respect the role of the individual elected MLA to represent the view of their constituents. We do," she said.
On the subject of education, Smith spoke about the need for "a fair funding formula where we have a prioritized list to clear the infrastructure backlog, and where we make that list public so we can take the politics out of it."
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| Wildrose leader Danielle Smith and Livingstone-Macleod candidate Pat Stier at the Pincher Creek Golf Course Clubhouse C. Davis photo |
Smith mocked the recent "Alison Wonderland budget", calling it "a disaster" that could lead to a 2.5 to 3 billion-dollar deficit this year.
"They don't want to get their spending under control, and they're hoping that resource revenues are going to bail them out of their spending problem." Smith referenced the Wildrose alternative budget, which was released the day after the official budget. "We showed how we would get the budget back into balance this year so that we can be on the track to surpluses, so we can start saving again, so that we can insure that we don't have an increase in taxes, and so that we stop blowing through our savings."
"Fiscal issues are going to really be the defining issue of the campaign. We're the only party that is committed not to increase taxes," she vowed. "We're the only conservative party. They're actually the liberal party."
Pat Stier was confident that he could offer a credible alternative to Livingstone-Macleod incumbent Evan Berger, who is currently the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development for the reigning Progressive Conservatives. "I've lived in southern Alberta all my life," Stier explained. "I've lived in my family home all my life, and it's right in the foothills area, and with an agricultural background and a bit of oil and gas and a lot of business and management experience I think I can bring an awful lot to the table and provide a fairly good representation for the people here." Smith said there was "No credibility to the traveling roadshow that they've been doing now to try to assuage some of the concerns of landowners throughout the province, and unfortunately Evan wears a lot of that."
"I'm going to be interviewed, Evan is going to be reviewed," Stier quipped.
Smith seemed eager to contest the imminent election. "We're ready," she said. "We knew there was a potential that an election could be called this week, so we're ready to go whenever they are." Smith was elected as Wildrose leader on Oct 17, 2009. She said the time since then has been "The longest job interview of my life."
"There really is no other party that is able to to challenge this government besides us."
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A Wildrose conversation
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| John Hilton-O'Brien |
How long have you been affiliated with the Wild Rose Party?
HOB: I was one of the founders of Wildrose in 2007. I was also involved with the Alberta Alliance from about '04.
What was the purpose for forming the Wildrose?
HOB: After almost 40 years, the PC party was becoming less effective as it became more enmeshed with government at all levels. We had become a dominant-party state, like India and Mexico. The existing opposition parties could not seem to do anything. It's a problem typical of such systems, where the opposition parties tend to marginalize themselves.
As I understand it you have worked in the background most of this time as an organizer, is that correct?
HOB: I once attended an event for a PC leadership contestant. The affair turned out to be organized by the Grande Prairie county planners, on company time. I was a director of Wildrose at the initial meeting, then VP of Policy in the interim. The existing VP quit and I was already doing most of the work, so they appointed me. When the parties merged in 2008, I was VP; the President then quit, and I became President. I actually declined the offered title, instead styling myself as "Acting President," because I did not think I should have the title without a proper election.
Did you stand for election then?
HOB: No, I just held the party together through the election. I was selected as President because the Board felt I was the one person who could do that. Mergers are TOUGH. I did wind up running for the Alberta Alliance in '04. I was a campaign worker. I wound up helping people get their nomination signatures. When the guy in Grande Prairie dropped the ball, they asked "who can we send up there who can get the nomination done, and won't embarrass us if accidentally elected." The next day, I headed to Grand Prairie through an ice storm that killed several people on that road. I got several hundred votes more than I expected, though. I got to have a debate with Mel Knight. Knight should not have come. Incumbents could really only embarrass themselves. They hold the upper hand otherwise. I convinced every voter in that room who wasn't a member of a campaign team to vote for me. They punished Mel by making him Whip.
We have reforms that MUST be done.
What are these reforms that must be done?
HOB: When Ed got in, he started a royal commission into the number of royal commissions. Seriously. He needed to. Nobody knew how many agencies, boards, and commissions there were.
You sound sorta friendly toward Ed
HOB: I feel sorry for the poor bloke. As an aside, in a democracy, you must remember that your opponents are not your enemies. It's the hardest lesson to learn, and the most important.
Do many of these commissions actually influence any change?
