I have a friend in Alberta who has always been left-of-centre politically. He was not happy with Harper nor the PC party in his own province. So I wrote him recently, seeking confirmation that he must be overjoyed with the elections of both Rachel Notley’s NDP provincially and Justin Trudeau’s Liberals federally. The message I received back was quite unexpected:
Not entirely happy is a bit of an understatement. I’m livid.
I think we’re pretty much on the same page here.
We are mortgaging our kids futures. And balancing the books by 2020. Please!!!!!!
It will indeed be a different Alberta and Canada 4 years from now.
Reading through this I now understand why he’s so upset:
She will increase spending on necessary infrastructure by $4.5 billion over five years.
And to pay for it all, she will borrow.
The budget predicts that Alberta’s provincial deficit will total $6 billion this year alone and $18 billion over the next four years.
For Alberta, all of this is unusually bold.
Why is he complaining? Isn’t this what he voted for?
Tough sh1t. He’s got what he voted for.
Did your Albertan friend really think that a vote for Mulcair and the NDP would actually lead to balanced budgets?
I’ve met lots of these people. The we vote for leftists because its cool crowd.
These people are who Nenshi convinces he’s a fiscal conservatives.
wasn’t there a definition of democracy as a system of government where the people get what they vote for and get it good and hard.
Ahem.
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
— H. L. Mencken
Its not only infrastructure. Over the next 3 years they are going to run a deficit of 4 to 5 billion in order that public servants get their pay increases.
While the oil industry is cutting pay and decreasing costs, they will not considered making “draconian” cuts – Joe Ceci’s words, to the public service
Albertan’s aren’t calling the shots, Ontarion’s and BC’ers are.
You know, all this talk about deficit spending; where does the money actually come from? Who collects the interest?
We have a regular dinner engagement with some 25ish old young urban folks. We use them as recipe testers and enjoy their company and life stories that help us try to understand what their lives are like.
The one consistent point in all the discussions is how inept, to the point of being clueless, they are about money and finances, especially their personal financial planning for their futures.
And they seem impervious to any logic. They think that making the minimum monthly payment on their credit cards is a great thing because it “proves” their credit ratings. There really is no such thing as bad debt as long as they can make those minimum payments. At least make the payments most of the time.
It is fine to put a 5 Star Mexican vacation on the old MasterCard, but it is a rip off to have to pay $2 to use a white label cash machine in a bar. Rents should be frozen, the government should forgive their student loans and lower the cost of buying a house.
Nice kids, fun to have at the dinner table, very scary they are so poorly educated about money.
It just may come from those whose basic dictatorship has allowed them to turn their economy around on a dime.
Some far left conservatives are just impossible to please. Suck it up …. maybe next time a freak of nature will come along with all the specific things you want Mr. I don’t like Harper, but now I don’t like the other meanies who are hijacking my kids future … I smirk.
You are either a conservative or you are not. Mr. Harper was a conservative and it don’t get much better than he. His policies were good and they were working. What part of that didn’t you and your now impoverished kids, get?
The problem with conservatives and libertarians alike, is they think in terms of left right. When in reality its divide and concur, the private banks run away with all the money. Racking up trillions in derivative debit, that now we are signed on to.Blaming taxes or Ontario is what kindergarten kids do.
What happens to equalization when Alberta becomes a have-not province? With Justin and Notely in charge the double-whammy will likely damage the Alberta economy worse than Pierre did. Tough times ahead my Alberta friends.
I’d be interesting to hear what your friend proposes instead there Robert. I’m guessing taxing those evil corporations and wicked rich people is the solution but surely this person is in favour of all the money being blown? Maybe they’re frustrated by the lack of social justice programs for the bunnies and lack of diversity programs for the toddlers?
Your friend is either a moron or lying to you or both
Robert >
Well at least you can tell your friend that the Alberta NDP actually do have an ounce of political survival:
“Alberta NDP ‘sorry’ for pay hikes and junkets gaffe”
“The Notley NDPers voted last week for big pay hikes to legislature bigshots and a trip to Boston for some of themselves.
