The Firewall's Looking Good Again

What Westerners is this guy speaking for? I'm in B.C. and certainly doesn't speak for me.

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If you don't like these ideas, I've got others. --Marshall McLuhan

<blockquote>Now that the election is safely behind him, Paul Martin will open the spigot and money will flow to Quebec and loyal Liberal Atlantic Canada.<br> What is Alberta's future within this Canada? To pay the bills but have no say? <br> F. L. (Ted) Morton, a professor at the University of Calgary, is one of Alberta's two senators-elect.<br></blockquote><p> Wow. Well said. I said it before the election too; If Paul Martin was a friend of the West, and truly wanted to make inroads here, he would have tried a little old fasioned bribery. <p> If I ran my household on the type of defecit spending that some provinces demonstrate, the bank would have taken away my chequebook a long time ago. But apparently the voters keep giving these Governments the blank chequebook. I say cut them off from the public tit and they can go through the cuts Albertans had to in the 90's. We'll be debt free by Spring 2005. They we'll see the billions in surplus go back into healthcare and roads and services Stockwell Day cut them from to make our budget balanced. That's my dream anyway.<p> <p>---<br>"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme" Mark Twain <br />
"The greatest price of not participating in politics is being governed by your inferiors." Plato

I second that. All Alberta, or any other province, anywhere in the country, has to do to be heard in Ottawa is to stop trying to deal with the USA directly. If provinces do that, of course Ottawa would seem like a big troublemaker. If provinces trade with each other & cooperate with each other we wouldn't have this problem.

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"These Yankee politicians are the lowest race of thieves in existence." - Sir John Sparrow Thompson

Ted Morton is a member of the so-called 'Calgary School,' an ultra Conservative academic membership. Many of its members are either US born or educated. I believe Mr. Morton is both. One of its most notorious member, Professor Flanagan, has called Aboriginal societies inferior and advocated for their wholesale assimilation into North American society. Stephen Harper, before he became a moderate (rolls eyes), did policy research for these guys.

I am hearing little to no talk here in Vancouver about the 'poor western party' attitude in regards to this last election.

Look (this is for the whiners in the conservative party) - if you cannot beat the corrupt and inept Liberal party by joining forces and spending millions of dollars ITS YOU THAT HAS THE PROBLEM not the voters in the east.

The Conservatives need to look in the mirror and wake up to reality. When people chose corruption over them - they MUST be doing something wrong.

Let me venture this - when you are so openly homophobic, pro-american, pro-war, pro-corporate, anti-social, anti-environment etc, you WILL turn off masses of voters no matter how pissed they may be at the Liberals. The values they are pushing will always ensure they will be second place finishers. Canadians are not buying what you are selling.

Snake oil only sells to those in the market for snake oil - it's that simple.

Get over yourselves - Alberta is not Canada nor does its conservative voters speak for the majority of Canadians. If you cannot make a break through in our democratic system, change your ways, and dont expect the rest of us to change ours to suit you - it doesn't work that way.

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If there was ever a time for Canadians to become pushy - now is the time - for time is running out on this nation called Canada.

<P>Morton is clearly not talking about BC. Although the Conservatives won the most seats and the largest percentage of votes in BC, they had fewer seats and a smaller percentage of the vote than just the Alliance did last time. The bleeding was worse if you take the PCs into account too. <P>The same thing happened even in ridings where the Conservatives won the seat. In Southern Interior, for instance, where our Reform/Alliance/Conservative MP was re-elected for the fourth time in a row, he got 3000 fewer votes than he had in 2000. That was in spite of the redrawing of the riding to include about 9000 <B>more</B> voters (who also happened to be constituents of Stockwell Day). <P>In other words, lots of people who had voted for Reform and Alliance candidates in the past--including Day himself--didn't like the Harper Conservatives and voted against them. <P>It may have been a mistake to have run a campaign about Liberal corruption when the memory of Peter MacKay's betrayal of David Orchard was still fresh. Of course, the real mistake was in betraying Orchard at all. Gordon Campbell probably hurt Harper more than he did Martin. <P>But it wasn't just the Liberals who picked up votes here. The big gains were by the NDP and the Greens. There is an ongoing restlessness among voters in BC. If there had been a "None of the above" option on the ballot, we probably would have had an 85% turnout.

Hey that must be Harper's school. He did both his BA & MA at U of Calgary. Scarier still, he did economics, & everybody knows economists can sometimes think things that have nothing to do with reality.

