Alison Redford: New Premier for a New Era

Dear Colleagues
I had the pleasure of standing in the gleaming marble rotunda of the Alberta Legislature last week as Alison Redford took oath as the 14th Premier of our Province.
Our paths first crossed many years ago, when she served as a young staffer in Joe Clark’s foreign ministry and Brian Mulroney’s prime ministership. As a senior journalist at the time, I had the pleasure of working with Joe during the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, building new security and governance structures after the fall of the Berlin Wall. And above all, chronicling the Clark-Mulroney leadership in the emancipation of South Africa.
Premier Redford’s grounding in that period of profound change, her subsequent service in building a robust constitutional framework in South Africa, her work as a United Nations election commissioner in Afghanistan in 2005, give her a very different skill set from her predecessors.
The sense of empathy and solidarity flowing from those experiences was a luminous presence in her deeply moving inaugural address.
She is indeed a New Premier for a New Era, as I suggest in a new Cambridge Strategies Inc. brief.
Please read it here.
As always, I welcome your comments and feedback.
Kind Regards
Satya