Comparing Budget 2010 to Budget 2009
Did you know you can download the ministerial business plans from Alberta.ca? With today’s Budget announcement and everything available at budget2010.alberta.ca, I thought, “I wonder if budget2009.alberta.ca looks anything alike?”
Well it turns out not only do the sites look and function the same, they have much the same information. Meaning it is VERY easy to compare one year to the next. (Open government FTW!)
As a result, here is a quick PDF comparison I just did of the Ministry of Culture and Community Spirit business plans from 2009 and 2010: Acr1649115.tmp. It makes for a quick side-by-side comparasion that shows you exactly what has changed. I may do a little more research into this, but for now, I thought I’d write a quick blog post inviting others to do the same with other departments and, with perhaps a little re-formatting, make the comparasion even easier.
I makes it very easy to see that on page 5 the vision and mission for the department have changed. There is also the addition of a “Clients and Stakeholders” section. To me however, the most interesting part is to see how the performance measures have changed. For example in 2007-08 “participation in arts activities or events by adult Albertans” was 87.4%; for 2008-09 it had gone up to 91%. In 2007-08 “Level of community volunteerism by adult Albertans” was 68.6% with a goal for 2009-10, 2010-11 and 2011-12 of 69%; for 2008-09 it had blown past it’s targets for the next 3 years and was already up to 81.4%!
See? Fun with numbers! I invite you to do the same. Go, enjoy; hold your government accountable and expose their successes and failures.
Manning Centre’s Conference on Alberta’s Future
When I first heard about the Manning Centre’s Conference on Alberta’s Future, as someone who values ANY conversation about a better path forward, I eagerly signed up. No conversation is bad conversation.
I then spent the next month being extremely excited about the prospect of the discussions this – no doubt – smart group of people was going to have. Then, about a week before the conference, we were emailed the agenda for the conference and my giddiness began to wane.
The agenda had set out something extremely prescribed. The format was to be six topics with the same order:
- Presentation by the speaker offering an assessment of Alberta’s current performance along with ideas to improve our performance (20 minutes)
- Question period with the speaker (15 minutes)
- Small group discussion led by moderators (15 minutes)
Someone please correct me if I got the times for each section slightly wrong. (Note: Normally I wouldn’t make a big deal about maybe getting these small a detail incorrect, but given the moderators singular focus on not going overtime, it seems important to have accuracy in this area. Several times he shouted for “ORDER!” and at one point refused to let a questioner ask her question because of time limitations. In response to her saying, “That’s not fair!” he seemingly with callousness said, “That’s the role of the chair. Next time come to the mic earlier.” At the end of the day he did apologize to everyone if he seemed gruff on the time issue. Agree with him or not, you can’t argue he did a great job keeping things moving forward and ending on time, despite the group’s best efforts to turn the day into solid side conversations.)
After hearing the speaker’s suggested solutions the 15-minute group discussion at your table of 8 people was focussed on answering three questions:
- Do we accept the speaker’s assessment of Alberta’s performance in this area? If not, what is our assessment?
- Do we agree with the proposed solutions and alternatives? If not, how would we alter them?
- What additional ideas, solutions, and alternatives do we think would improve Alberta’s performance in this area?
The group answers to the questions were recorded and handed in as the next speaker was introduced.
Our ambitious schedule for the topics and speakers was as follows:
- 09:00 – 09:50 Fiscal Responsibility – Mark Milke – Director of Research, Frontier Centre for Public Policy
- 10:00 – 10:50 Balanced economic growth – Michael Percy – Dean, Business School at the University of Alberta
- 11:00 – 11:50 Environmental Conservation – Marlo Raynolds – Executive Director, Pembina Institute
- 12:45 – 13:35 Democratic Participation – Peter McCormick – Professor of Political Science, University of Lethbridge
- 13:45 – 14:50 Health & Education – Peter Cowley – Director of School Performance Studies, Fraser Institute, and Nadeem Esmail – Senior Fellow, Fraser Institute
- 15:00 – 15:50 Leadership on the National Stage – Monte Solberg – Former Federal Minister
Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by the “unconference” model. Recently I’ve attended CivicCamp, TransitCamp (in Edmonton), CivicCamp 2, Reboot Alberta, #yegdata (in Edmonton) and Calgary Conversation 2, all of which have used the unconference model where participants are asked to ‘leave their hat at the door’ to engage as equal citizens and to set the topics of discussion themselves through a quick democratic process. Even when the format for the day is highly prescribed the participants at these events felt engaged because they were controlling the topic of conversation. This is why my giddiness began to wane after seeing the agenda prepared by the Manning Centre. We, as a participants, had no say in the topics we felt were of importance for discussion, and out of a nine and half hour day, participants were only scheduled one and a half hours of time to express their opinions. And even then, two thirds of that discussion was focussed on the speaker’s points, not the participants.
