Happy Halloween!
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith gave her annual tritely titled “State of the Province” speech yesterday to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, complaining about Ottawa but painting a rosy picture of things here in Wild Rose Country under her guiding hand.
Whether she had anything to say to the good burghers of Edmonton about the predictable danger Alberta might return to deficit, thereby giving her an excuse to delay that long-promised tax cut once again, will have to remain a mystery for the moment, since the lunchtime speech cost $140 and was sold out anyway.
The deficit prediction came up Tuesday at a news conference the United Conservative Party Government called, unsurprisingly, to yack about Alberta’s dubious latest legal challenge to the federal carbon tax.
Alas, Alberta remains on the resource roller coaster, and every time there’s a shift in the oil price, everything has to be recalibrated all over again, usually for the worse. Since fixing that problem would require an increase in taxes and thereby deprive conservative governments of a convenient excuse to cut public services, nothing is likely to be done about it.
Ms. Smith, however, was not going to take any responsibility for that state of affairs. “Unfortunately, external forces stand in the way, and by that I mean, our federal government,” she can be heard complaining in a brief news clip, with her characteristic annoying chuckle.
“They’ve gotten into the habit of attaching ideologically motivated strings and conditions to their funding,” she was quoted adding in a CTV News story, by which she meant, presumably, they won’t just hand over the cash with no deliverables signed off.
Tracked down by journalists, NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi accused Ms. Smith of failing to be accountable for her own actions. “She blames Ottawa for everything,” he said, accurately enough, before adding a rather strained metaphor about a dropped ice cream cone. That one needs work.
The best response, if you ask me, came from the Alberta Federation of Labour, which put researcher Tony Clark to work to dig out the true state of Alberta the weekend before the UCP AGM and clambake in Red Deer, for which Ms. Smith has been assiduously prepping.
“Don’t believe the hype in Smith’s State of the Province address,” said AFL President Gil McGowan. “Alberta is falling behind in terms of wages, jobs, business investment, and economic growth.”
“We’re also dealing with grossly over-crowded schools, a collapsing health care system and attacks on worker rights, public health, and even democracy,” he added. “Much of this is the direct result of policies enacted by Smith’s own government. There’s a lot to worry about and very little to crow about.”
The real state of the province? Definitely more trick than treat.
- Alberta is tied with Saskatchewan for the lowest minimum wage in Canada
- Alberta has the lowest wage growth in the country
- Alberta has the highest unemployment rate west of Newfoundland
- Alberta has the second-highest car insurance rates in Canada
- Albertans have overpaid for electricity to the tune of $21 billion since 2001
- Alberta surgery wait times keep growing despite UCP “reforms”
- Alberta faces labour strife in schools, hospitals, universities thanks to UCP meddling
Scary!
I suppose that everything is fine in Alberta except for those nasty Feds line makes it easy for Smith’s communication staff to just cut and paste speeches for her.
Of course everything is not so rosy here in Alberta as the richest province in Canada heads towards a less well off future. Of course there is no election coming up soon in Alberta. But if things continue in this direction there is more time for Albertans to become more uneasy and discontented than they are now about Alberta’s economy. And in a few years Albertans won’t have Trudeau to blame anymore. So they will find someone else, but Smith might not like who that is then.
“And in a few years Albertans won’t have Trudeau to blame anymore.”
That’s the trick, isn’t it. My guess is that the first year or two they’ll blame Trudeau in a legacy sort of way ( remember how long blaming Trudeau senior’s NEP worked as a rallying cry) then they’ll go back to the tried and true strategy of blaming Quebec and equalization for all their economic woes. It’s been a long time since a conservative Alberta government held people together based on a positive view of the future. But the reasons are obvious: oil producers see the climate change writing on the wall and realize that the gravy train could soon end, as their customers adopt green technology. Survival means using every tool in the toolbox, including the fascist-shaped ones.
So, I’m going to take a wild guess here and say Marlaina ‘doesn’t’ know that M.Cooper’s name is on the list of one of Skippy’s renegade MPs going behind his back and advocating for federal funding for housing in their communities?? (Sean Fraser in the HoC).