On Tuesday they beat a hasty retreat.”
http://www.calgarysun.com/2015/09/29/alberta-ndp-is-sorry-for-pay-hikes-and-junkets-gaffe-they-didnt-mean-it-they-made-a-mistake-and-theyll-never-do-it-again
Be careful what you wish for commie.
Now, when Klein balanced the budget and paid off our debt, oil and gas royalties accounted for 40% of provincial revenue. After a couple of decades of low taxation and the resultant economic diversification that results, oil and gas royalties account for 6% of revenues. What’s Notley’s plan? Simple.
Remove some of the tax advantage helped create that diversification, and then hope oil recovers so that we can get on with diversifying the economy. Meanwhile, they’ll mouth pieties about the sanctity of public sector wages, grumble about the need for “infrastructure spending”, and make high-minded pronouncements about “investments in our future”. All of which, for an additional $1.75, will get you a medium double-double.
Find me a politician who grasps that the so-called “infrastructure deficit” that we are encountering is a direct result of over spending on social programs, and I’ll get you an envelope of 8×10 glossies of every mating pair of Bigfoot in Brazeau County.
It has been pointed out that many “progressives” in fact live their own lives fairly conservatively. They believe that “budgets balance themselves” and all of the other nonsense because they want to. Eventually, however, some (and some, sooner than later) figure out that the measured, balanced approach to government brought to Canada by Stephen Harper is, in fact, in their own best interests, that of their children, and that of the country as a whole. Unfortunately, they are unable to admit that to themselves, much less to other people.
I wish I had been more successful with my appeal to voters in my region to “Vote for us, and pretend that you’re appalled if we win.”
Yes Notley is running a $6 billion deficit and borrowing $4.5 billion for infrastructure projects such as more roads, schools and hospitals. No she won’t balance the books until 2020, based on projected higher oil & gas revenues in the future.
But don’t forget, she’s diversifying the economy. Get it? I totally get it.
“What happens to equalization when Alberta becomes a have-not province?”
Those equalization payments come out of federal tax revenues.
If there is not enough revenue, the Federal Government can just borrow the money!
Sure that’ll increase the deficit. But so what?
Wheeeeeeeeee!
Fun? Wow!
This year Quebec is getting $17.34 billion in federal equalization payments. Alberta, Saskatcewan and BC get none. There is no way the Quebec payment will go down one cent regardless of how well things are going anywhere. With the Liberals in power, it’s only going to get worse.
Sorry – that’s 9.5 billion for Quebec
Last summer I was up at the projects in the Tar Sands and had to listen to a site foreman extoll the virtues of the NDP and the chicken headed cluck that ran it. It’s an awful thing to say but I sincerely hope that idiot was one of the casualties in the project cancellations.
As a veteran of the Alberta boom/bust I can say with authority that although it sucks for everyone – the kids will be the ones that take the hardest hit. It will serve them right to, as somebody else has said – they are totally unaware of the relationship between economic actions and consequences.
Meh. My house is paid for, I have no debt I have money in the safe. Semi-retirement is looking more and more appealing.
Just a thought.
As Wynne is now selling the furniture to keep the creditors from putting the province into receivership, what would be the reaction in other provinces be if PM Leisuresuit felt obligated to have Ontario bailed out?
Not real sure why he would think it would have turned out any differently. It is, after all, what the left is all about. The guy obviously isn’t all that bright.
I live in Montana – Went to a repair shop for some auto work. I asked the owner who I know, “So, who is the new guy helping you?”
“Oh, he’s a Canadian oil worker – just got laid off.”
Well, that is $100,000 Loonies a year to $20.00 hour.
The guy did not vote for the NDP or the Grits.
The NDP statement that the deficit will total $18b over the next 4 years is a flat out lie and Redford type creative accounting. 4 years from now the NDP forecast the debt will total $47b and that is after they blow through the rest of the provinces savings. If we use real world accounting the NDP are planning annual deficits that will exceed $12billion.
So the worker is an illegal in the US? Or was he a TFW in Canada?
The NDP in Alberta are just tossing out number that they themselves don’t understand. They have no clue what the situation is going to be over the next five years. Consider that they have stuck a knife into the back of the golden goose that was Alberta. They have no idea how far in debt they are going be by next election, nor do they have any idea how they are going to pay for anything as the oil industry in Alberta goes GALT.
