Interesting times...

This past week has been quite interesting in the world of politics. We have the federal Tories moving to prorogue parliament and start a new session as well as here in the land of Tory, Alberta, the provincial Tories also doing some interesting things such as annoying the oil industry.

First there's Harper's proroguing of parliament. There are many good reasons that he'd want to do this of course. There's avoiding question period for another month for starters. The spring session didn't do the federal Tories any favours during question period, the lot of them looking like buffoons at the end. Avoiding question period for another month would look good to a Conservative party looking at trying to get a boost in the polls. There's killing legislation on the order paper. The so-called Clean Air Act which has been radically amended by the opposition to something that might actually reduce greenhouse gas, the Tories would like to see go away, and with the end of the parliamentary session, it will die on the order paper, never to return. This gives the Tories a chance to either start over or just ignore the issue and hope it goes away. They also get a chance to re-evaluate their crime bills, also stalled in committee, perhaps re-introducing them with provisions that may not cause as much rancor in the house. There's also the Ontario Provincial election, and a delay in the start of parliament would both give Tory MP's a chance to hit the hustings for their Ontario provincial counterparts as well as keep bad news about Conservatives and conservatism out of the papers while the campaign is on. Finally there's presenting a new throne speech, which would help give the Conservatives some much needed direction, having drifted like a rudderless ship since the last budget.

No matter what the reason, and I suspect it's a bit of all of them, the move still manages to make the Harper Conservatives look desperate. Desperate to avoid the glare of accountability at the hands of the opposition. Desperate to ditch a couple of albatrosses hanging around their necks and finally desperate to have some direction that might move them in an upward direction in the polls. Will proroguing parliament do this for them? Well they'll get to do the avoiding for sure. The bills will disappear and can be safely ignored into the next federal election. The help for the provincial Tories may not be much, given the federal Tories current standing in the polls in Ontario. The riskiest part of all this is the throne speech. Failure to produce a middle of the road throne speech will doom the Tories to a non-confidence vote and election which, if they produce a throne speech that neo-cons would find easy to support, is what might just happen. Harper has to step lightly for the next couple of months.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, so to speak, Ed Stelmach has reversed the decision of his Sustainable Resources Minister, the ever nutty Ted Morton, to allow seismic testing of Marie Lake. Now Ted, over the objections of the local Conservative MLA and of course the residents of the area, gave a Calgary oil company the green light to perform seismic testing of the lake to determine the extent of heavy oil under the lake for possible future mining. Now this would normally be the end of this story as listening to the locals and individual MLA's was not SOP for the Conservatives in this province about any topic, let alone petroleum exploration. It was pretty much assumed that in any battle between an oil and gas company and local citizenry the oil company would win with massive government support. Well now the oil and gas sector is fuming over the fact that the Premier, Ed Stelmach, has reversed the decision to allow the exploration.

Now it is to be expected that the oil patch would be upset at such a decision, especially since for the past 20 years, the provincial government has basically allowed the oil industry to do whatever it wants without let or hindrance. So now, to have the provincial government stop them from doing something, it has them worried about what else Ed Stelmach might change. Perhaps royalties will increase from their current fire sale giveaway level of 1% to something more in line with the fees in other jurisdictions. Or environmental impact might suddenly be of a concern. Heck, farmers might get first crack at the water and that would be the end of western civilization in the eyes of the oil industry. So naturally this thin edge of the wedge must be stopped and I'm sure Ed has received some nasty phone calls from some Calgary head offices this past couple of days.

Which brings to light the predicament that the Alberta Tories are in at the moment. The oil patch has been running amok over everyone in the province for years, but the effect has only recently began affecting larger and larger numbers of people in a negative way. It's now starting to cause voters to shy away from the Conservatives. This is something that Stelmach can't afford given his sinking poll numbers. So he has to act to save the votes. Problem with that is saving the votes angers the oil industry and the oil industry is responsible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions to the Conservative party. Anger the petroleum industry and those donations will start to dry up, making it harder to win back the votes that being the patsy of the oil industry caused to leave.

So as the ancient Chinese curse goes, may you live in interesting times. At the moment it would appear that Canadian and Alberta conservatism and Conservatives are living in interesting times indeed.