Facts speak the truth on past PC governments
By Letter to the Editor on December 5, 2018.
The saying goes that hindsight is always 20-20, but there seems to be an exception when it is the myopic hindsight of Liberal cheerleader Peter Mueller on Alberta’s political past. First of all, Mueller confuses the far-right SoCred governments with the centrist Progressive Conservatives and lumps them together under the title of Conservatives. The PC rise to power under Peter Lougheed was a response to the far right social conservatism of the Social Credit. With their mandates the PCs governed to the middle of the political spectrum as espoused by Premier Lougheed, the challenge, of course, being determining where the middle lay. Mueller goes on to characterize these governments as short-sighted, mismanaged and tone deaf. Yet the facts speak the real truth. Billions saved in the Heritage Trust Fund and Sustainability Fund is hardly mismanagement and this saving to hedge against volatility is hardly short-sighted. How could it be in Mueller’s view, when planning for volatility is the tact he is advocating? Should Mueller attend an optometrist he would also see that Norway, as a country, is vastly different from Alberta, as a province within a country. Norway pays no equalization payments for example. How much would have been in the two funds mentioned above if Albertans didn’t have to send money to Ottawa? Mueller’s dirty reading glasses also seem to have abandoned him on a comparison of tax rates between Norway and Alberta. In Norway the income tax rate is approximately 50 per cent. The PC governments chose to keep taxes low using oil revenues to do so. I don’t recall reading any letters from any taxpayer, especially not Mueller, complaining about our low tax rate for those 44 years. As for being tone deaf, Mr. Mueller must have forgotten, or lost his glasses, when it comes to the repeated and regular consultation of the PC governments asking Albertans’ advice, especially with respect to oil revenues. Finally, I had a hearty laugh when Mueller characterized the NDP as pragmatic and less doctrinaire. It is far from pragmatic to impose a tax on carbon during an economic crisis, tantamount to throwing gasoline (including carbon tax) on a burning house. It is uber doctrinaire to do so in order to look green (the tax does not reduce emissions) to attempt to acquire a social licence that we have found does not exist as witnessed by the feds’ refusal to support Alberta by getting pipelines built. Jim Taylor Medicine Hat 9-8
Jim Taylor just keeps on insisting that he proves how ignorant he is. he still believes the Ralph Klein lie that Alberta is broke because we have had to send billions of dollars to Ottawa and Quebec in the form of Equalization Payments. Alberta governments have never paid a penny to anyone in the form of equalization payments, it comes out of federal Taxes and has nothing to do with provincial wealth, but these poor old seniors just aren’t capable of understanding that, and still believe every lie Klein fed them. Maybe Taylor would like to say how he expects to get the pipelines built when the courts won’t let us, and why didn’t didn’t his hero Ralph Klein make certain this was all taken care of before he slashed our royalties down to the lowest in the world and invited the world to come and get our next to free oil, or wasn’t he listening to what Peter Lougheed was trying to tell them?
I certainly agree that Alberta didn’t have a problem until Klein took office,and Mueller is wrong, the P.Cs under the Lougheed and Getty governments were running this province properly and Klein, who aways bragged about being a Liberal, adopted the Reform Party Policies and deliberately destroyed everything Lougheed had created for us.
Now Taylor is believing every lie Jason Kenney feeds him, and proves he doesn’t support our oil industry who wanted the Carbon Tax implemented, knowing that we have got to do something about our pollution to help get our oil to market. Oilmen I talk to are fed up with these ignorant Albertans who don’t support them, and why wouldn’t they be?.
When they tried to join the Kyoto Accord they had Harper and Klein refusing to let them. When Dr. David Swann stood with them, voicing his concerns for what our pollution was doing to people’s health Klein had him fired. The public outcry was such that Klein was forced to apologize and offer him his job back, he refused and later became the leader of the Liberal Party and Alberta lost a very good doctor. Then we watched as celebrities flocked to Alberta to hurl their sarcastic remarks at our industry and now when they finally have the NDP and Trudeau governments on their side they have to go through it again with Brian Jean, Jason Kenney, Andrew Scheer, Brad Wall, Rob Ford and Scott Moe who don’t give a damn about our air pollution and what it’s doing to the planet, or what it will do to our children’s future.
My friends and I can’t believe that there are fools like Jim Taylor who aren’t smart enough to see the massive , billions of dollars in damages around the world, and the lives lost and can come to the conclusion that it’s all a hoax and we aren’t interested in shelling out a few dollars to try to stop it , or slow it down. This lame excuse that if the U.S. isn’t doing it we shouldn’t either doesn’t make them look very smart, does it? But then we have seen how many of our fellow seniors aren’t smart enough to avoid being targeted by con-artists. police officers keep telling us about the massive amount of manpower hours and millions of taxpayers money being wasted on these fools, so it isn’t surprising that some were fooled by Klein and now Kenney, they just aren’t smart enough to understand it.
I hope I’ve been sarcastic enough I intended to be, I realize that you can’t change these people, they are what they are, as University Professors point out, but the rest of don’t need to be like them, do we?