Kevin Libin

Ottawa’s a heck of a town. Gorgeous architecture, skating on the canal, museums, it’s a reasonable drive from Ottawa. Oh, and it’s also the place where ideals go to die. Exhibit A: our prime minister.

The changing face of Stephen Harper

Ralph Klein sure is beating himself up over “failing” to fix Alberta’s health care system. Sigh. Too bad he only had the federal government, the electorate, and the law on his side.

The mystery of Ralph Klein’s health-care failure

Hobbema was once known as the gangland capital of Alberta. Then a two-year-old girl got shot in a drive-by. Now? Well, it’s probably still the gangland capital of Alberta, but at least they’re trying to change it.

‘Now I’m proud’: One Alberta aboriginal community rallied together following the shooting of a toddler

Surprise, surprise: Canada’s political parties have become so hooked on campaign handouts from taxpayers that they would now be “crippled” without them. That’s the gist of a new study, brought to national attention by none other than me:

Political parties dependent on public handouts: study

Recycling is good for the environment, right? And public transit. And eating local.

Not so fast. Behold my five-and-a-half part series on why almost everything you think you know about the environment is wrong, wrong, wrong:

Throw Out Your Blue Box: Why Recycling is Bad for the Earth

Go Green: Chop Down More Trees

Our Gift to Mother Nature: Fish Farms, Fertilizer and Frankenfoods

Save the Planet, Don’t Take Transit

Eat Global, Not Local

The Original Clean Fuel: Crude Oil

For 11 years, Liberal politicians swanned around the world in first-class style in the name of opening markets for Canadian exporters. They called them Team Canada Trade Missions. And did anyone, once, stop to ask whether they were actually achieving anything

Maybe They Should Stay Home

He’s a noble, caring doctor, fighting single-handedly to stop bloodthirsty oil capitalists determined to wipe out the aboriginal race—but first he has to dodge the evil government agents trying to shut him down. Sound like a fantastic, fictional story? It is. Trouble is, a lot of Albertans actually believe it.

Exposing John O’Connor is all part of the oilsands conspiracy

Subsidize solar power, force biofuels onto the market, buy carbon credits, but whatever you do, don’t actually solve the purported climate change threat. If we do that, after all, how will climate-profiteers get richer?

What’s scarier to Al Gore than global warming? Solving it

Exciting politics? What province am I in?

Why, it’s the brand new Alberta. Under Premier Ed, the political scene is awake from its 15-year slumber and its ready to rock. Brace yourself for my series of thrilling and chilling reports from the Progressive Conservative annual meeting in sunny Red Deer, Alberta.

Danger in all directions for Alberta’s Tories

Paranoia strikes deep at Alberta’s PC convention

Ed Stelmach says respect the ‘family’

Ed Stelmach wills away his Tories’ troubles

Evidently Calgary Transit thinks so. The public transportation system refused to run ads featuring a realistic depiction of a newborn baby. But then, it’s the job of government bureaucrats to make our world as bland as possible, isn’t it? That’s my take, in . . .

Baby sculpture judged too gross for Calgary Transit

BONUS: My editor Kelly McParland tries to rebut me on this one. Spoiler alert: he fails.

It’s got nothing to do with babies

Danielle Smith saved the Wildrose Alliance from disaster once, winning a problem-plagued leadership race with such dominance that she eliminated any doubts of fairness. Now can she save it from being a fringe party? That’s my big question in the wake of the Wildrose leadership convention:

Wildrose looks to cultivate voters

The premier of Alberta had something very important to tell voters the other night. So important, he felt it was necessary to come on television and take up time we could have been using to watch Wheel of Fortune. The message: we’re a great province, with a great government, and nothing—repeat, nothing—at all could be wrong. In other words, exactly the same thing the premier and his government have been saying for months. Here’s my review of the show:

Stelmach adds to narrative of ‘no narrative’

Canada’s invited to a surprise party in Copenhagen this December. The surprise: we’re going to be presented with a big, fact bill for the “climate debt” Canadians have unwittingly been racking up over the last 100 years. It’s a doozy, and it’s just the start of a long list of cheques Canada’s going to be asked to write if we sign on. It’s all there in the Copenhagen treaty, in black and white, as I recently wrote:

Climate ‘debt’ comes due

Record deficits, party infighting, and a third-party beating the snot out of him in what should have been an easy by-election—the last thing Alberta premier Ed Stelmach needs right now is Ralph Klein breaking his silence to weigh in on Tory party business. Lucky for the rest of us, Ralph doesn’t seem to care about what Ed Stelmach thinks.

