I had the pleasure today of reading through some of the posts at Reboot Alberta. Reboot Alberta is a project of Ken Chapman, David King, and Michael Brechtel to hold a conference of just under 100 progressive Albertans in Red Deer to discuss the way forward for progressives in Alberta. I'm not going to be able to attend because of school commitments. But I was inspired to send my own ideas to Ken, and Ken has graciously posted them.

Well, hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted in Ontario by the Ministry of Health in their eHealth program, which was supposed to create electronic health records.

In response to this report from the Auditor General of Ontario, the Minister of Health has resigned. Premier Dalton McGuinty at a press conference held a few moments ago said something to the effect of

"This is our parliamentary tradition. It is the current Minister, the one who is at bat, who takes responsibility for what happens."

It's fascinating.

Greenpeace activists break into a facility up in Fort MacMurray and do their thing: banners, chaining themselves to equipment, etc.

The media reaction is "protesters enter suncor site."

The following week, they do the same thing at shell.

The media reaction is again "protesters shut down shell production."

The following week they do the same thing again.

The media reaction: "If it's this easy for greenpeace to get into oil sands facilities, what about terrorists?"

I don't want to make too much of this, but he his not the kind of guy I would have pegged for having a passable singing voice, or the guts to use it at the National Arts Centre. It's also a pretty ingenious little political move. It changes his image from the cold economist who takes himself too seriously, and it helps to undo some of the things he said about the arts that killed him in Quebec last time.

Plus, it's just entertaining.

Check it out..

This blog started out life as a Scoop site running on an old computer that ran Linux on the floor of my apartment. Five years (and two homes) later I ran out of the floor-space and patience to be dealing with my own hardware, and so I decided to switch to a blogger site hosted on a friend's server. I've been blogging in more or less that format for the last four and a half years.

Doug Griffiths, MLA for Battle River - Wainwright, is right.Read his article on the need for nuclear power in this province. It's important.But also ask yourself this: is he making a conservative argument, or a liberal argument?I think the answer is neither. Which goes to show what I've been harping on for a long time: the most important problems that Alberta faces in the next 50 years cannot be solved by disagreements over how conservative or liberal we are.

I'm going to admit to a sort of train-wreck fascination with what's been happening in the Alberta Green party for quite some time. So when "Mary Martin" posted on a recent blog that some things had recently been posted on the facebook page for the Greens in Alberta, I had to take a look.

As I mentioned some time ago, the City of Edmonton undertook a pilot project this year to involve a group of citizens, randomly selected and representative of the city's population, in a long-term education and consultation process that would help the City Council guide its decision-making in the 2010 budget process.The results of that process are avaialble here.

In a culimination of a long series of posts here on Gauntlet.ca, we can now make it official.

Check out this story at the CBC. It's not alone, it's just the most stark example of this problem I've seen recently.The liberals are at 32.6, the Conservatives are at 34.8. The difference is 2.2. Both of those numbers have a +/- of 1.7%. Which means the Liberals are between 30.9 and 34.3, 19 times out of 20. The Conservatives are between 33.1 and 36.5, 19 times out of 20.