48 Facts About Ed Stelmach

The grandson of Ukrainian immigrants, Ed Stelmach was born and raised on a farm near Lamont and fluently speaks the distinctive Canadian dialect of Ukrainian.

Ed Stelmach spent his entire pre-political adult life as a farmer, except for some time spent studying at the University of Alberta.

Ed Stelmach's first foray into politics was a 1986 municipal election, when he was elected to Lamont County council.

Ed Stelmach continued in this position until his entry into provincial politics.

When Klein resigned the party's leadership in 2006, Ed Stelmach was among the first to present his candidature to replace him.

Ed Stelmach's premiership was heavily focused on management of the province's oil reserves, especially those of the Athabasca Oil Sands.

Ed Stelmach rejected calls from environmentalists to slow the pace of development in the Fort McMurray area, and similarly opposed calls for carbon taxes.

Ed Stelmach was succeeded as Premier by Alison Redford on October 7,2011.

Ed Stelmach joined the board of Covenant Health a year later, and has been its chair since January 2016.

Edward Michael Ed Stelmach was born on a farm near Lamont, Alberta, the grandson of immigrants from Zavyche, Ukraine.

Ed Stelmach's grandparents settled near Andrew, Alberta in 1898, after bypassing Saskatchewan because they did not care for the terrain.

Ed Stelmach was raised speaking Ukrainian, and did not learn English until he started attending school.

Ed Stelmach was raised a Ukrainian Catholic, and continues to attend church regularly, sing in the church choir, and act as a volunteer caretaker for the cemetery.

Ed Stelmach continued there, working as an assistant manager at Woodward's, until 1973, when his oldest brother, Victor, died.

Ed Stelmach entered politics in 1986 with his election to the council of Lamont County; one year later, he was appointed county reeve, a position he held until his entry into provincial politics in 1993.

Ed Stelmach ran for the Legislative Assembly of Alberta as a Progressive Conservative in the 1993 provincial election, defeating incumbent New Democrat Derek Fox in the riding of Vegreville-Viking.

Ed Stelmach became a member of the Deep Six, a group of enthusiastically fiscally conservative rookie MLAs; in addition to supporting Premier Ralph Klein's aggressive deficit-cutting, Ed Stelmach practiced fiscal restraint himself, incurring low office expenses and declining a government vehicle.

Ed Stelmach said that he had only stepped in to help the riding after its MLA, Nicholas Taylor, had been appointed to the Senate.

The opposition parties charged that the government was not regulating these sufficiently, but Ed Stelmach responded that municipalities had the authority necessary to effectively regulate them.

Legislatively, Ed Stelmach sponsored five bills while in the Agriculture, Food, and Rural Development portfolio, all of which passed through the legislature.

In 1998, Ed Stelmach sponsored the Agriculture Statutes Amendment Act, which overhauled the penalty system for violation of various agricultural statutes, setting maximum fines and leaving the precise amount up to judges on a case-by-case basis.

Finally, Ed Stelmach initiated the Agriculture Statutes Amendment Act, which allowed the government to delegate the inspection of branding to the cattle industry.

Ed Stelmach briefly aroused controversy by proposing reversing the slow and fast lanes on provincial highways, on the grounds that this would equalize the rate at which the lanes broke down and therefore save on maintenance costs; nothing came of the proposal.

Ed Stelmach established a fund for capital projects, but was criticized for not doing enough to address the deterioration of the province's infrastructure.

Ed Stelmach introduced a program of graduated driver licensing and initiated a review of traffic safety programs.

Ed Stelmach was re-elected by his largest majority yet during the 2001 election, and retained the Transportation portfolio until 2004, when he was reassigned to the position of Minister of Intergovernmental Relations.

Ed Stelmach ran a low-profile campaign, touring the province in a custom-painted campaign bus, while most media attention was focussed on the rivalry between Dinning and the socially conservative Ted Morton.

Ed Stelmach acknowledged receiving a $10,000 donation from the Beaver Regional Waste Management Service's Commission, a landfill operator owned by five municipalities in Ed Stelmach's riding.

On February 4,2008, immediately after Lieutenant Governor Norman Kwong read the throne speech to open the legislative session, Ed Stelmach requested a dissolution of the legislature with an election to follow March 3.

Shortly before the writ was dropped, a group calling itself Albertans for Change began to buy print and television ads that attacked Stelmach for lacking a plan and portrayed him as unfit to lead the province.

Ed Stelmach had previously made this suggestion in 2006, but the government had not acted on it.

Ed Stelmach recommended following the election that his office, rather than the government's Justice department, be responsible for prosecuting election-related offenses; the latter did not lay charges in any of 19 alleged campaign finance violations Gibson brought to its attention.

Ed Stelmach aggressively defended Alberta's oil at home and abroad, and called the idea that it was extracted at an unacceptably high environmental cost "a myth".

Ed Stelmach committed to reducing the proportion of bitumen that left Alberta to be upgraded out of province, likening the export of bitumen to "scraping off the top soil" from farmland.

Ed Stelmach was less decisive in increasing in-province bitumen upgrading; in 2008 he conceded that Alberta would continue upgrading between sixty and sixty-five percent of the bitumen it produced for the foreseeable future, rather than the seventy-two percent target he had previously announced for 2016.

Ed Stelmach initially downplayed the incident, but ordered a judicial investigation once the province's Information and Privacy Commissioner initiated an investigation of his own.

The opposition parties called for the dismissal of the entire EUB and Energy Minister Mel Knight; Ed Stelmach instead opted to appoint a new EUB chair.

Ed Stelmach's government responded with legislation entitled the Alberta Utilities Commission Act, which would split the EUB into two parts: the Alberta Utilities Commission and the Energy Resources Conservation Board.

Ed Stelmach clashed with rural landowners again in 2009 when his government introduced the Land Assembly Project Area Act, designed to make it easier for the government to acquire large blocks of land for public purposes such as ring roads or reservoirs.

Ed Stelmach went as far as to advocate borrowing for capital construction, a departure from the Klein government's notoriously anti-debt approach.

Shortly after winning an increased majority in the 2008 election, Ed Stelmach's cabinet approved substantial raises for themselves, increasing the salary paid to cabinet ministers from $142,000 to $184,000 and that paid to the Premier from $159,450 to $213,450.

The increases were attacked by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and the opposition parties, but Ed Stelmach defended the raises as the first received by cabinet ministers in fifteen years and as being necessary to attract qualified people to politics.

In spring 2009, Ed Stelmach's government announced its intention to overhaul the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship, and Multiculturalism Act.

Ed Stelmach called this a "very, very fundamental right" and suggested that it would allow parents to opt out of having their children learn about evolution, though his Education Minister Dave Hancock argued that the new wording didn't extend beyond current practice.

Critics of Ed Stelmach suggest that, as a farmer from the central part of the province, he is biased against Calgary and urban Alberta in general.

Heninger was defeated by Liberal Craig Cheffins and, in the 2008 election, Calgary was the only area of the province in which Ed Stelmach lost seats on his way to an increased majority.

In late 2009, the Conservatives' plunging popularity at the polls and the surge in support for the right-wing Wildrose Alliance led to speculation that Ed Stelmach would receive lukewarm support at his mandatory leadership review, to be held at the November 2009 Progressive Conservative convention.

On January 25,2011, Ed Stelmach announced that he would not seek re-election; he promised a leadership race before the next election.