New leaders often toughen ethics, transparency rules. Danielle Smith and UCP take different approach

When sweeping somebody else out of power, it's common for new leaders to use that same broom to tidy up the system to reassure the public that they are more honest and accountable than the bums they replaced.

This may not be the approach from the current Alberta government, but it's a time-honoured good housekeeping practice in politics.

When Stephen Harper defeated the Liberals to become prime minister in 2006, his first legislation was the Federal Accountability Act. It blocked political staffers from hopping straight from Parliament into private-sector lobbying, and put the ethics commissioner in charge of policing that.

Former premier Ralph Klein brought in the Freedom of Information system in his first months in office, and successor Ed Stelmach gave Alberta a lobbyist registry as his Bill 1.

In Jim Prentice's brief premiership, his government passed an Alberta Accountability Act which, like Harper's before him, put premier's and ministerial aides under the same Conflict of Interest Act rules on forwarding private interests, disclosure and post-employment lobbying as MLAs or ministers. It also expanded the rules to top-level bureaucrats.

The reforms won support from the Wildrose Opposition, led by Danielle Smith.

"Those rules that applied to MLAs before also now apply to staff in the premier's and ministers' offices, a very, very, very good improvement," Rob Anderson, the Wildrose's lead MLA on accountability measures, said in the legislature.

A decade later, Smith is premier and Anderson her top adviser. The accountability reforms they've brought in during their first two years include letting MLAs accept larger gifts and creating various new exemptions for freedom of information requests.

The next measure Smith's team has laid groundwork for would undo what Anderson once called "very, very, very good."

Last week, the UCP members on a special legislative committee examining the Conflicts of Interest Act endorsed changes that would exclude all but the most senior aides to the ministers and premier from the law's provisions, as well as exempting top bureaucrats and heads of provincial agencies.

That means the end of legislated rules governing gifts given to most political aides, their professional/private conflicts and their post-employment "cooling off" period. It also ends requirements for disclosure to the independent ethics commissioner, and the office's oversight.

Instead, any rules or ethical breaches would be policed by the staffers' de facto boss, the premier's chief of staff. Rob Anderson, at present.

Grant Hunter, the UCP backbench MLA who proposed these motions at committee, suggested the changes were designed to bring Alberta in line with some other provinces and erase overlap between this act and other codes of conduct for the public service.

There are some times when the provincial government wants to be the nation's best, or provide a leading "made-in-Alberta solution." Ethics rules, critics suggest, might not be such an occasion.