I guess the reason I was disappointed with the format boils down to this: I thought the Conference on Alberta’s Future was occurring, in the words of Nicholas Gafuik, Executive Director of the Manning Centre, “because Alberta is in a time of change and there is a need to generate ideas, proposals, and plans for shaping a more positive and inspiring future for our Province” and I didn’t feel like participants were given much of an opportunity to help achieve any of these goals. Instead the Conference was a conversation about the solutions put forward by the six speakers. Which is still valuable, it just doesn’t help achieve this inspired goal.
Please take a look at the format again: speaker talks for 20 minutes, questions for 15 minutes, followed by a 15 minute small group discussion complete with written notes, then about an hour later it’s on to another session with a different topic. That format reminds me more of school than anything else. And I’m confident very few people would argue school was a place that oriented students to come up with solutions in their classroom. School was about learning – taking the knowledge of the speaker and distilling it into your own life. This certainly is not a bad thing! As a matter of fact, it’s vital! It’s not, however, the format best oriented to “generate ideas, proposals and plans”.
I did feel this was really what I, and the other participants, got out of the Conference on Alberta’s Future too. There was a HUGE amount of learning going on. The speakers were fascinating and provided a litany of information. In some cases, the speaker was providing so much information they needed to skip forward in their notes/slides because they couldn’t even pack everything they wanted to share into 20 minutes! Personally, I learned a lot on each of these six topics this past Saturday, and for that I consider the Conference an un-mitigated success. Unconfrences may be great for coming up with solutions, but someone still needs to drop the knowledge so others may absorb it and come to their own conclusions. And right now, outside of universities, I can’t think of many other venues through which this kind of information is being shared.
My only hope is that the Manning Centre does not try to present the information contained on those sheets handed in at the end of each topic as anything other than a distillation of what the speaker talked about. To present it as consensus or policy suggestions would, in my opinion, be disingenuous. The format for the day was not conducive to that kind of an outcome.
A result of a potential mismatch in goal and format, I think can be seen in the last session of the Conference. During this session, summaries of what was written down by each group on each topic were presented. Following this, attendees were asked to vote on whether or not the summary accurately depicted the conversation had at their table. From what I saw, for the first couple summaries the majority of participants meekly put up their hands for the affirmative, almost to say “yeah, kind of, I guess so, that looks pretty accurate for the most part”. However as things went on, more participants began to realize they had no idea if the information they were being presented with was accurate or not because they were only sitting at one table – they had only participated in approximately 1/16 of the overall discussion. Each conversation was obviously different at each table, so the information on the screen that was different from their conversation just as easily could have been from another table as it could have been made up out of the blue. (The good news is the Manning Centre had previously stated they would make scans of each topic sheet available online. This will allow for verification of discussions, but it still does not make the votes meaningful.)
Another issue with these summaries goes back to what I spoke of earlier in this post: they did not reflect many of the beliefs of the participants, mainly they reflect the discussions we had about the speaker’s talk. So a statement such as “Alberta should invest in technology to help solve the democratic deficit” only means, the speaker mentioned this and we talked about its pros and cons as a potential solution; it does not mean we thought this was the best solution or that it should not be explored in favour of other potential solutions. The questions we were asked did not ask us to rank or make recommendations, instead they simply asked us to discuss the speaker’s solutions and to offer some of our own. The result of this format is that two thirds of the ideas on the summaries are the speaker’s ideas – regardless of whether the participants agreed with those ideas or not – because two thirds of the discussion was geared toward discussing those ideas.
This becomes a major issue when you consider there was only one speaker per topic – one set of solutions proposed. The summaries being highly weighted to the issues that speaker spoke of, and a casual observer can be forgiven for thinking these are the ONLY solutions being offered. This result could already be seen in the discussions being had on Twitter during the conference. When someone writes “new taxation model being explored”, it’s hard not to think the participants are suggesting a new taxation model be explored, instead of taking the statement at face value: we talked about it, no suggestion is being made. If more than one speaker had presented on each topic (something that logistically would have been impossible give the broad-range of topics being addressed) then the line would have been “taxation model A versus taxation model B being explored”. That can no longer be misinterpreted as a simple statement of fact; it is clearly a debate that will result in a suggestion.
