Enough of the phone conservatives in our midst

By Letter to the Editor on June 30, 2021.

Editor:
My senior Conservative friends and I have had enough of these phony conservatives, Reformers, and the lies they have been spreading .
As soon as they hired Janice MacKinnon, former Finance Minister of Saskatchewan’s NDP party, we knew our rural doctors were in trouble. She was credited with the closing of 52 rural hospitals in Saskatchewan and getting the NDP defeated by the Brad Wall conservatives.
It was obvious that she was hired to do the same thing here and we were not surprised when health minister Tyler Shandro began beating up on our rural doctors trying to drive them out.
Blaming them for the high cost of health care when it was former Conservative governments who created it didn’t make them look very smart. It was just one more plan to destroy what our hero, Peter Lougheed, had proudly created for our rural families and friends.
It’s no secret that destroying everything Lougheed stood for is their game plan, as we have all seen.
Now Shandro is trying to pretend that he had nothing to do with our doctors leaving and we are expected to believe his lies. We aren’t.
Lougheed ‘s energy minister Bill Dickie was a brother in-law of one of my uncles. I got to know several of the MLAs from the Lougheed era and they considered Reformers to be their enemies and were furious with the Conservative party for allowing them to take control and destroy what the Alberta conservative party stood for.
None of it was about looking after the well – being of all the people, like it was with them. Catering to the rich to try to buy votes and making the rest of us pay more and more for privatization, while giving away our oil and tax revenues was the plan and it still is. Ralph Klein’s father Phil and daughter Angie were furious with Ralph for doing it and tried to help us vote him out.
As these former MLAs also pointed out, Reformers Stephen Harper, Preston Manning, Brian Jean, Danielle Smith, Jim Prentice and Andrew Scheer have all been defeated in elections when the people finally realized what they stood for and Jason Kenney will be next, and none of them have been smart enough to suggest the obvious – that they should follow Lougheed’s lead of collecting proper royalties, and taxes like Lougheed did and Alaska and Norway are doing. In other words, there is nothing conservative about them.
Alan K. Spiller
Edmonton