They rode into the ledge on unicorns and they crawl out on their hands and knees in four years of utter failure and political debauchery.
The media fueled hatred of PM Harper blinded a lot of folks to what good economic practice is. Soon to be what good economic practice was, and a lot of chickens are going to come home to roost. The free lunch and a chicken in every pot crowd are going to get a rude awaking, although the dedicated Marxists like it this way as they then will be able to foist even more regulation and government interference in business.
” Mr. Harper was a conservative and it don’t get much better than he”
really, and that statements shows you wouldn’t know a conservative if you tripped over one. Harper was moderately right of center, and a politician, not true conservative, but then about 75% of his constituents are not cons either, but he governed 100% of the population. I think you are also a little shy on understanding basic governance.
As we try to figure out what the election results mean, here are a few insights:
Like many millennials, after trying to strike out into the big vast world on his own, Justin Trudeau has returned home to the place he was raised (24 Sussex Dr.)
On the flip side, Mr. Harper woke up to quite likely his worst nightmare.
He woke up as a regular Calgary citizen with a gay Muslim as his mayor,
the NDP running his province and the Liberals running the country…
Rachael Notley lowers Albertan’s expectations to zero.zero
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/11/04/alberta-premier-spars-with-opponents-over-layoffs-says-no-magic-wand-to-fix-it_n_8467304.html
“It would be lovely to wave a magic wand and create 40,000 jobs out of nowhere,”
So Notley now wants to double down on the problem by assisting the Federal Liberals and the Ontario Liberals to import 25,000 more unemployables. There is no bottom to the tank of imbecilic moronity (Can’t call it ignorance because that can be fixed.) that has engulfed this country. Just hope that you’ve all taken note of which of your neighbours had the signs up for Libs, Dips and Greens so that when they start belly-aching and whining you can have some solace in knowing you were right. Solace is small consolation I know but it’s going to be all you will be able to afford.
More of the same. Too many stupid Canadians that are fooled into thinking that the NDP has changed, is different, learned from the past, cant be any worse, etc, etc.
They are socialistss and ssocial justice warriors, thru and thru. Change the faces, doeesnt matter. Always Progs same team new decade, new group of STUPID voters.
They got the government they deserve
“Mr. Harper woke up to quite likely his worst nightmare.
He woke up as a regular Calgary citizen with a gay Muslim as his mayor,
the NDP running his province and the Liberals running the country…”
That’s why I can’t imagine him staying in Parliament very long. The country has effectively renounced everything he tried to accomplish, at all levels of government, all across the country. Only Brad Wall remains, and he’ll be ostracized & ignored in the New Liberal Order. Harper has years of vilification to look forward to in the media before he might reach a status akin to Mulroney, namely that of ‘former PM that we begrudgingly acknowledge once governed the country, but we moved on from his terrible rule years ago and try to pretend it never happened.’
The western prime ministers, Bennett, Diefenbaker, Clark, and Harper are the most despised prime ministers in eastern Canada, because that’s what they do in the east – hate.
Kind of overblown?
Harper basically kept his base, Western Canada has not rejected fiscal sanity and the number of conservative voters barely dropped.
“The country has effectively renounced everything he tried to accomplish”.
No the conservative base is steady and 4 years of the resurgent Old liars and kleptocrats will go a long way to swinging the much impoverished eastern voter toward voting more sanely.
The question may be more along the lines of what does Western Canada have in common with the East? Especially after another 4 years of theft and abuse from their leaders.
And do we trust eastern voters well enough to continue to share an economy with them?
Trade requires trust, notice that interprovincial restrictions are much worse than international trade barriers .
Canada is already a country more in name than practise.
“On the flip side, Mr. Harper woke up to quite likely his worst nightmare.
He woke up as a regular Calgary citizen with a gay Muslim as his mayor,
the NDP running his province and the Liberals running the country…”
You also forgot to mention the lame stream media ragging on him because as an Alberta resident he will be paying less taxes (for now). I saw that story line in at least two sources. Pathetic, really.