| The Klein Age started in 1994 with a never-blink resolve to cut runaway bureaucracy and a promise to re-invent government. A decade and five cases of eye-drops later, the Kleinrons do not talk about reinventing or cutting. Instead, the largest, longest serving cabinet in Canada is holding the course and re-investing. The Kleinrons have gone from saying that Alberta has a spending problem, not a revenue problem, to being the only government in Canada with a Minister of Revenue.
It is no surprise that the Kleinrons changed from radical deficit-slashers to status quo tinkerers. A buoyant economy and a weak opposition have produced a popularity that transcends bad decisions. Left unchallenged, governments will avoid risks and become caretakers. The surprise is that Klein, who has built a reputation as bring-it-to-the-people Premier, has hoarded and centralized his government’s power.
Pushing local and the federal governments to the sidelines, Klein has ensured that all the decisions that matter in health, education and child services, the heart of any government’s mandate, are made by his cabinet.
With health care and child services, the Klein government dabbled in decentralizing before deciding it wanted the sandbox to itself. In K-12 education, they waged an assault on the school boards right from the start. Post-secondary institutions were allowed to imagine there were no strings making them dance, but with bill 43, the Post-secondary Learning Act, the puppet-master has revealed his intentions.
Alberta has a quality health care system. It had one in 1993 as well. The Kleinrons have struggled to manage health care let alone re-invent it. Their goal has been to control health care costs so that the government is no longer at the whim of the health care providers and hospital administrators. This has produced a variety of responses from squeezing how much money is put into the system to guidelines on proper care to backdoor efforts at privatization.
The number of new policies and programs is dizzying, but there has been a consistent effort to erode first hospital administrators and then health regions’ authority to manage health care. When the Kleinrons first slapped together the regional health authorities, they promised elected boards to avoid a backlash from eliminating dozens of local health bodies. After six years of appointing, fighting and then dismissing RHA boards, the Kleinrons caved into mild public pressure and permitted Albertan’s to elect two-thirds of each board.
The elected boards were no more radical, but two years later, when the Kleinrons reduced the RHAs from 17 to nine, the elected positions were eliminated with little public outcry. A pointless effort in local control was brought to a swift end. Appointed or elected, the regional health authority boards are provincial government puppets. They are told exactly how much money they have to spend, and are given clear instructions – through the business plan and annual report guidelines – on where and how the money is to be spent. Those that struggle too publicly are removed.
Establishing appointed or elected entities to carry out the province’s bidding has been a popular, if not overly successful, formula for the Kleinrons. The first experiment came in K-12 education. Alberta’s education bureaucrats have long believed they are better financial managers than the yokels running the school boards. The Kleinrons, desperate for financial control, agreed, and took away the school boards’ power to levy property taxes. Since then, the province has decided how much money schools need and how much Albertans will pay for K-12 education.
Alberta’s school boards are no longer local decision makers – they are locally elected patsies who spend their time figuring out the latest directive from Edmonton instead of making decisions. Those that struggle too publicly are either removed, Calgary, or investigated, Edmonton.
Small chickens are coming home to roost, however. Last week, the Auditor General reported that the Kleinrons had the money to pay for the teachers’ salary increase all along. The money was sitting in the surplus property tax slush fund. Money the schools boards would have controlled directly 10 years ago. Also last week, the Learning Commission recommended the novel idea that the province give schools the money they need to meet government policies and standards. Sadly, neither of these chickens will change the centralizing trend. They merely recognize the provincial government’s power over education.
Fortunately, there is a flaw in the Kleinrons’ plan. As long as they continue to use boards to deflect criticism and take the fall for mistakes, there will be those who struggle against assimilation. The Kleinrons will have to continue to use investigations, public humiliation, and dismissal to bully health, school and child services puppets into towing the line. One day, the puppets might decide to stand up to this schoolyard bully.
Auditor General’s site - www.oag.ab.ca/
Maps of your health regions past and present - www.health.gov.ab.ca/system/rhas/rhamap_current.htm
Learning Commission report - www.alis.gov.ab.ca/mirror/ |
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