+After 2yrs of listening to PP and his 3 word slogans, imo– he just got fuddle duddled in the HoC, by PMJT —“why won’t he get his security clearance, Canadians want to know.
“Maybe I’ll put it in a way, that he’ll understand
Get the clearance
Take the briefing
Protect the country
It’s that simple! ”
YOWZZER!! I smell smoke !
The video kept me amused throughout my day, even at the hospital. When you can make the radiologist laugh, it’s a good day for all…. just passing it forward!
Sorry, back on track; about that housing in St Albert???
It’s an absolute shame how people were fooled by these phony Conservatives and Reformers in the UCP. This is the horrific mess we have. I thought that Ralph Klein was quite bad, and he definitely was, but the UCP and Danielle Smith are outpacing him.
Things can’t be that bad if people are willing to pay $140 to listen to Marlaina whine about Ottawa.
Having never been on the inside of this club I can never be certain, but I’ve always been of the opinion you’re paying to be in the room with the other “business leaders” the speaker is to add gravitas, they’re not really listening to what they’re saying.
Having said that, trash can Dani adds all the gravitas of a hog caller, so lord knows what they’re paying for.
Bird: Rubber chicken. DJC
I have to wonder if/when/who will make sure my bank account is credited by $1350 a year equivalent to the Carbon Tax rebate. By some fairly competent calculations including gasoline, natural gas, and charges via retailers, I come out way ahead. Admittedly, I drive a vehicle that averages 53-54 mpg [18.75-19.1L/100km] over the course of a year and have a high efficiency furnace, which helps lower my tax contribution quite a bit.
Maybe the current Alberta government could ‘axe their gas tax’ with a rebate that would help even more!! {As an asthmatic, holding my breathe is out of the question, as is my ask of the current government!}
Suggested slogan: Pass the Gas! DJC
Same old
Is that Dani’s Halloween outfit or is there a remake of The Virgin Queen underway in Calgary? And where in Red Deer do you assemble 6000 UCP members? Red Deer College?
I cannot help but notice the juxtaposition between this image of Smith and the one from the axe the tax presser.
Thank you DC, great column. May I make a late comment on yesterday’s topic, the proposed amendments to the Alberta Bill of Rights (ABR): Danielle Smith’s October 28 statement misleadingly said that “The Alberta Bill of Rights has not been significantly updated since it was first introduced in 1972”. Perhaps she would prefer to forget the 2015 amendments. Smith was part of the Jim Prentice government that passed an important amendment to the ABR in the months leading up to the 2015 election recognizing gender identity and gender expression. In March 2015 Bill 10 was passed. One provision amended the ABR’s s 1 by striking out “or sex” and substituting “, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity or gender expression”. The Black Hats and TBA wanted that provision repealed. So far, Smith’s proposal does not go that far. They’re going to test how far they can push her.
Simon Renouf: Danielle Smith tabled Bill 29. This will be a real nasty piece of work. It doesn’t fit Danielle Smith’s previous beliefs, and TBA and the Black Hats made her do this. Coincidence, since her leadership review is here.
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
Excuse the sarcasm, but what else would we expect? It’s a UCP government with a leader who has explicitly said over the years that she disapproves of public services, especially health care provided by public servants. In addition, the law was amended to allow for politicians to be permitted to accept gifts of a greater financial value.
Our darling premier is a libertarian – which means she will happily reap the benefits of a democracy, but when it comes time to put in the hard work to maintain that democracy, she would rather bail.
‘State of the Province’, I think you meant to type ‘My Province is a State’ (or at least as it is visualized by Ms. Smith).
Apropos of nothing, while provincial revenues may be flattening or decreasing, despite all obstacles real and imagined, oil exports seem to be doing okay (riddle me that Batman). As per the CBC (while it is still around), “Canadian oil exports to the United States have reached a record high. The amount of Canadian oil exported south of the border climbed to 4.3 million barrels per day (b/d) in July, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), released on Wednesday.”. Full article here, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/bakx-tmx-eia-exports-1.7367983
With most of this oil ethically produced by Alberta, where are the resultant tax revenues?
Dispense the nonsense!
