Revolutionary Moderation

Alberta Politics celebrity deathmatch



On Saturday, the Alberta Liberal Party elected Kevin Taft their new leader, in a race that had more predictability than even its federal counterpart. Canoe has an excellent short bio of the new leader here.



Taft inherits a party that spent like drunken sailors last election and carries an enormous debt into the next, but he also carries one huge advantage that Grant Mitchell had, that Nick Taylor had, and that so many recent Alberta Liberal leaders have not had: Taft thinks of the Liberal Party as something more than just the Red Team of some intersquad game. Decore, McBeth, Nicol - any of these leaders would have been perfectly comfortable as Tories - in fact, Nancy McBeth ran for the Tory leadership against Klein.



I like that Taft gets so deeply under Klein's skin. When Taft published Shredding the Public Interest, he became a bestselling author saying something very few others were saying in Alberta at the time. It obviously hit a nerve.



The media focus on the book was on the critique of the cuts, but what got me about it when I read it was the description of the communications strategies that allowed Klein to make the cuts in what seemed to be a docile, accepting environment. In particular, Taft described the changes made to the Public Affairs Bureau office, which was converted from a little group conducting legislature tours and sending copies of documents to those who request them, into the centre of government spin control - doing a political function in a government office. This is the office that developed the idea of spending tax money on the annual Premier's message broadcast, passing the free time offered by the CBC so they could have exclusive access to the public, for instance.



Taft knows how the Tory communications machine works, and is emminently qualified to find the "off" switch, or figure out the right span to wrench. The Liberals are now in as good a shape as they could possibly be, given the million-odd dollars of debt.