When promises to reverse previous government actions and decisions are made by a candidate for the PC leadership, common courtesy — and curiosity — demand, when she wins and automatically becomes Alberta’s new premier, that Alison Redford be given some time to make good, or renege on those promises.
Presto! Changeo! With one wave of the good fairy’s magic wand $107 million in cuts to education are restored and, with another, Potatogate is slammed shut, the scheme to sell 16,000 acres of priceless native prairie grassland habitat to a PC party supporter, allegedly to plow up, irrigate, and grow spuds for potato chips.
Aside from wondering where we are as a democracy and why do we bother with a legislature when just one woman, new to the job, can make such decisions, and fretting over where the $107 million is going to come from, most of us will applaud these decisions.
The Oct. 19, Alberta news release announcing the cancellation of the Request For Proposals to sell the 16,000 acres says: “Government cancelled the RFP after people expressed concerns that there was no public input into using a RFP and that there might be an impact on water and on the ranching community. Water use and availability are priorities for this government.”
By ignoring the thousands of Albertans who objected simply because this was rare and priceless habitat for many native and endangered species, the release shows that this government still does not get it, despite the fact that even the government’s own South Saskatchewan Basin Regional Advisory Council has already recommended that “on public native rangelands, the conversion to arable agriculture or other permanent uses will not be considered.”
Specifically, our new premier should alter the slipshod way our public land is administered and introduce measures to ensure that Potatogates can never again open. Generally, Ms. Redford should take a hard look at the whole question of the chronic lack of stewardship and mismanagement of Alberta’s public land that is costing Albertans multi millions of dollars annually.
Before going “political,” this column wanted to know who the premier appointed minister of Sustainable Resource Development in her Cabinet, the minister responsible for what interests outdoors people: fish, wildlife and public land. That was not easy, because, of the star-struck media, only The Edmonton Journal gave the full cabinet list the day after the appointments.
The new SRD minister is Frank Oberele, who was elected in 2008 for his second term as MLA for Peace River.
Prior to his SRD appointment, Oberle served in the cabinet as Solicitor General and minister of Public Security. Our new SRD minister was educated as a forester and worked in the forestry industry, which may be why Alberta’s conservation organizations have not greeted his appointment with the enthusiasm shown Ted Morton, an avid hunter and angler, when he was appointed SRD minister.
Oberele does enjoy fishing and river boating.
Even though many Alberta outdoors people regard appointing a career forester SRD minister as oxymoronic, Oberle should find it easy to be better at his new job than was his immediate predecessor, Mel Knight, demoted there from Energy, and a mover in the Potatogate boondoggle.
But Morton is now minister of Energy, and I would not be surprised to see a man of his strong environmental and recreational convictions bring about some changes in the way the resource extractors treat the renewable resources upon which our outdoors recreations depend.
Then we have former energy company worker, Diana McQueen, MLA for Drayton Valley-Calmar, appointed Minister of the Environment: time will tell what this will mean. The plot thickens . . .
My advice to Oberle would be to arrange a meeting with Allan Warrack, minister of Lands and Forests (as SRD then was) in Peter Lougheed’s first cabinet, generally regarded as the best minister in the portfolio we have ever had and the only one who understood and took seriously that he was the trustee for us all for our sustainable resources, including our public land, our fish and wildlife.
Oberle will have ample time to learn his portfolio and set an agenda, so I am expecting to hear a barn-burner of an address by him to the annual conference of the Alberta Fish and Game Association in Calgary late in February.
On balance, this column sees a promising start from our new premier., so promising that I am willing to suggest to her, or “her people,” how, with a flick of that wand of hers, she could find that $107 million with, maybe $50 million to boot to restore some of the debilitating cuts the SRD budget has suffered in recent years.
Those funds were “rediscovered” as a byproduct of this column’s venting on Potatogate and as I did research for a “barnburner” of my own, to be delivered as the Kostuch Lecture at the annual meeting of the Alberta Wilderness Association in Calgary on Nov. 18.
Bob Scammell is an award-winning outdoors writer living in Red Deer.