[Dion]

Breakenridge: Drop the charade, bring on the Alberta election already

Albertans may very well share the concerns raised last week by Premier Rachel Notley about a future UCP government possibly entertaining the idea of road tolls. It would certainly be an issue worth raising on the campaign trail.

However, it was hardly appropriate to be launching into a partisan tirade in her speech to the Industrial Heartland annual conference, a speech that was ostensibly government business. As it turned out, the announcement of “the next step in the Made-in-Alberta energy strategy” turned out to be not much of an announcement at all.

There was no official government news release about any such “next step,” but there was an NDP press release that day reiterating Notley’s points about comments from UCP Leader Jason Kenney concerning user pay and infrastructure projects.

We all know an election is coming. But as the premier’s public appearances and proclamations become more transparently political, perhaps we could spare ourselves the charade of pretending we’re not in a campaign. Moreover, we need to get away from the unseemly use of government resources to advance partisan political agendas.

If the premier and her government feel as though they have legitimate business to attend to that precludes such timing, then they should start acting like it. If the premier is already in full campaign mode, the least she could do is make it official and let everyone else join her

Notley’s government is not the first and will not be the last to try to maximize the benefits of incumbency heading into an election. Furthermore, Notley’s NDP is not the first nor will it be the last party to have such an approach while in opposition, only to embrace it themselves when in power. The rest of us, though, shouldn’t be so cynical as to let this slide.

It was actually twice last week where the premier scheduled what turned out to be non-announcements and instead used the opportunity to campaign against her opponents. Earlier in the week, Notley appeared at the construction site for the new Calgary Cancer Centre to re-announce her support for the project. So why was she there? Why were the media summoned there? As it turns out, Notley had a lot to say about she sees as a questionable commitment to the project on the part of the UCP.

As anyone who works in media knows, we’ll all be getting besieged with this sort of stuff on a daily basis during the campaigns from the war rooms of the various parties. But the apparatus of the Alberta government is not the NDP war room.

https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/co...-election-asap