Laying It Out: Random thoughts from an eventful week

By Medicine Hat News Opinion on September 26, 2020.

According to the new justice minister, Red Deer RCMP officers were unable to make on-the-scene arrests of the racist losers who were assaulting peaceful anti-racism rally goers because they had gone to the wrong venue.

When we finally fire up that pricey provincial police force, maybe we should put a few Uber drivers through the academy. In the meantime, a known racist publicly says he and his racist friends will be going to the rally to be violent… then they show up and do exactly that… and it’s all caught on video… and there hasn’t been a single charge laid.

Personally, I can’t believe so many people want to defund the police.

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Someone asked me this week why I would publicly question the credibility of economists after I had publicly questioned the credibility of an economist. I guess it’s because everything an economist can tell you about the past can be Googled, and anything they tell you about the future is a complete guess and almost assuredly dead wrong, even though politicians use those constantly failing predictions to make constantly failing policy decisions. Other than that, economists are the best.

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It’s fine that conservative politicians and pundits didn’t like the federal government’s throne speech this week. To be honest, I didn’t really like it much either. But if you’re one of the people who mentioned that none of the 6,783 words in it were “pipeline,” you should know that you’re the butt of an increasingly unfunny joke. And if you’re St. Albert MP Michael Cooper, who actually posted a photo of himself counting each word, you should know that pretending not to know about Microsoft’s word-count feature doesn’t exactly scream, “We’re the party for young people.”

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Among the words that did make it into the speech was “intersectionality,” which essentially says that individuals can have unique experiences of discrimination due to overlapping aspects of social categorization. So, for example, someone who is both Indigenous and female could face issues that might not exist for an Indigenous man or a Caucasian woman.

Premier Jason Kenney called it “a kooky academic theory.” If you’re going to trust a person’s opinion on academia, you might not want it to be a guy whose education consists of not finishing a philosophy degree at the only California school no one has ever heard of.

Low-hanging fruit, no doubt, but it was Kenney who once reminded us that education levels are a reflection of our “human capital.” Not to mention that one of his own “academic theories” was to once suggest in his school newspaper that allowing pro-choice activists on campus would be akin to doing so for pedophiles. But, you know, understanding discrimination is “kooky.”

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Medicine Hat-Cardston-Warner MP Glen Motz isn’t a fan of the throne speech, and will “absolutely not” support it. When asked by the News how he felt about the Federal Wage Subsidy being extended, he responded by saying, “Business owners would like to have a stable economy, like they had before COVID, and to get the economy rolling again. I know of dozens of companies that want to get back to work. We need an incentive to get people back working.”

First, I can’t believe no one else has thought of wishing away the pandemic. What a great idea. Second, did a conservative MP accidentally admit that Trudeau’s Liberals were in charge of “a stable economy before COVID arrived?” Probably not.

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Kenney recently demanded a sum of $6.5 billion in “reverse equalization” from the federal government. He said it would be a start for paying back all the money Canada owes to Alberta and its people. It’s true that over the years Albertans have required less money for services than Albertans have paid in federal income taxes, and I know certain people like to claim the difference as some sort of theft.

But the truth is everyone pays the same income tax percentages as we do and the federal government is responsible for ensuring equal services for all Canadians. If Albertans want more services than taxes paid, all we need to do is make less money and require more services.

I’m 43 years old, I’ve had a job in the private sector every day since I was 16, and I’ve spent a grand total of three days in hospital in my entire life. My ratio of taxes paid to services received is probably different than someone who got laid off from a minimum wage job while awaiting their third ACL surgery.

When Albertans complain about equalization, what we’re really saying is instead of having massive quantities of oil and gas under our feet for the past 80 years, we’d have been much better off unemployed with a bum knee.

Scott Schmidt is the layout editor for the Medicine Hat News. He can be reached by email at sschmidt@medicinehatnews.com, or follow him on Twitter at @shmitzysays

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