My column on it all:

Klein makes life difficult for Stelmach

Milking populist outrage has its risks, as the Conservatives may be finding out. When you throw your lot in with the crusading activist crowd, things can get out of hand quickly. Ask the anti-tobacco gang at Health Canada to write a bill that would ban fruit-flavoured cigarillos, for instance, by claiming (based on but a whiff of evidence) that they’re targeted at kids, and suddenly you might find yourself trying to back away from legislation banning Marlboros, sets of a trade dispute, and threatens hundreds of perfectly good jobs.

It’s a tale so nice, I wrote it twice, first as an online column

How Ottawa bungled the easiest health law ever

Then again, slightly differently, as a reported column in the deadtree edition

A Tory cakewalk goes up in smoke

Vote online for your favourite!

No time for half-witty headlines or punchy copy today. I’m about two weeks behind in posting links to my latest works, and I still have to tidy up my office. So let’s get right to it!

Here’s my big piece exploring how urban European environmentalists are teaming up with poor, rural Canadian First Nations to fight the oilsands. Might be a sitcom plot in there somewhere (Chauncey and the Chief?). Anyway, no time to work that one out. Here it is:

Cree Connection

Here’s my hasty tribute to a man who deserved something far more thoughtful. He got it, but not from me

Norman Borlaug’s fight to feed the world

The best column you’ll read on the Wildrose Alliance victory in the Calgary-Glenmore byelection? Right here, mi amigos:

There’s rebellion afoot in Alberta

Okay, you’ll think I’m kidding about this, but here’s my story about how the National Capital Commission is nervous about allowing a memorial to the, oh, 100 million or so people killed, and hundreds of millions more enslaved worldwide by Communists regimes . . . because it might offend Communists. Really! Just look at the headline:

Ottawa memorial risks offending communists

Speaking of Communists . . . they’re resurgent, as I write here, with some attempt to explain why. Better not piss them off with some kinda provocative monument:

Americans no longer afraid of Mr. Wolff

Not only that, they’re buying up the oilpatch! Should we be worried. No sir. We have nothing but respect for our new Communist overlords. And, even if we didn’t, what harm could they seriously do us in the oilsands? None, say I, in my latest FP Magazine column:

Kevin Libin: Sinophobia in the oilpatch

There’s a couple more items, but I’ll post them later. That wore me out

It’s hard to blame First Nations for resorting to blockades and other illegal actions to protest land claims. For one, knowing how lousy governments are at respecting rights, it’s almost always the case that the natives have a legitimate beef. For another, it works so well. As one refreshingly frank Alberta chief once told me “‘Blockade’ seems a bad, bad word, But it’s not.  It sometimes brings both parties that are in dispute together to fix it.”

Sure. But this ain’t the Gulf of Aden. When Canadians get screwed over, we don’t resort to seizing property and demanding ransom to release it. We go to court. And with so much at stake, governments had better start insisting that First Nations do the same, as I explain in my column in the September issue of the Financial Post Business Magazine:

Can’t win for trying

The thing about criminals in Saskatchewan is that they’re not much less trustworthy than the provincial justice system itself. So, yes, I know, most everyone thinks Colin Thatcher’s guilty of murdering his ex-wife. And even reading a bit of his version of things (he has a new book out this month), I’m not sure I disagree. But it would sure be nice if we had a plainly fair trial to back that hunch up, wouldn’t it?

Maybe Colin Thatcher picked the wrong province to be tried for murder

a) Harry Strom

b) Jim Dinning

c) Don Getty

d) Ernest Manning

e) Not enough information is given

For the correct answer, see my column on Ed Stelmach’s deficit strategy (the headline provides a hint):

Steady Eddy another Getty?

My obituary for the legendary thoroughbred factory that was E.P. Taylor’s Windfield Farm. The only one, surprisingly, to appear in the mainstream media.