HOB: The ABCs, as they're called, include school boards, regional health authorities, WCB, and any other technically "arms-length" bodies. You see, the ABCs turn out to control half of the budget. Ed got rid of a few. Going for the health superboard was probably an attempt to curb ABC creep. The ABCs are run with appointed boards. All the members are influential in the PC party. All of them believe they have a moral obligation to represent their board to the government. If a Premier who is leader of the PC party tries to make a targeted (as apposed to across the board) cut, he will be opposed within the party by the board members of the organizations he cut. In other words, he or she will soon cease to be leader.
And how do you circumvent that if you feel cuts are needed?
HOB: You can't. If you are the PC leader, you're hooped. Ed did the best he could, trying to curb the health boards. He was also trying to bring the outlying health systems like WCB into line. That is part of the reason he was ousted.
Would that be different under the Wildrose, if you were to gain power, or is gaining that level of power not the present goal?
HOB: Yes, that would be different. But that difference has conditions. First, there is a central idea in Wildrose that militates against it - the principle that no order of government should make decisions that can be made as well or better by an order of government closer to the street. In technical terms, this is called "the principle of subsidiarity."
So, those closer to the situation understand it better?
HOB: Always. Consider it from the position of the voter, too. If all the decisions about Pincher Creek are made in Edmonton, how engaged in politics will you really feel? If most decisions are made locally, and only the most important and cross-provincial decisions are made in Edmonton, you can understand that your say is less direct. In the bigger issues, I mean.
So you mean, say, in education? Healthcare?
HOB: Precisely. That means local health regions again -- and most importantly, elected ones. The municipal level of government doesn't really exist in North America. Cities are strictly the creations of the state or province.
And how do we avoid having a succession of committees that undo each others work?
HOB: The same way that you have continuity in any organization. Including the province. We have to make the cities more "real."
As in connect the people to them?
HOB: And have more real power. Ideally, we would be talking about a Constitution for the Province, which lays out the powers of the Province versus those of the municipalities and villages.
I guess my big question there is this, how do you create stability in a city culture that is so rapidly changing, where the people come and go, etcetera.
HOB: At the provincial level, the legislators and executive are cadres, elected as a group, with no integral tie to the legislature. In a municipality, there is always a core of people who stay, permanently. They actually LIVE there. The Legslature is ephemeral. Pincher Creek is REAL.
So you believe in smaller groups with more power to do things on an essentially local level?
HOB: Yes. Now, I also believe that the local group has every ability in the world to make mistakes. You have to be willing to let the local folk make local mistakes. Those mistakes are a lot easier to fix than if, say, the provincial government messes up with royalty rates. We use a light, light touch...guide, not direct.
Healthcare...
The local health facilities are non-profit, profit-making, or provincially-run bodies, running according to Provincial standards. Really, what we have here is a case of government by network. What we have to say is that we are in the business of making health care happen, rather than in the business of providing that health care. A region should be generally able to provide for its own health care, however its network works.
Provincial intervention should be just that: an intervention, which means that it has a beginning, a middle, and an END. We help the local region perfect its system, and then we butt out.
Does that bring privatization into the mix?
HOB: We already HAVE privatization. And we have done it BADLY. We need to figure out how to make the private facilities mesh better with other local facilities. I know an old man who is in an extended care facility. His wife, in permanent care, is in another (private) facility on the other side of Calgary. An effective local management could solve that problem, but it is almost impossible in the complexity of the "superboard."
Make the decision-making power local, and local people will be able to impact that decision. Things CAN get better. The flip side of subsidiarity is solidarity: the authority making decisions is with the people it is making decisions for. Keeping the source of funds as local as possible, though, is essential.
So how do you turn the money gathering machine around?
HOB: Background first: Lougheed intentionally developed the grant making system as a way to get local authorities to do what he wanted them to do. It worked well. But it grew. Today, over half the budget is given out in grants. Every government department makes them. With every grant, there are strings: if you do things our way, we will give you grants. The sheer complexity of the system means that there is no coherence to the program. In a sense, ALL of the money is wasted. All we have done is made funding unreliable at the local level. In a sense, ALL of the money is wasted. Then, grants are sometimes actually destructive, because they cause a local authority to change its mission.
I was on the board of the homeless shelter in Grande Prairie, from 05 to '07. Our building needed to be condemned, badly. We had plans for a new shelter. But how to fund it? No money was available for homeless people: the relevant department assured us that they had already "dealt with homelessness" the previous year, and no money was available for temporary shelter. Seniors and Community Supports, however, eagerly came to our aid. They could give us all the money we needed: so long as we built long-term subsidized housing units. They just couldn't do temporary housing. In other words, the government was glad to help us build our shelter, so long as we built anything but a homeless shelter. Let's just say that we're very glad for the local Rotary clubs, shall we? And what would we do without homeless shelters, exactly? Occupy Front Yard?
