Editorial

Who cares where they’re from?

Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach’s new cabinet, the commentators say, is his answer to the critics of the last one. It ignored Calgary and didn’t favour Edmonton all that much either. This time around, Calgary is well represented, while Edmonton still isn’t, so much, if you don’t count the surrounding communities as part of the city.
Rural ridings still got the lion’s share, which some city pundits like to complain about. People in Edmonton apparently don’t consider Sherwood Park and St. Albert part of ‘the city.’ To the rest of the province, they certainly are.
Also complaining are Fort McMurrayites (a few of them, anyway) about longtime minister Guy Boutillier being left out. Here’s The Leader view on the matter.
For starters, this notion of ‘regional balance’ is overblown. The press makes too much out of it, by giving big play to anyone who wants to complain. What really matters – and surely most people know this – is that the best people for the job are in the job. And of course that they do it with the welfare of all Albertans in mind.
As a rule, they do. They spend so much time, in fact, dealing with provincial priorities, that they have a lot less time to spend in their constituencies. As a good example, on the federal level, look at our MP Brian Jean. As a first-term backbencher, he was around quite a bit, or at least quite available by phone. Promoted to parliamentary secretary in his second term, he (until quite recently) seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth.
The point is that constituencies are just as likely to lose as gain by having their MLA in cabinet. It is the nature of the system that once chosen for a cabinet post, an MLA’s constituency becomes the whole province.
So besides the prestige of having ‘our guy’ around the cabinet table, what’s the big deal? There isn’t one, really.
Nevertheless, all the fuss and bluster about geographical balance, or demographic balance in cabinet fills pages and much air time. The more it does, the more it sounds like invented news, rather than the real thing.
The real news is who these people are and what kind of a job they do. For sure, what matters to municipal politicians is who’s running the departments of Municipal Affairs and Transportation and how easy to deal with they are.
Who cares where they’re from!
From what we’ve heard from our town and M.D. councillors ministers Ray Danyluk and Luc Ouellette are pretty approachable fellows, who seem to take our small-town needs seriously - Danyluk in the matter of housing and Ouellette in the matter of highways. He used to have infrastructure too, but that’s been broken off into a new ministry under Jack Hayden, a man we’ve yet to hear anything about. Where he’s from, though, is not important.