News Roundup

Chris Boutet

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KLEIN: BUSY!

Following the announcement of several unexpected multi-million-dollar spending items over the last few months, Premier Klein’s Conservative government headed back to the legislature on Tuesday to justify their actions to some seriously freaked out opposition parties, who will get three whole days to debate the merit of the Alberta government’s $3 billion worth of unbudgeted promises.

According to a report from the National Post, Liberal leader Kevin Taft is concerned that the brevity of the debate period will mean massive spending will only get a cursory examination. “Spending is willy-nilly,” Taft told the Post. “We’re probably 30 per cent over budget or more for the year, and that’s a huge issue of accountability.”

In an argument that the Post noted would “seem surreal in any other province,” NDP house leader Ray Martin complained that the Tories have been tossing money around without giving a second thought to long-term wealth management. “Here we have a government that we believe is totally spinning out of control,” Martin told the Post. “Our spring budget basically means nothing anymore.”

Also complicating the debate is the fact that the Premier has decided that he apparently doesn’t even need to be there to defend his spending announcements. According to a report from the CBC, Klein will be not be in session next week due to a scheduling conflict that sees him traversing the country on a speaking tour intended to “soothe relations between oil-rich Alberta and the rest of Canada.” Klein, however, doesn’t see what the problem is, saying just because he’s not there doesn’t mean he doesn’t, like, care. “It’s just that there’s other things to do,” Klein told the CBC. “The legislature is one thing on my agenda, and you’ve got to look at my daily agenda. It’s huge.”

Klein went on to explain that the speaking tour had been planned much earlier in the year, so the conflict was unavoidable—despite the fact that, you know, his government got to decide exactly when the fall session would be held. But hey—such things are necessary when you’ve got a responsibility to traipse around eastern Canada explaining why, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Alberta is awesome and everyone should listen to us. “I think that Alberta is perceived as a good whipping boy by the Liberal party in Ottawa, because there are no votes here, outside of Anne [McLellan] and they know that, so it’s politically expedient and easy to take on the Conservatives here in Alberta,” said Klein, adding that he plans to go through with his tour even if an election is forced next week.

Great. Because, really, who could ask for a better ambassador than Ralph Klein?

PRIVACY: INCONVENIENT!

So thanks to a surprising and possibly unholy alliance of right-wingers, French people and business hippies in the nation’s capital, it sure looks like there’s going to be another federal election in a few weeks—so you’d figure common sense would dictate that our embattled Liberal government should probably want to avoid doing anything too, you know, controversial. Ah, but the Liberal party, you know, she makes her own rules, and just to prove how unfazed they are by the political inferno that surrounds them, the Grits introduced a long-awaited and divisive bill on Tuesday that would give Canadian police and spies the authority to intercept e-mails and listen in on phone conversations.

According to a report from the Canadian Press, the bill, dubbed the Modernization of Investigative Techniques Act, would force communication service providers such as telephone companies, wireless firms and internet providers to eliminate barriers which prevent police and security agencies from gaining access to messages or conversations, and also require that these companies build in the capabilities needed by authorities to easily tap communications.

Following nearly three years of legal wrangling, the bill was finally tabled by Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan, who called it little more than an update to Canada’s 30-year-old wiretap legislation that would give law enforcement officials the tools they feel they need to better combat global terrorism. “It’s my obligation to ensure that we have the legislative framework in place so key law enforcement agencies can do their jobs,” McLellan told the press afterwards, noting that similar laws have recently been passed in Britain, Australia and the U.S. “We are well behind other nations who we regularly compare ourselves for our police forces to intercept certain kinds of technologies.”

Luckily for privacy advocates, however, it’s likely the bill won’t get very far, seeing as there’s that election thing coming up in the next few months, which tends to kill this sort of thing off pretty quick. Which also, I guess, kind of makes this not news. Huh. Surely a first for Vue Weekly’s always cutting-edge and informative News Roundup! V

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