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
11-10
Suck-it-up Don like the rest of us and quit whining! You will get your chance to vote them out in a few years.
“Whining”?
Ryane is merely pointing out salient facts concerning the budget. No doubt you would call them “alternative facts”, no matter the truth of their contents. Disagree if you like, that is your prerogative, but cynical responses with no reasoned argument is patently uncalled for.
May I suggest, Fedup, that “true conservatives” have drifted off into the authoritarian mists, always beckoning those who line up with the idea that “there’s no such thing as society.”
We are currently experiencing a massive slapdown of that, along with the other two conservative “values” of shrinking government despite a society sprawling exponentially in size and complexity and the other nonsense of disappearing taxes, a.k.a. vital revenue. Indeed, capitalism itself is being outed for its mature result–monstrous and ultimately paralyzing inequality. It’s ALL been tried, and those who can still think critically now know that human beings simply trump the economy.
Conservatism/austerity/libertarianism/theocracy/survival of the fittest/greed/”knucklehead culture” generally, as a creed, is what needs to go by the wayside, starting with the formerly GOP.
well stated, tris. our present system is so patch-worked, decrepit, and, frankly, just too unfair and wickedly unsustainable.
The “all forgiving of everything NDP” have spoken. No one bothers to postulate the wreck we would be in if Phillips and Notley were still spending like “women gone wild”. The unions would be 10% larger then they were when they were tossed and Phillips would still be handing out Lightbulbs installed by a Ontario Company. They would be into deeper spending ensuring that no one could toss a union person in the future if they tried. They would be in the same predicament with as the UCP when it came to COVID readiness and would be farther in debt with NO source of income because windmills and solar panels do nothing to substitute for income.
CO2? No need to go there, 4 years and they never saved a tonne, but they did manage to spend $58billion. So somehow you find it easy to be critical of the UCP but never saw anything to be critical in the way the NDP did things. The NDP paid for every Union Job they created they paid for everything you now insist UCP is doing wrong because they are withdrawing that payment. You are truly NDP, it does not matter we have near zero income, just as long as you are able to ensure a voter base by increasing unions, you are happy, because it allows you to spend taxpayer money until there is none left. When it is gone, well, we can always raise taxes.
You seem to clearly see that COVID created an issue with the scaling down with healthcare that the UCP was doing and the glorious NDP would have been in better position. Yet you seem somehow able to gloss over the fact that NDP never saw $7.50 a barrel oil coming and would be in a worse position today then the UCP are now with their multiple liabilities they created for their own government.
How strange to only see clearly from one side