In some cases ideas were put on the summary because “one table mentioned” it. Meaning, at best, that idea was discussed by 1/16 of the participants, and even then, they may not have reached consensus it was worth exploring let alone endorsing.
Despite the easy to misinterpret outcomes of the Conference on Alberta’s Future I am incredibly glad I attended. As I said above, we have an understanding deficit and more events like this that are focused on passing on knowledge will only make Alberta an even more well-rounded province of engaged citizens. Something we certainly could use much more off.
I pass on my congratulations to Nicholas and the entire staff at the Manning Centre for putting on an engaging and superbly run event. As I imparted to Preston Manning at the conclusion of the Conference, I hope this is not the last one the Centre does. There is much more to be explored and many more solutions to be discussed. We need more groups and individuals such as the Manning Centre and its namesake who are willing to host events to do just that.
How not to administer a vaccine program
Markham Hislop has a great op-ed piece on his South East Calgary News site right now. He presents his case for why the Alberta Government does not deserve the criticism they are being shellacked with right now over their handling of the H1N1 vaccination program.
If there is one thing I hate it is people being blamed for things they do not deserve blame for. If there is a second thing I hate it is unwarranted hysteria. But in this case I’m going to have to disagree with Markham. The reason Albertans feel like they are embroiled in a Ron Leipert created mess is because we are.
Here’s why:
The reason the Alberta Government is taking so much flak right now isn’t because lineups were long or because we are running out of vaccine or because the public is in a state of hysteria. It is because the Government had a plan to begin with (vaccinate only high-risk cases) and then didn’t stick to the plan (vaccinate everyone). That’s on them and no one else.
Not following their own plan ended up creating confusion. First, beginning in the Legislature. The premier was saying one thing (that their vaccinating everyone) and the health minister was saying another thing (vaccinating only high risk). Then the health minister said the opposite of what he first said. Then he went back to his original story. The only place to determine what is going on is too look at what is actually going on. This everyone agrees on: everyone who was showing up to a clinic was getting a shot. No one was being turned away.
In order to only be vaccinating the high-risk cases, you can’t be vaccinating everyone. That should be obvious.
Around this point it became clear the media has no idea what is going on either and slowly – or quickly if you think a couple days is quick – the public began to feel like the clinics were a free-for-all. This feeling was then compounded by announcements of shortages and it really did become an ‘every man, woman and child for themselves’ rush of humanity to the clinics to ‘get while the getting was good’.
Alberta Health Services continued to oblige by giving everyone who showed up a shot – whether they were high-risk or not.
Then there is the added layer of the long lines created by only having a handful of clinics. Please remember, a handful of clinics was all that was needed to only vaccinate high-risk cases. This was part the plan. When they started accepting anyone and everyone the lineups became long and AHS did not have the capacity to manage those lineups, thereby exacerbating the free-for-all hysteria.
In both these cases the underlying reason for the problem was the Government’s inability to stick to the plan.
This helps put the Calgary Flames vaccination in a different light. Think about it from the Flames perspective. You’re a team doctor, you see everyone being accepted at the clinics and you don’t want to send your players to wait in 8 hour lineups, for time management and public safety reasons. So you call AHS and explain your rationale. They look at the lineups and agree: it is not a good idea to have Flames players waiting in line too. They see everyone is getting the shot so there is no reason to exclude these ‘everyones’ from getting the shot and schedule a separate session for the players and their families.
Now we see the Alberta Government actually having the gall to be criticizing citizens, saying it was their fault the line-ups were long, that things devolved into irrational hysteria, and that we’re running out of vaccine so quickly. This infuriates me. The only thing the public did was show up to get a vaccine shot they were told everyone eventually should get. If you didn’t want them to get it now and you wanted those folks to wait to get the shot THEN WHY DID YOU GIVE IT TO THEM?!
Any parent will tell you that is just reinforcing bad behaviour. And of course the next person will expect to be treated the same.
You’ll notice no one is criticizing the Alberta Government for this week’s clinics. It’s because they had a well thought out plan and are sticking to it. People who are not children under 5 and pregnant woman are being turned away. I applaud the Government and AHS for this. That’s the way it should have been on day one.
The question does have to be asked though: if our Government is incapable of following it’s own instructions on such a straight-forward program how can we trust them to manage more complicated things?
There is one thing that would fix all this – not the minister’s resignation, that won’t do anything – but an apology from the Health Minister for he and his employees not following their own plan and creating a mess of things. The provinces’ chief medical officer has already done this for his part. And again I applaud for the honesty and wherewithal he’s showing now.
