Guest Column: Pie-in-the sky promises, empty threats

By Medicine Hat News Opinon on September 22, 2018.

The little white prince rides into the realm. He’s astride his little white donkey named UCP, aptly named for his poor toilet training. A constant trail of piddle indicates his previous travels.

This prince-in-waiting is short in stature but oh so tall in pie-in-the-sky promises and empty threats. He fully expects the people of the realm to rise up and follow him back into the era of Conservative mismanagement. He believes that the people will not remember the Age of Insider Entitlement characterized by Redford’s Edmonton penthouse, of Prentice’s royally short temper, of Ralph Klein’s rapacious and selective austerity programs.

He assumes people will ignore previous Conservatives ineptitude in putting all their financial eggs into one oily basket, ignoring the calls for energy diversification, and pooh-poohing the pleadings of financial and climate experts.

He hopes that people won’t remember that Conservatives stubbornly continued instead to bask in the Cheshire grins and greedy handshakes of rich oil men, preferring to graze on the Alberta Advantage. Until it was suddenly gone. A second Ice Age — in reverse — with another generation of dinosaurs in hasty retreat.

And then the sky fell. The cornucopia emptied, and dollars charged out of the land like mice escaping a flaming grain elevator, never to return. Any government courageous or foolish enough to attempt to douse these flames of economic destruction, knew it would be taking on a near-impossible and thankless task.

Faced with a financial tsunami equal only to the Great Depression, the new caretakers under Rachel Notley pulled up their rubber boots and set to work. Slowly and painfully they made progress while avoiding the painful cutbacks favoured by Conservatives. The land began to move towards hope and jobs. No other leader could have weathered this firestorm any better. Still, monumental problems continued to exist, recent pipeline rulings being the worst.

Leader Notley, however, continued to battle against market and judicial vagaries to resurrect the economy and help the people, aware that there existed no magic bullet, no easy answer. And sensible people saw that leader Notley was doing anything and everything to make the best of a bad situation. If allowed, time would be on her side.

But many people, remembering the days of oil and pre-glut markets, turned to Postmedia to find the words to express their anger. Down with the carbon tax! Get those pipelines built! Screw the minimum wage increase! Throw out the socialist bums!

So the little white prince saw his opportunity. He travelled the land proclaiming easy answers to the problems in the land. It soon became apparent that the little white prince was not ready for prime time. His solutions to the problems plaguing the land were “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Based on a quick reading of a Medicine Hat News story of Sept. 7, the little prince, aka Jason Kenney, proposed a bizarre scattering of “quick fixes.”

“Equalization payments are evil!” he declared, and people lustily joined in the demand to end this unfair drain on Alberta’s resources.

ButÉ

“The idea that Alberta is making payments into an equalization fund is a common misconceptionÉIn fact, the equalization fund comes from general federal revenuesÉ” and is distributed to ‘have not’ areas of the country” Éto ensure that provincial governments have sufficient revenue to provide reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation.” (nationalpost.com), (ualawccsprod.ualberta.ca-equalization)

We all pay our federal taxes every April, and part of those taxes go into the equalization fund and are distributed on the basis of need. The federal and provincial government are committed, by constitution, to providing equal services to all Canadians. So, just try to hold back your taxes this fall. The tax collectors in Winnipeg will quickly be in touch and the little prince will not be there to help you.

He then suggests Alberta hold a referendum aimed at amending the Constitution. If the province-wide referendum was successful (unlikely) then a Constitutional conference would convene to look at amending the equalization formula (time consuming and economically inane). Sadly, any change an amendment would bring to Alberta would have to be applied equally to all provinces, effectively ending equalization transfers. Seven provinces and 50 per cent of the people of Canada would need to agree on the amendment. This will not happen, and the little prince knows it.

Then, just to further alienate B.C., he suggests that he would pressure the federal government to cut federal transfers to B.C. until the pipeline is built.Again, this would require an amendment to the Constitution. (See above. End of story.)

Pie-in-the-sky promises and empty threats. Nothing happening here. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Peter Mueller is a long-time resident of Medicine Hat who, in spite of all the evidence, continues to believe we can build a better world.

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