Our (Annoying) Small-Town Charm

Mayor Stephen Mandel wants to promote Edmonton more as the capital of Alberta, and is asking Premier Ed Stelmach to help him out.

It’s true that most people outside the province don’t know that this is the capital of Alberta, and Mandel’s right to try to correct that.

He also wants to kick panhandlers off the streets and is reluctant to fund late-night transit service.
But Edmonton can’t be both a small town with no one on the streets after 9 p.m. and a major centre of politics, culture, and industry. Cities that are recognized in the rest of Canada require a certain level of maturity and excitement to attach the kinds of people that contribute to the city’s reputation.

Good public transit is a necessary amenity and panhandlers an unfortunate reality in bigger cities. Edmonton can’t have it both ways.

Rationalizing The Health Superboard

Ken Hughes, the interim chair of Alberta Health Services (the new health “superboard”) says the reorganization of the province’s healthcare system is about providing the same service for all Albertans.
And how can you argue with that? Everyone wants fairness. But the pill is also hard to swallow, because the provincial government doesn’t have a good handle on how the healthcare system was performing before the switch.

When Bill-Moore Kilgannon, executive director of Public Interest Alberta, made a direct request to Alberta Health and Wellness for the total number of long-term care beds in the province before the election, he says the department told him they didn’t know, instructing him to speak to the health regions. That might have been a communications tactic, but the province didn’t offer reams of research on the success of centralized health boards either.

It’s far more likely that the Tories wanted to rein in regional debt and prevent senior health officials from speaking up about underfunding.

These Boots Are Made For Pandering
How many cowboy hats or boots do you see on city streets in Alberta? When this SEE staffer moved west, she made a habit of counting the rural accessories as a joke, and found surprisingly few. (She then moved on to noticing the big city problems of homelessness, drugs, and poor urban planning.)

So when Stéphane Dion visited the Calgary Stampede last week and then headed to Edmonton for a youth climate change conference, it was severely disappointing to see media photos of him dressed in jeans, boots, and, yes, a cowboy hat.

Politicians dressing like a cowboy in Alberta are part of a long tradition (check out The Globe and Mail’s <a><href="www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070706.wstampedegallery0607/PhotoGallery01?slot=1 ">photo gallery</a> of Stampede outfits), but it still feels like pandering, not to mention promoting an ill-conceived and outdated image of our province to the rest of Canada.