Another one for the state of the province list. Presumably homeless people with disease are having their organs harvested as recent recipients of organ transfers are walking away diseases like trench foot which would generally affect people with no access to water to clean. Who knew Alberta’s homeless people were so up to date on there organ donor cards and prioritize carrying them when their possessions are surely limited. Ghoulishness, Halloween and the ucp seem to fit well together.
This is an interesting read. Things aren’t all that rosy in Alberta then. We had a letter to the editor here in Nanaimo and they waxed on about how great Alberta was and given most of northern B.C. had voted B.C.’s version of Conservative they should just leave B.C. and join Alberta so they could ship oil directly to the new Alberta sea ports and on it went.
Some people in B.C. maybe crazy but they are not stupid, joining Alberta is not something I am sure most would want to do. The NDP government is building more schools, hospitals, etc. Yes not everybody is happy with the NDP but the lack of medical staff, high cost of housing, drug addiction is something we are seeing in not only B.C. but the rest of Canada and other countries around the world.
Most of the issues people complain about could be dealt with but no one wants to use the solution–higher taxes to deal with homelessness, drug addiction, using a prison system similar to the one in Norway–less people going back to jail, building more affordable housing for the disabled, seniors, low wage earners, etc. No one wants to pay taxes but they all want solutions which cost money.
Whoever wrote that letter should check in with the fella I know who decamped from Edmonton to Nanaimo because Alberta is an increasing terrible place to live and raise a family.
As for your broader point w/r/r to the broader societal decay we are witnessing in the west, I tend to disagree this is the natural result of folks not wanting to pay taxes.
All of these problems have an origin, for example you could say that the opioid crisis started when Purdue pharmacy changed the recipe for Oxycontin to one that could no longer be crushed, forcing people into the market for street drugs. But really, the opioid crisis started in the 90s; when what we now call the rustbelt began to mothball its factories and the people living there became SURPLUS to the needs of capital.
This happens to coincide with the gutting of corporate tax rates and the common practice of offshoring or using tax havens to reduce the tax burden of a corporation to as little as possible.
So what’s left after all that ? An increasingly desperate population scrambling for an ever shrinking number of good paying jobs while governments from municipal to federal try to figure out how to pay for services and infrastructure without revenue.
Spoiler alert : they just cut everything.
People are fine with paying taxes actually, provided they have a stable secure income that affords them a comfortable lifestyle, see: Scandinavia.
Who isn’t fine with paying taxes are corporations, rent seeking capitalists and the rich. As DJC as pointed out time and again on this blog, they continue to get away with it because political parties in the west have largely become captured by a neoliberal ideology that not only created these conditions but is therefore INCAPABLE, COMPLETELY of changing them.
What we now have on offer is either fascism (more of the stick and the removal of the carrot, and if you don’t like it we don’t care) or an alternative that has yet to be created and has never been realized on the sort of scale that we need in order to rescue ourselves from our current overlords and or avoid the total collapse of our society under the weight of its many contradictions, and or stave of the coming ecological crises that are barreling down on us at this moment.
“They’ve gotten into the habit of attaching ideologically motivated strings and conditions to their funding,” she was quoted adding in a CTV News story(…)
I must ask, is Premier Smith familiar with the psychological process known as ‘Projection’? It seems everything she and her Government does is born of ‘ideologically motivated strings and conditions’. What a circus Albertans live in – of course, here in Ontario we have our own Ringmaster to cope with. Take care, everyone.
“State of the Province”
More creeping Americanisms to show we are incapable of original thought.
A quick note on power rates. My family farms in all three prairie provinces. This spring I compared our farm’s power bill with those of my daughter and son-in-law who farm in Manitoba. Both farmsteads are serviced by a mile and a half of dedicated power line off a main line. Both have the same size of transformer, and both pay a fixed rate of twelve and a half cents per KWh for any electricity used. The walloping difference is in the line charges. They pay nine dollars a month while we pay around one hundred and ten dollars a month.
Manitoba Hydro’s grid is just as reliable as our system , but Alberta’s so-called deregulated system guarantees a rate of return to the private companies which own and maintain our grid system. So, my extra thousand bucks a year keeps some oligarch in Champagne for a few days and we do have a stupidly over-built grid in Alberta.