Family and Community Social Services (an ABC) teamed up with United Way in the late 90's in Calgary. They started doing joint surveys to "assess need." At the time, I was doing an internship with the Calgary John Howard Society, which provided front line services to persons who were involved with the justice system or at risk of such involvement. FCSS and United Way determined that the only need of downtown Calgary with respect to crime and criminality was "getting tough on crime." The very next day, the Calgary John Howard Society had a new motto. ON IT'S WALL IN RECEPTION. "Tough on crime." John Howard Society had become completely dependent on FCSS and United Way for funding. They had no choice at all. The granting system had lifted an effective street-level agency up by its roots, turned it around, and dropped it back in the soil. This is an extreme case, but the subtle case has become more common than you might think.
Agencies in the non-profit world spend a great deal of time trying to invent new programs to follow different available grants. they have to: its a matter of survival.
So, more long term funding, and perhaps less overall grants so that can happen?
HOB: Yessir. You get to the independent funding ONLY by reducing the amount of money that upper levels of government take. That is true both in corporate tax (which increases available donations) and personal taxes. We MUST curb the provincial government's addiction to taxing and spending. You can make it possible for lower levels of government to tax independently by building new fundraising means, and by adding in ways of legitimate taxation. So, in Pincher Creek's case, we could allow municipalities to receive donations on some sort of enhanced donation structure. We can do the same by allowing new fundraising tools (By empowering Charitable Remainder Trusts). We can also improve real taxing powers by returning the full proportion of property taxes to them, or perhaps mandating a deal with the County on linear assessments (which the County wouldn't like much). Much of this is technical, but the basic principle is that we are using non-intrusive ways to help a municipality get funding. The middle option is the most immediately viable: the block grant.
To use block grants, we would have to convert some of the money involved in the grants with strings attached, and give it directly to lower orders of government, without the strings. In other words, instead of parcelling out the dollars going to Pincher Creek in a hundred grants with conditions that require spending half of it on accountants, we give three quarters of the total to Pincher Creek, and say "you decide how to use it." Pincher Creek gets more dollars, and the government saves money. Everyone is happy, except perhaps some accountants.
There's a couple of very happy things that go with this:
1. The people parcelling up the grants are typically managers, not front-line government employees. A couple of years ago, the government gave out bonii to managers -- almost a quarter of the total employees of the government got one. That's a lot of managers, and we can afford to lose some.
2. We can make the changes piecemeal, one government department or program at a time. We don't even need a coherent plan -- just a general intention. We can implement this sort of thing as circumstances allow.
3. Nobody gets left out. The current competitive granting process might allow, say, Peace Country to get all the money allocated for homelessness grants. Alberta Southwest could get nada. In a block grant system, you're giving money to municipalities, probably on the basis of area and population.
So, a leaner machine?
HOB: Not just a leaner machine -- a machine that gets leaner every day without thinking about it. It's the reverse of the situation the PCs have.
I would be negligent if I didn't mention the last way that a government can get to street level: Do it yourself. If you've decided that close control of a service is necessary, you don't give grants for it. You do it yourself, whether through a tightly-controlled network of contractors, or by having your own outlets (think social services).
We don't really believe in larger government, you know.
Do you see this being the way the world should ultimately govern itself, smaller groups with less control from centralized government?
HOB: Yes, for many reasons. First and foremost, this is about humanizing government. The Wildrose vision of society is organic. We take part in society through our families, our communities, our markets, our towns, and only then through the central government. To be human is to live in community. The most important communities are not formally constituted governments: they are emerging communities, like our families and our marketplaces. The fall of the USSR was the thin edge of the wedge. We also see that in movements such as Occupy Wall Street, as much as they aggravate us sometimes.
The European experiment is part of the movement. They are struggling with subsidiarity right now: how can their smaller states and communities live within the Union?
Europe is having a tough go of it at the moment. How do we survive those moments?
HOB: Europe's problem is that they failed to respect the basic principles. They spent too much at the centre, and they tried to much control over locals over things that didn't matter. Canada is in a much better situation right now, because our debt is so much lower. Sovereign debt means that you spend a significant part of your GDP on servicing it. That means power flows away from the lower orders of government constantly.
