UCP’s budget doesn’t fit with Albertans’ needs

By Letter to the Editor on March 23, 2020.

Do corporate business methods, attitudes and practices work for government? Should politicians follow the financial goals that guide business?

The latest UPC budget is an attempt to overlay business financial objectives on our Alberta ministries and community. Alberta municipalities are upset with the premier’s attitude that oil companies need not pay taxes, and should not be required to pay for well maintenance and clean-up.

These UPC attitudes are simply antisocial, and followed to the extreme, are practices that would land individuals in jail.

In light of our present viral health scare, Mr. Kenney wants again to transfer responsibility to Ottawa. He proposes to tell Mr. Trudeau to pay health-care expenses, which are equally provincial, in attempt to cover for disastrous health cuts in the UPC budget.

Mr. Kenney carelessly slashed funds for doctors, nurses and hospitals at just the wrong time. His business agenda is out of whack with the needs of communities in Alberta. He is attempting to make the government follow the quarterly financial justification of a corporate “efficiency” model.

Should oil and gas corporation apologists in our legislature be recalled? Are they serving the voters who were not fully informed at election time of the intentions of a gabble of a loose ideological scrambled-egg type party? If legislation were in place today to recall unsatisfactory MLAs, how many UPC politicians would be left to institute Mr. Kenney’s radical agenda?

My opinion is we should be very careful to watch lobby by lawyers, business executives and economists in running our legislature. Social policy types, especially from the University of Calgary – subgroup of the U of Chicago, the infamous group that inspired Pinochet and the disastrous Chilean experiment – are known to be right-wing neoliberals. Too much attention to their theories has sold out Alberta’s heritage for a cowboy song.

Don Ryane

Lethbridge