The province of Alberta is holding a general election on 3 March 2008, and there are five parties competing for the opportunity to run the province. Alberta has only had four different parties in power since 1905 and once a party is voted out of the office they have never returned (to date).
The Progressive Conservatives have been in power since 1971, and Ed Stelmach is the fourth premier under this party’s banner. The PCs have had mixed success (in my view) of running this province, and mostly I think they’ve stayed in power due to luck and good fortune as opposed to any particularly good leadership. The wealth of the province since 1971 has been largely due to petroleum. And when petroleum was doing poorly and the government ran up a large deficit it took an opposition politican (Liberal Laurence Decore) to push the Tories to change.
In recent years, the Tories have been at a loss for any sort of planning or great ideas on how to deal with the rapid economic growth and massive migration into the province and all of the problems that have resulted. They have tended to throw good money after bad (as if more money would actually solve some of these problems). And they have not provided any leadership nationally by providing innovative ideas for solving problems faced by every province (i.e. health care).
I cannot bring myself to support the Tories this time around. None of the alternative parties have a platform that I agree with 100% but I have to say that the party that is closest to my views is the Wildrose Alliance.
The Wildrose Alliance want to reduce taxes and cut unnecessary spending. They also want to make funding follow the students in education (ie. vouchers) and patients in health care. They still seem to think that universal government funded health care is sustainable but then so do the other parties…
The Liberals, NDP and Green Parties are all socialists of different shades of red, and therefore none are acceptable. All three would raise taxes, increase program spending by throwing money at health care and education, and don’t understand that imposing strict emissions regulations or higher resource royalties will depress economic growth and make Albertans poorer. And all of Canada should realize that would be bad for the country since Alberta is soon to be the only province paying significantly into equalization.
Paul Hinman for Premier!
1 comment
Llewdor says:
26 February 2008 at 16:01 (UTC -7 )
Universal health care is sustainable. 14 OECD nations provide it, and some of them do it fairly efficiently.
What Canada does badly is it requires not only that there be a single payer for health care, but also that there be a single provider of healthcare, and that’s where the gross inefficiency appears.
A voucher system like the one Hinman is proposing defeats that failing.