It was over a plate of bacon this past week that the leader of the Alberta Party tried to prove his party and its latest ideas were no ham-and-eggers.
Glenn Taylor was at a west Edmonton breakfast joint on Friday to push his party’s platform of “democratic renewal.” Among the talking points shared over coffee and flapjacks were the party’s ideas for collaborative decision-making, decentralizing power, working for citizens and better voter engagement leading to better elections.
One of the specific ways Taylor touted for reaching these goals was disbanding the province’s public affairs bureau, the central body that interacts the most directly with Albertans and media across numerous platforms, which Taylor told the Edmonton Journal “has become more about selling public policy to Albertans than helping Albertans engage in defining and putting forward policy.”
It would be replaced, party literature proposes, by “a Citizen Affairs Centre that reaches out to Albertans and simplifies the process through which citizens can provide feedback to the government.”
After decades of a Progressive Conservative party so entrenched in power and without fear of losing an election that it didn’t feel it needed to answer to anyone, more openness in government is certainly something every Albertan should be able to get behind, regardless of their political stripes. Indeed, the Alberta Liberals also list the elimination of the public affairs bureau on their website as a goal under the umbrella of “Open Government,” while the NDP tends to focus more on getting donations from big oil and other large corporations out of provincial politics.
But, with the Alberta Party’s ideas, the question soon becomes, how open is too open? According to party literature, even the annual budget would be developed using feedback from citizens in the province. This is commendable from a philosophical point of view, but completely impractical.
It’s all well and good and noble to go out and solicit feedback from Albertans before and during the processes of making major decisions, but there comes a point when the decision must actually be made. We have elected MLAs to represent our views in the Legislative Assembly — some of whom do a better job of that than others — and while we as voters have to make those views known, we also have to let them take the ball and run with it at some point. It’s impractical to ship a copy of the draft budget to every Albertan and get them to go over it line by line and reach some kind of consensus across their broad range of opinions. It would lead to endless handwringing and consultation and would become bureaucracy run amok.
Of course, the real test would be how many of these measures would actually be put in place should the Alberta Party ever rise to power. With just one MLA in the legislature right now — one who wasn’t even elected under the Alberta Party banner — they are an awful long way from that, so they can talk a big game at the moment. But, if they should ever reach the point where Taylor or one of his successors becomes premier, it would be interesting to see just how many of these reforms are put in practice and just how often the status quo prevails. It’s easy to talk about democratic renewal when you’re outside the halls of power looking in, but it often proves much tougher to actually implement such reforms once elected.
Make no mistake; the discussion around democratic renewal is certainly a worthwhile and timely one, especially in Alberta. But what the Alberta Party and the rest of us must be mindful of is that, as the old saying goes, too many cooks spoil the broth and at the end of the day, it must be served up rather than thrown in the garbage can.
