[Newsbot]

Title: Fair Deal panel report underlines challenges for Kenney when rhetoric meets reality
Category: Provincial Politics
Posted By: DrCaleb
Date: 2020-06-18 08:12:38
Canadian

[DrCaleb]

Fixed the link. Sorry about that.


So here is a list of things Albertans don't care about. I wonder how much it will cost us, from the government hired to reduce the defecit and create jobs.

[raydan]

defecit...

Good one.

[DrCaleb]

Bah! Spellcheck doesn't warn me on front page comments.

[Zipperfish]

As a British Columbian whose career has been in the federal civil service, I sympathize on this. I wouldn't countenance separation under any circumstance, but I can tell you that anything west of Ontario is treated as the colonies. That hasn't changed.

[DrCaleb]

And spending huge sums to create our own police force, and penalties for pulling out of the CPP to create our own smaller pension plan (that most people at the town hall meetings rejected) does nothing to address that colonial attitude.

[DrCaleb]

And now they are saying they want to put the Police, Equalization, and Pension ideas to a referendum.

But what are they actually proposing? There doesn't seem to be an actual question they are asking, or an actual plan in place to vote on. It's just going to be like the bullshit Senate elections that we don't hear a word about until we are handed the ballot.

[Thanos]

1) During the Klein years Alberta was basically used as the test-bed for utility privatization, with many of the same characters involved in the rip-off who later went on to participate in the even more massive Enron rip-off in California
2) During the Klein years Alberta toyed with large privatization of the medical services, until it was revealed that the "expert doctor" from New Zealand who they were getting their information from wasn't even a certified or licensed physician. When that got revealed the entire scheme fell apart quickly and wasn't raised again.

In light of this, that fiscal conservative plans to increase "efficiency and effectiveness" ALWAYS end up as some kind of outright robbery from beneficiaries and investors, I'd reject any of the propaganda coming from the UCP about taking the CPP away from the feds and having it "managed" by the province. All it will succeed in will be in handing billions and billions of dollars over to another one of these friends-of-Reagan/Klein/Bush Jr. scam artists, with zero supervision by the government, and we'll get robbed blind of what we have left.

This province has already been effectively destroyed by external enemies. Handing over what's left to someone's "pals", the way conservative politicians always do, who turn out to be nothing but a pack of liars and outright thieves would just be the final nails in the coffin for us.

[DrCaleb]

OPINION | 'Fair Deal' report foreshadows a tumultuous future for Alberta

[Thanos]

And the comments at the bottom of that article are the primary reason that this resentment which leads to bad ideas will never go away. They hate us, Doc.

[DrCaleb]

I never read the comments. I actually have the javascript that displays them blocked in my browser. Trolls will be trolls.

I heard Donna Kennedy-Glans, Drew Barnes and Graham Thompson on "Alberta at Noon" yesterday, and Barnes definitely is shilling for the UCP. I guess the UCP got their money's worth appointing him to the committee. He seemed to be spouting the talking points of the UCP, while DK-G was giving us actual numbers. And the numbers on Police look weak, Pension reform is non-existent to hostile, and Wexit seems flaccid.

She also added that not only has Covid-19 changed all those priorities, bringing it up now seemed like Kenney trying to distract from his lack of job strategy and torpedoed economy. One thing she said that came up often in the town halls was economic diversification, and that barely is mentioned in the report.

[CharlesAnthony]

$1:

"Albertans have been working for Ottawa for too long," declared Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in his keynote address to close the Manning Conference last November.

As long as none of them say: "Wait a cotton-picking moment!!! Why the fuck are any of us Albertards working at all??!?? We should be collecting royalties by virtue of our birth-certificates alone -- the way arabian princes do!" then all is good in the empire.

[bootlegga]

Thanos Thanos:

1) During the Klein years Alberta was basically used as the test-bed for utility privatization, with many of the same characters involved in the rip-off who later went on to participate in the even more massive Enron rip-off in California
2) During the Klein years Alberta toyed with large privatization of the medical services, until it was revealed that the "expert doctor" from New Zealand who they were getting their information from wasn't even a certified or licensed physician. When that got revealed the entire scheme fell apart quickly and wasn't raised again.

In light of this, that fiscal conservative plans to increase "efficiency and effectiveness" ALWAYS end up as some kind of outright robbery from beneficiaries and investors, I'd reject any of the propaganda coming from the UCP about taking the CPP away from the feds and having it "managed" by the province. All it will succeed in will be in handing billions and billions of dollars over to another one of these friends-of-Reagan/Klein/Bush Jr. scam artists, with zero supervision by the government, and we'll get robbed blind of what we have left.

This province has already been effectively destroyed by external enemies. Handing over what's left to someone's "pals", the way conservative politicians always do, who turn out to be nothing but a pack of liars and outright thieves would just be the final nails in the coffin for us.

Agreed. As we saw recently, AIMCO lost $4 BILLION on bad oil patch investments, so you can probably expect that as international investment dries up, the public sector pensions will get dumped into more bad plays to prop up a declining industry, instead of helping to diversify the economy as they should.

I'm pretty sure that's what this is all about - filling the trough for Kenney's friends and wealthy UCP donors.

If I actually thought any of this was aimed at making things better for Albertans as a whole, I'd support it, but as we've seen over and over, the UCP only cares about the rich and wealthy and the rest can go screw off to BC or wherever if they don't like it.

Anyone who thought Klein screwed us over is about to get a royal lesson in sodomy from the UCP.

[JaredMilne]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

And spending huge sums to create our own police force, and penalties for pulling out of the CPP to create our own smaller pension plan (that most people at the town hall meetings rejected) does nothing to address that colonial attitude.

It also does nothing to trim the size of the civil service, which would increase if we did these things. The UCP's already cut taxes, so where's the extra cash coming from? Do they have any kind of idea besides just praying for yet another oil boom and then promising, on a stack of Bibles and with sugar on top, that they won't piss this one away?

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Criticize Rachel Notley all you want, but she at least tried to make our finances less reliant on the ups and downs of oil prices. Increasing taxes was always going to be a difficult sell, but she said outright she was planning to increase income taxes for the rich in 2015.

Meanwhile, when the oil money dries up and the cuts come...well, that opens the door to problems like what Thanos talked about.

Some of our problems are caused by external factors, whether it's federal legislation or the free market fucking us over, but we're the architects of some of our own misfortune.

[Thanos]

1) Rachel Notley was the best premier we had since Peter Lougheed.

2) I can't see where a single thing the Kenney government has done will make things better when the bill comes due, but I can certainly see how most of what they've done will make things that much worse.

3) We're fucked, like totally.