War Rooms, Secrecy and a Little Patronage—Democracy in Alberta

Former journalist and conservative lobbyist Tom Olsen was the UCP candidate in my riding of Calgary-Buffalo in this spring's Alberta election. Tom lost to Joe Ceci of the NDP, but his loss was only temporary. Recently it turned into a handsome reward. He was named by Energy Minister Sonya Savage to the position of managing director of the newly-created Canadian Energy Centre, otherwise known as the "war room." Olsen will be paid $195,000 a year in his new job, a cut above the $120,931 he would have got as an MLA. For some people it's all horseshoes.

The war room will have a $30-million budget and work to counter what the government considers to be misinformation about Alberta's resource industry. One suspects it will apply a broad definition for "misinformation."

The new centre was set up as a private corporation which means much of what it does will not be subject to freedom-of-information legislation. This lack of transparency was explained by Christine Myatt, Premier Kenney's press secretary, as necessary to avoid providing "a tactical and/or strategic advantage to the very foreign-funded special interests the CEC is looking to counter. For example, we would not let those foreign-funded special interests seeking to attack our province see our detailed defence plans."

Strategic advantage? Attack our province? Defense plans? Is our new government paranoid or have the premier and his energy minister simply been playing too many war games on their PCs? In any case, this secrecy when they are spending taxpayer dollars is offensive. As Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch put it, "Exempting any government public organization from the access to information law is a recipe for waste and corruption and abuse of the public and the public interest." Amen, Duff.

And then there is a very real question about what this war room will actually be used for. After all, you don't need an annual budget of $30-million and secret strategies to counter misinformation. You only need one, very open strategy: tell the truth. What the UCP has set up sounds very like a propaganda centre, and indeed concerns have arisen that it will be used to stifle free speech and demonize those who express views critical of the industry and its contribution to global warming.

Paranoia has a history in Alberta. In 1937, Premier William "Bible Bill" Aberhart's Social Credit government introduced a bill that would have forced newspapers to print government rebuttals to stories the provincial cabinet deemed "inaccurate." The bill was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. This would be a fitting future for Kenney's war room nonsense.