Alberta electorate getting a chance to give itself a headache
By Lethbridge Herald on April 29, 2023.
Editor:
I have long had an empirical turn of mind and therefore firmly believe in evidence-based analysis.
It is a fool’s game to plunge in without having first tested the proverbial waters. Likewise it is futile to claim knowledge without some basis of tested fact.
You may have heard, for instance, that it hurts to hit yourself in the head with a hammer. This always struck me as a presumptuous claim. So I determined to hit myself in the head with a hammer in order to tease the truth out of this old saw.
WONK! Wuddya know? – it hurt.
Flash forward to May 29, 2023 – the upcoming provincial election. The Alberta electorate is being given the opportunity to hit itself in the head with a hammer by casting a vote for the conniving and factually-challenged Danielle Smith and her coterie of bumbling, neo-Darwinist, conspiracy-addled, convoy-hardened poodles.
Let me save everyone the trouble and the miserable post-encounter headache. I have tried such an experiment so that you need not suffer the pain. If you hit yourself in the head with this really big hammer it will hurt – really, really bad.
At times like this, of course, it’s best to turn to the great minds of yesteryear. Yes, it was Yogi Berra who offered these immortal words to live by: “When you get to a fork in the road – take it.”
Phil Burpee
Pincher Creek
11-10
Sure, vote NDP and vote for the provincial sales tax they will implement, whether we like it or not. They haven’t denied that they would do that.
Where do you get the idea she is planning a sales tax when she has only been promoting making the rich pay their fair share by increasing royalties and taxes back up to the Lougheed levels? Aren’t you forgetting that Smith is promising a lot more privatization of health care, User Fees? She was the one promoting privatizing health care and education systems in 2012 and it got her defeated, didn’t it?
Waiting for the last few months to decide which party to vote for will only find you voting for a party who sucked you in with false promises.
In the upcoming municipal election, I have already made up my mind who I would not support, and I also made up my mind who I would not support in the current provincial election.
Many people forgot that the NDP terminated the water bomber contracts for fighting forest fires just months before the disastrous Ft. McMurray fire , if you recall the headlines at the time, Notley and her staff were out partying and having fun while the city burnt.
With the Safe Drug Consumption Site opening, the NDP devastated our city, along with countless lives and the downtown businesses.
Since they support harm reduction and have claimed in media reports that science has proven it to be effective, they will open another one as soon as they are in office. Tell it to everyone who died in Vancouver after their harm reduction programmes failed for 20 years.
The NDP West MLA has done nothing to address our problems in this city; instead, she relentlessly criticises the UCP and residents who want to see change in order to save lives, while supporting non-profits that have failed to address rising fatal overdose statistics, homelessness, and crime while making money off of them.
But there are several wonderful nonprofits that are making a difference in this city that need to applauded though!
By suing the LPS after the LPS took more than reasonable steps to punish the cops who improperly surveilled her, which will now cost the taxpayers, the NDP MLA West also demonstrated utter disregard for the residents.
Unfortunately, I had to decide to vote for the lesser of two evils, and the NDP isn’t my choice.
Apparently you don’t care that these phony conservatives starting with Ralph Klein have screwed Albertans out of about $975 billion, why? So how do you explain why lawyers, accountants, oilmen, bankers and former Conservative MLAs all stated that Notley was on the right track in her desire to increase corporate taxes and royalties back up to the Lougheed Levels to get us out of this financial mess. Have you forgotten how she increased Corporate taxes by 2% and because of the oil industry crash of 2014 she was going to start increasing oil royalties in 2021. Kenney cut taxes by 4% costing Albertans $9.4 billion. Scraped the purchase of railway cars Notley was purchasing that would have increased royalties of $2.2 billion to Albertans, wasted $1.5 billion on the Keystone Pipeline that Biden stated he would approved, wasted $3.5 million on his lie that foreign corporations were attacking our oil industry, yet not one single oil executive agreed with this lie. Smith made a backroom deal with her oil friends to screw Albertans out of another $20 billion by helping pay for the orphan well cleanup mess that the oil industry was forced to pay for under Lougheed and Getty. Are you going to ignore the fact that Smith was promoting User Fees for Albertans needing Medical Help and is wasting another $2.2 million on her pal Preston Manning.
It is also my understanding that Under the Lougheed and Getty Governments there was a fire wall, cleared land space, built around Fort MacMurray and it was being maintained on an annual basis and that funding was scraped by the Klein Government and the cleared space disappeared. I have no proof that this is true but when I financed the construction of 338 houses there in the 1970s it was certainly talked about.
Maybe you had better read the truth about what Notley did it had nothing to do with the MacMurray fire as firefighters have pointed out over the years. Her cuts didn’t affect it one bit. Once again we see a senior allowing himself to be made a fool of by Reformers, trying to pretend they are conservatives.
no idea why you get so negged when pointing out such an obvious truth. shows us the kind of suckers that are so duped by a team name, like conservative.
You do realize the NDP aren’t in power, right? If you’re upset about the way provincial decisions are being handled in Lethbridge, those things are 100% due to the UCP government, they have a majority. You appear to know so little about our political process that you don’t even know who you’re mad at. In other words, a perfect Danielle Smith voter.
she has every right to sue – the dirty actions by people we depend on to uphold our security had no business doing what they did. however, we agree the cost to taxpayers would suck, which is why the dirty individuals in question should be sued directly. why should the entire force be sullied? moreover, there is no reason at all taxpayers should be on the hook for the improprieties. kind of mirrors smith and her having us pay for the filthy toxic leaching lakes of sludge and orphaned wells left behind by rogue and irresponsible self serving oil barons.
are you truly so simple?
Unfortunately half the province thinks the NDP are “socialist” although they couldn’t define that word if their lives depended on it.
They don’t even know the difference between a true conservative and a Reformer either yet there is a huge difference. Conservatives collected proper royalties and taxes and ran this province properly like Norway and Alaska are doing. Reformers help the rich steal the peoples oil and tax wealth in an effort to try to buy votes and replace the lost revenues with privatization. In other words while we look after ourselves and our friends let the rest of the fools pay for it.
A senior in Calgary told me years ago that him and his wife thought Klein was a wonderful premier until their kids bought them tickets to one of his $250. per plate fund raising dinners as a anniversary present. He sated that Klein’s speech was nothing more than a pack of lies , yet the seniors sitting around them were believing every one of them. Giving him standing ovations. After it was over he went to the washroom before driving home. When he came out of the washroom here was Klein talking to one of his MLAs and he overheard Klein say ” I could tell these idiots anything and they would believe it”. We went home and cut up our conservative membership cards and have never voted for them since.
With our family knowing the Klein family since the early 60s we knew what a jerk Ralph Klein was and none of us voted for him and know that some his own family didn’t either.
The big question here in Edmonton, at coffee, is how many ignorant seniors are going to be dumb enough to believe the Danielle Smith lie that Notley increased taxes 97 times over four years? She only increased corporate taxes once for 2% and the corporations effected fully supported it.
How many are going to believe she was responsible for the loss of 183,000 jobs when it was the International Oil Industry crash that created it a year before she was even elected?
You just can’t believe anything this fool says, can you? We would be damn fools to elect her, wouldn’t we?
It’s a well known fact that she holds the record for the largest number of political defeats in Alberta’s history, and couldn’t even get elected in her own home town of High River. They knew better than to elect her. She refused to run in a vacant riding in Calgary because she was certain she would be defeated. So she went to Rural Alberta because she thinks they aren’t as smart. Let’s hope they show her they aren’t as dumb as she thinks they are.