E.P. Taylor’s legendary Windfields Farm nears its end

What a wellspring of headlines has David Gray proved for the Edmonton Journal. Day after day this week, the former Consumer Utilities Advocate has served up one after another juicy outburst indicting Ralph Klein and the privatization of government-owned industry—the kind of material that’s right in the Journal’s wheelhouse. What isn’t, it seems, is bringing a scrupulous eye to the validity of his hysterical claims (prepare for $2,000 a month power bills!) and the motives for a guy who just resigned, unexpectedly, for undisclosed reasons, while uttering not a peep about all these calamities while he was in a position to actually do something about them. So I’ll do it for them. Here:

He’s mad as hell about Alberta deregulation (even though it’s working fine)

A senior bureaucrat is convicted of crimes in his work, kids in provincial care are brutalized and murdered, while other kids in provincial care are charged with murdering innocent people. Is this a child welfare ministry in crisis? Don’t be silly. Remember what province you’re in, after all.

Scandal would matter anywhere but Alberta

Promoters of global-warming theory talk a lot about relying on “evidence,” and “science.” That just got a lot harder now that one of the world’s most esteemed authorities on climate change data admits that it, um, doesn’t actually, um, have much data. Here’s my column on the scientific screw-up at the Climatic Research Unit:

You’ll just have to take our word on the global warming stuff

Polls show Canadians are fine with private healthcare reform, they like private healthcare, they want private healthcare. So why are politicians afraid to talk about it? Maybe because they’re cowards. I discuss in my column in the Saturday National Post’s healthcare package:

Privatized health care: Canada’s third rail

A government gets elected, in part, on a promise to reform one of the government agencies in its control, but discovers it can’t. Why? Because the government agency in question insists it doesn’t answer to the government, and will make its own decisions, thank you very much. The saga of the Canadian Wheat Board is a hair-raising morality tale for any government building powerful bureaucracies. The lesson? They may someday turn on you, as I write today:

When government creatures turn against their masters

Spent the last few days at the Assembly of First Nations general assembly in which more than 500 chiefs gathered to vote themselves Ottawa’s new, official, biggest-pain-in-the-ass. Lucky for PM Harper, they voted in a guy who will probably less of a pain the last one. My favourite was Terrance Nelson who basically advocated taking a separatist posture. Even if it didn’t work, the strategy has sure paid off for Quebec. You can read about him in the first of these entries from the floor:

Separation a solution

And here’s some reports on the looooong vote, including the scene from the exhausted, frustrated convention floor:

Two locked in dead heat for 20 hours

And an insta-analysis on what the winner, Shawn Atleo, means for the increasingly irrelevant, out-of-touch Assembly (though you wouldn’t know it from the headline):

New leader seeks unity after gruelling vote

Canadians often brag—or are ordered to brag—that their universal health care system is more caring, compassionate, cuddly, etc. because it values “patients over profits” or some such cliché that suggests money takes a backseat to more humanitarian considerations. Actually, it’s exactly the opposite. A health care system that guarantees you can save your RRSP and your condo in Florida, but not your sick child? That sounds as materialistic as any I’ve seen. No wonder the U.S. Democrats like it so much. And, as I write in my monthly FP Business column, would rather voters didn’t look to closely at what they have planned for a similar American system:

Just one debate — please

There’s a certain danger, when you spend too much time talking with Alberta’s conservative writers, thinkers and politicians, in believing the Wildrose Alliance—the quasi-fringe party to the right of the PCs—is actually political a force to be reckoned with. To the faithful, they’re a government in waiting. To those of us more astonished at the deep and tangled roots the Tories have spread into every stitch of this province’s fabric since they were elected nearly four decades ago, they appear as a child with big, almost outsized dreams of beating the unbeatable establishment. So, until now, I’ve held off on commenting on the leadership race, presuming most Canadians consider it as interesting as the fight to lead the New Brunswick Green Party. Maybe less so.

But the recent sight of so many of Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives signing up and supporting the Wildrose Alliance—and ruin their Alberta Tory cousins—is suddenly somethin worth mentioning. So I did.

A thorn pierces Tory heartland

If only we had some group of elected individuals we could put to work on planning the economic future of Alberta. Luckily, we do have a committee hired for the task. And luckily again, we’ve managed to snag one of the world’s top professors of immunology to help run it. It’s what you call a recipe for success.

Maybe Alberta needs a committee to recommend better committees

When it comes to murderous ideologies, Nazism gets all the glory. That may be about to change in Canada, where immigrant communities and the federal Tories are teaming up to erect a memorial to honour the victims of Communism and, in the process, educate Canadians about the horrors of a system still celebrated in certain corners.

As I write in my column, nobody, but nobody, knows how to spill blood like the Bolshies do.

Cross of the sickle: Ottawa plans monument to communism’s victims