No, it's not another meltdown at what the local plants used to call "blogsters" who sometimes irritate their beloved leader.
[Aside: Anyone else notice that since the whole process has been outed, the plants have dropped from the airwaves?]
This time, it's Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach who has his political knickers in a knot over a website - edstelmach.ca - run by a University of Alberta political science student and former Alberta Liberal opposition staffer Dave Cournoyer.
The Alberta Tory had his lawyers threatening to sue for misappropriation of persona unless the site disappeared. They even included a little threat that is lawyer code for "we don't have a case but maybe some fancy letterhead will work instead".
The URL now redirects to a Wikipedia entry on a social credit premier, in case you are wondering. According to Canadian Press, it used to redirect to daveberta.ca.
Pretty tame stuff.
However, as a result of the threats, the story has become a national embarrassment to Stelmach and given the blogger bags of free publicity. Stelmach won't sue - he was bluffing from the beginning - and has already sent his chief of staff to try and find an amicable solution to the whole thing.
Even if the whole thing vanished tomorrow, the story puts the Premier look what the people in Fort Mac know as "stunned": Had Stelmach spent $14 bucks - that's what it cost the blogger to register the domain - when he got into politics he wouldn't be shelling out for huge billable hours to his lawyers and dealing with the media over what essentially adds up to nothing.
It shows incredibly poor judgment for a guy who is also looking at a story about lost oil royalties [see below].
Your humble e-scribbler left a comment at Dave's blog that suggested, only partially tongue in cheek, that it would be appropriate to have every Ed Stelmach in the province sue the Premier for trying to appropriate their persona. An evil political mind could surely find ways to drag this one out for as long as the Premier wants to keep it going. After all, Stelmach is paying for the publicity for his own self-immolation.
The only thing that would be more embarrassing than Stelmach's reaction to the daveberta story is a column in Edmonton Sun that laces into Cournoyer on a purely partisan basis.
Neil Waugh reads like his copy was clacked out by some highly placed thumbs in Stelmach's office. What a novel concept.
The references to "juvenile" and "little Liberal" are embarrassing since Waugh ledes with reference to a much bigger story that he ignores entirely in the main part of the column:
For a few hours this week, it looked like the hopeless Alberta Liberals might be making a comeback.
The Grits energy watchdog, Edmonton Gold Bar MLA Hugh MacDonald, released some disturbing research from the government's annual accounts - the so-called Blue Book.
He revealed that a numbered company controlled by former energy department bureaucrat Kellan Fluckiger had been paid an obscene $1,358,645 to redesign the province's electricity system.
Fluckiger left the government mysteriously in the fall. And the highlight of his handiwork so far was the near brownout the province suffered before Christmas which forced the Tories to delay putting on the legislature Christmas lights for fear of crashing the grid.
Not to mention the sky-high electricity rates consumers have experienced.
And if Neil bothered to read Dave's blog - he likely cribs much from it but wouldn't admit it anyways - he'd find reference to an Alberta government report showing how much the province was losing in royalties. The original story appeared in the Edmonton Journal, but, c'mon: a good story shouldn't be ignored just because it was covered by another newspaper.
-srbp-