But if Ron Leipert won’t offer a heart felt apology and admit his department made a mistake by screwing up on something so fundamental, he should be fired.
PS – Speaking of being fired… even though I can see where things went array as clear as day, MLA Art Johnson offers this gem of a quote: “The government had a plan and stuck with it, but people stood in line who shouldn’t have.” Umm, no you didn’t. And how dare you.
Why Stelmach looks disingenuous today
Let me be clear: I have nothing against Ed Stelmach. Generally speaking I think the PC government of Alberta is doing a pretty decent job. I’m not happy with them all the time, but a lot of the stuff they get slack crap for would come the government’s way regardless of what party was in charge. It’s a recession. It’s tough to keep the public confident in you during a recession. I get that.
I only mention this to highlight how disappointed I am with Premier Stelmach this morning. Ed specifically, not his party or the government. After all, he was the only one on TV last night.
First there was the televised “commercial” from last night that ironically spent a bunch of cash to tell us how he was going to save us a bunch more cash in the next couple of years. As near as I can tell there was nothing in the commercial – and what a fancy commercial it was – that could not have been announced via a press conference. (Please outline in the comments which announcement could not have been if you disagree.) So that confuses me and does anything but instill my confidence in the man. And, I assume, that’s the opposite of what he was trying to do by hitting the airwaves.
Generally speaking, it looks to me like the commercial was meant to calm Albertan’s fears about the future. Meaning it might have been useful a few months or a year ago, but serves little purpose now that the vast majority adapted to the current realities. (And in many cases, appear as thought the worst may be over and a recovery may be beginning.) Assuming this is true and was the actual point, this puts the Premier out of step with average Albertans.
But this morning I have to really shake my head again as the Premier announces he is taking a 15% pay cut and the ministers will be taking a 10% hit. When I first read this I thought it seemed like a good idea. But asking just a couple basic questions puts things in perspective:
- Why was this not mentioned in the TV ad when he announced they were freezing the salaries of 6,500 Alberta employees? To do it now looks like a PR intervention. Like a communications person watched the ad and said, “Do you think those 6,500 people will be mad they are the only ones taking one for the team? Maybe we should have the Premier do something too?” And so they came up with this over-night solution so the Premier can look like a good guy too. Ta-da!
- Too bad the cut is only for ministers.
- Remember six and half months ago? In March after the last election the government voted themselves a 30% raise plus extra for committee work. (I’m not going to get into whether those were justified at the time, that’s not part of my point here.) So, everyone got a 30% raise six and a half months ago, when we were in the thick of the recession, but now 20 or so folks are taking a 10% cut? And we’re supposed to think this is a sacrifice being made by our Government that will help solve the deficit they created? Why not just roll-back the whole thing? THAT would be a sacrifice.
In all, it simply seems disingenuous to me.
Doug Elniski: now just another walled off politician?
Did MLA Doug Elniski do something dumb? Yes. Was posting his thoughts online the mistake? No.
This is what makes social media such a powerful tool when it comes to politics: you get a chance to see inside the mind of our leaders and what makes them tick. And as you can imagine, when you get a chance to look inside someone’s mind you might not always like what you see.
The alternative to this is what we have been doing for generations. In that example, we elect someone without really knowing much about them and then either approve of what they do on our behalf or become belligerent and shocked when a massive scandal blows up.
I would argue social media like Twitter and Facebook allow us to get an inside perspective of what our elected officials do and think and that is a good thing. If they are corrupt or disengaged, status updates may give a peek at that attitude. If they don’t? Well they were just lying to us anyway so we’re no worse off then we were before.
Personally, I don’t agree with Doug’s comments. When I first read his tweets at the Edmonton Pride Parade I thought to myself, “Gee, I don’t think those are appropriate comments to say out loud.” And when I read what he said at a grade 9 graduation I thought, “That does not seem appropriate at all.” But you know what? He has a right to think and say those things. Just like we have a right to judge him based on what he said.
I would much rather an elected leader show me their true face and let me decide what to do with that information, than live a lie and pretend to be something they are not.
Where I really became disappointed with Doug was with his reaction to the controversy created by his remarks on his blog. Rather than apologizing on his blog and trying to help us understand why he made the remarks and what he is doing/going through in getting past them, he simply deleted the blog all together.
And in doing so left us all to wonder what is going on in his head and became just another walled off politician. And that is our loss.
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