Dateline: 09/30/2014

About Jim Prentice

A lawyer by profession, Jim Prentice worked on property rights, including dealing with First Nations negotiations. From 2004 to 2010 he served as the Conservative member of parliament for Calgary Centre-North. During that time he held several different cabinet posts: Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Minister of Industry and Minister of the Environment.


At the end of 2010 he left politics and moved into the private sector as Vice-Chairman of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC).

Jim Prentice Becomes Premier

Jim Prentice was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta on September 6, 2014, after a three-month leadership race. He won nearly 77 percent of the votes on the first ballot, defeating Ric McIver and Thomas Lukaszuk.

As Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta, Jim Prentice automatically became Premier of Alberta. He was sworn in on September 15, 2014. He replaced Dave Hancock who had been serving as interim Alberta Premier since Alison Redford resigned as Premier in March 2014. Redford was facing increasing unrest and dissatisfaction from the PC caucus, the Progressive Conservative Party and the Alberta electorate over numerous reports about her excessive spending, extravagant travel, her sense of entitlement and her top-down leadership style. As more and more stories kept surfacing, it also began to look like the problems ran deeper than just one person.

After all, the Progressive Conservatives have been in power in Alberta since Sept. 10, 1971 when Peter Lougheed became Alberta's first Progressive Conservative premier. There have been 11 more majority Progressive Conservative governments in Alberta since then. It's not surprising that a sense of entitlement and bad habits could run deep.

Jim Prentice Makes Early Changes

Prentice has been quick off the mark in his first two weeks as premier.

His new cabinet was sworn in at the same time as he was. He brought in two unelected outsiders: former Edmonton mayor Stephen Mandel for Health and former Saskatchewan MLA and chairman of the Calgary Board of Education Gordon Dirks for the Education portfolio. Both will run in by-elections on October 27. Prentice himself will be running in a by-election that day in the Calgary-Foothills riding. He also reduced the size of the cabinet and reorganized responsibilities.

The first decision of the cabinet was to sell the government's fleet of planes. The premier and ministers will fly commercial. The government plans to tender a contract for a charter air service for members to use when they need to access remote areas.

Further work on the redesign of Alberta license plates has been cancelled, saving $15-million on production and distribution of new plates, and disposing of a contentious issue.

The premier announced $39.6 million to build four starter schools in phases to ease the overcrowding in Calgary schools.

The controversial decision to shut down the Michener Centre, a long-term care facility in Red Deer, was reversed.

Prentice announced that an extra 12 people would be hired to clear up outstanding claims from the 2013 floods in southern Alberta. He also announced two new flood mitigation projects.

The government will not re-introduce two controversial pension reform bills.

Prentice has said that the government is working on a new Accountability Act which would ensure that there were no "sweetheart" severance packages for political staff, would strengthen conflict-of-interest-guidelines for staff, and also make sure that contracts went through a competitive process or were made from a prequalified vendor list if necessary.

Matters of Substance

Many of the issues that are being dealt with were large irritants to a lot of Albertans, and the moves do show that the Premier has been listening to what people have to say. What will be telling is when the legislature comes back on November 17. The speech from the throne will be an indication of the direction the government plans to take on the big issues, like the budget, health care, labour policy, and pipelines. In the meantime, there will no doubt be lots of details coming out as campaigns gear up for the by-elections.