Lengthy Post article:
https://nationalpost.com/news/politi...nces-divisions
A couple of interesting excerpts:
The new government will be working off a “Mountain West” strategy. Imagine standing on one of the peaks of the Rockies and looking down the western corridor of North America, beyond Alberta’s borders and through Idaho and Colorado, for businesses that may be inclined to move some of their operations up north.
For all the attention paid to the pipeline file, the UCP is also focused on highly mobile companies, like tech and banking firms, that could move their headquarters without blinking an eye. A major firm that established a home base in Calgary or Edmonton, they reason, is within striking distance of the more expensive U.S. west coast and mountain states with a cheap, quick flight. It’s just three hours, for example, from Calgary to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Part of that online world is the media website PressProgress, which is funded by the Broadbent Institute, a think tank sympathetic to the New Democratic Party.
It’s hard to overstate the role PressProgress played in the election campaign that just concluded, and the magnitude of the challenges it presented for the UCP. Many of the stories about UCP candidates that resulted in embarrassment, apologies or resignations originated on the PressProgress website and then trickled into mainstream outlets through social media.
Kenney said his civil libertarian instincts make him uneasy about the idea of media regulation, but added, “having said that, it’s not a legit media outlet.”
Because PressProgress functions as a “de facto political action committee,” he said, the salaries of the people working there should be included under the $2-million electoral spending cap during the writ period brought in by the NDP government.
“As far as I’m concerned, PressProgress is a de facto third-party advertiser. The NDP, if they can’t get mainstream media to pick up on their research, they just email it over to PressProgress to breathlessly write it up.”