That's why Redford's coming spending spree (and it is starting to look BIG) scares us so much. The farther we go down that road, the less control we will have at the local level.
Education...
To be honest, a lot of our policy is about doing whatever stands a chance.
Not all kids are made the same, and not all towns are made the same. We have to realize that, and make decisions in the best interest of the local community. That means diversifying. Sad to say, we are going to need provincial achievement tests to give us a framework. Then, we can go with power to local authorities. Let a lot of people try out what they think will work. That's what makes a good R&D program function. They'll get it closer to local needs than we could in the first place, and we'll see some innovation.
I wonder how much of the future of education will be held in concentrated brick and mortar classrooms in the future.
HOB: In all honesty, I don't care, and I don't think the rest of Wildrose does. We need to be in the business of making sure kids get their educations, not in the business of providing that education. We all care about that a whole lot, and whether our personal sacred cows survive the process is something we're willing to risk.
So the providing would be done locally, with some policing of it from a more centralized body?
HOB: Precisely. Local authorities can decide where to build schools. That doesn't have to be done from Edmonton. What's more, families can have some say in those schools. Let the funding follow the child. Are they going to the local public school? Fine. Catholic School? Also fine. Charter school? Fine again. A last thing about education: provincial exams are key for that model. It's the only way we can reliably compare results.
I wonder about Universities and Colleges, how do they get funded in that model?
HOB: Having money follow the student works pretty well at the college level, too. Imagine if you could easily set up a partnership with Athabasca University to run your college in Pincher Creek through the BA level. We can offer good loan forgiveness to keep graduates in the province. I'm afraid that'll have to be tailored to labour needs, though. So it's a good bet that we won't forgive loans on Philosophy or poli-sci degrees any time soon. If funding follows the student, you'd be able to build your college if you need it. Or not.
We need to make sure that any student loans are big enough for where you're living. It's the living expenses that will get you. A lot of people get student loans that aren't high enough for the area. We also need to expand the available scholarships. A LOT. It is often cheaper to go to the US for the last 2-3 years of a bachelor's, because they have way more scholarships. that's all about those fundraising/donation tools.
The we is both. It has to start with centralized scholarships, and then devolve to the local as they are able to raise more money.
Well-negotiated tax credits take most of the money from the Feds!
Where does this fit with a Federal government over and above our provincial one?
HOB: Simple. The Federal Government should not be controlling things that the Province can control, and so on down the line. So part of our time will be spent on claiming authority back from the Feds.
Do you think we need a federal government anymore?
HOB: Yes. I like the army to be controlled by someone as far away from me as possible, thanks. When the Rabbi in "Fiddler on the Roof" was asked if he had a blessing for the Czar, he said "God bless the Czar, and keep him far from here!" Things like the army and foreign relations are essentially federal. It is also a beautiful thing to have a court of appeal beyond the Province. It limits the amount of damage we can do.
The Constitution lays out the division of powers between Federal and Provincial governments beautifully. We just want that distinction respected.
The role of the local MLA...
HOB: A lot of what an MLA actually CAN do stands in the area of social entrepreneurship. If a community has a problem, you can call people to come to a meeting. Communities can do a lot, but someone has to convene the right people. All those people who want to lobby the MLA can become useful.
Upcoming election...
HOB: Redford was last seen at 43% with her party lagging behind. She's falling relatively fast.
This election is partly about whether her honeymoon with the media ends before the election does. She hired too many of Gary Mar's supporters. She's starting to expand the ABCs again. As a reformer, she actually lags behind Ed. We have a great candidate running against Ted (Morton), and his riding changed to include Chestermere. Bruce McAllister, our candidate there, has good name recognition, is a decent human being, and raised $43 grand in his first fundraiser
One of our concerns deep in Wildrose is that we can never allow the opposition to be hobbled this way again. We need to change governments every so often. It's a matter of backstopping, as well as reasonable criticism. We have a history of "disdaining partisanship," which forced us into this. It allowed the PCs to present themselves as all things to all people. The Alberta Borg tell us that resistance would be impolite, and that we should wait to be assimilated.
Disclaimer: The Pincher Creek Voice is not endorsing any candidate in the upcoming Provincial election. We invite candidates from every party to contact us for an interview so that we may present as many points of view here as possible to our readership. To that end we have attempted to contact the candidates and parties we know about. To date, only the Wildrose has responded to our invitation. pinchercreekvoice@gmail.com
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