Sunday, August 01, 2004
More righteous indignation
The Edmonton Journal, in an article not available online to non-subscribers, today highlighted yet another one of the services offered by one of my favourite hobby horses, the Public Affairs Bureau. Regular readers of this space (we know who you are) will recall that the Public Affairs Bureau is a government department directly under the Premier that is responsible for communications between the government and the public. Trouble is, it has an unfortunate tendancy to also deal in the business of propaganda, such as when, for example, it told Progressive Conservative MLAs on the Legislature's Public Accounts Committee what questions to ask Ralph Klein.
As it turns out, the Bureau doesn't limit its scripting of Tory MLAs' comments to those on the Public Accounts Committee. No, it actually produces a booklet with talking points for Tory MLAs (the booklet in question, of course, being unavailable to opposition MLAs) with talking points to defend government policy in each ministry.
Which brings us to wonder which is more outrageous between a government department - subservient to the Premier who serves at the pleasure of the Legislature - writing propaganda for some members of this Legislature and denying its services to other members, and MLAs being prepared to take their cues from a government department that they're supposed to be supervising. The dog, methinks, must be getting motion sickness from being wagged so vigorously by its own tail.
Democracy in Edmonton is more broken than it is in Ottawa (where it remains, despite (because of?) a minority government, very broken indeed). Those most culpable for this are not the good people in the Public Affairs Bureau, or the Premier, or the Executive Assistants to the Premier, or the oil companies, or the sympathetic media. Those most culpable are the great majority of legislators who fail to meet any of the most basic requirements of a competent legislator.
Again, this is not an issue of ideology or of the government's fitness to govern. I don't care if you think that Ralph Klein is the greatest Premier in Alberta history, I still cannot understand why anybody would choose to elect an MLA who behaves in such a fashion. Perhaps the Tory voters in my readership would care to enlighten me on this front.
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The Edmonton Journal, in an article not available online to non-subscribers, today highlighted yet another one of the services offered by one of my favourite hobby horses, the Public Affairs Bureau. Regular readers of this space (we know who you are) will recall that the Public Affairs Bureau is a government department directly under the Premier that is responsible for communications between the government and the public. Trouble is, it has an unfortunate tendancy to also deal in the business of propaganda, such as when, for example, it told Progressive Conservative MLAs on the Legislature's Public Accounts Committee what questions to ask Ralph Klein.
As it turns out, the Bureau doesn't limit its scripting of Tory MLAs' comments to those on the Public Accounts Committee. No, it actually produces a booklet with talking points for Tory MLAs (the booklet in question, of course, being unavailable to opposition MLAs) with talking points to defend government policy in each ministry.
Which brings us to wonder which is more outrageous between a government department - subservient to the Premier who serves at the pleasure of the Legislature - writing propaganda for some members of this Legislature and denying its services to other members, and MLAs being prepared to take their cues from a government department that they're supposed to be supervising. The dog, methinks, must be getting motion sickness from being wagged so vigorously by its own tail.
Democracy in Edmonton is more broken than it is in Ottawa (where it remains, despite (because of?) a minority government, very broken indeed). Those most culpable for this are not the good people in the Public Affairs Bureau, or the Premier, or the Executive Assistants to the Premier, or the oil companies, or the sympathetic media. Those most culpable are the great majority of legislators who fail to meet any of the most basic requirements of a competent legislator.
Again, this is not an issue of ideology or of the government's fitness to govern. I don't care if you think that Ralph Klein is the greatest Premier in Alberta history, I still cannot understand why anybody would choose to elect an MLA who behaves in such a fashion. Perhaps the Tory voters in my readership would care to enlighten me on this front.