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"These Yankee politicians are the lowest race of thieves in existence." - Sir John Sparrow Thompson

Senate reform and the public vetting of supreme court appointments don't sound like bad things. Why can't we have this along with ProRep?

Right on Roy, sorry to hear you weren't elected.
Dr Caleb says Albertas' debt will be paid off in 2005, as I recall we didn't have any debt before we started saving for a rainy day.

While senate reform sound good at first, at second glance there are problems. As it stands now, the senate is essentially a ceremonial institution. It rubber stamps legislation from the house of commons. If the senate was constitutionally reformed (and that's what would really have to happen-consitutional reform, a mess in and of itself) and became an elected chamber, the question arises as to what would happen to the power of the house of commons? Power would shift from the chamber that houses the government to a chamber that is filled with elected regional representatives who mandate is to address regional concerns. Good or bad thing, I don't know. But we have to understand the shift in parliamentary operation that would occur. Personally, I think we should just abolish the senate and find another method to address regional concerns.

As for creating a US style Supreme Court nomination process, well, that turns my stomach. The US Supreme Court is a political minefield to the point where impartiality is becoming endangered. The Canadian appointment process is admittedly rather Byzantine and needs to be reformed, but let's not recreate what the US has done. We must remember the Canadian Supreme Court is an extremly distinguished body and is laragely regarded as one of the best in the world. There is very little wrong with it as it now stands.

That is a good question, I have often wondered exactly where our debt, in Alberta came from, was it the Principal group bail out, the Peter Pocklington fiasco, and more? These are the issue which need to be out front and centre; and how did we get such a deficit in healthcare, blowing up a perfectly good hospital, 'The General' which had just undergone renovation about 6 yrs prior to the blowing up? What happened to the Heritage Trust Fund, we had so much money in there we were able to loan it to other provinces, didn't we get any back? There are far too many questions and too few answers.

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If I stand for my country today...will my country be here to stand for me tomorrow?

Morton's problem is he seems to think he speaks for most westerners when he speaks only for himself.Poor devil needs to get out of the ivory tower. He is symbolic of the conservatives and their magic wand style of reasoning, because I say it is so it must be the truth, no effort required. When you build a wall it not only keeps the barbarians out it keeps the inmates in. Walls are the last thing we need in this country, its too precious to allow the selfish to carve it up for their own narrow financial interests. Some nation builders these conservatives would be, they definitely would not have built the railway.

Morton's problem is he seems to think he speaks for most westerners when he speaks only for himself.Poor devil needs to get out of the ivory tower. He is symbolic of the conservatives and their magic wand style of reasoning, because I say it is so it must be the truth, no effort required. When you build a wall it not only keeps the barbarians out it keeps the inmates in. Walls are the last thing we need in this country, its too precious to allow the selfish to carve it up for their own narrow financial interests. Some nation builders these conservatives would be, they definitely would not have built the railway.

Anyone in Alberta who thinks we are debt free or will be in 2005 is fooling themselves. While the province's books may show no debt by 2005, the City of Calgary is over $1 billion in debt and likely to be well in excess of $2 billion in debt after they get finished borrowing to make up for the 10-year backlog of transportation infrastructure projects that accummulated because the provinces starved it for cash while sitting on multibillion dollar surpluses for the past 10+ years. I'm sure Edmonton must also be incurring the debt as well, maybe not as much but after all their population has not been shrinking over the past 10 years.

Also, to compare running a government to a household budget is simplistic. The closer comparison would be to a business but there are also problems with doing this. Namely, if a business has a downturn they can lay people off and forget about them; a government can't let people starve. Also, businesses aren't obligated to spend their own money funding other businesses economic activities as our taxes go to fund and maintain public infrastructure so they can earn money. However, where it does compare is that business routinely takes on debt that will result in short-term losses (deficits) but calculated long-term gains (upgrading machinery for example). One thing that you will never see business doing though is voluntarily forgoing revenues that allow it to conduct its business and grow but instead run losses (deficits). However, this is exactly what the Canadian government has done by letting about 30% of wealthy individuals off the hook for paying their fair share of taxes over the past 20 or so years. This is also what the Alberta government did when it went to its flat tax, which primarily benefited high-income earners while the average taxpayer saved under $100 from doing this.

In short, deficits and the reasons for them in Canada in particular are more complicated than you understand them to be. Instead of just taking the word of people like Ted Morton, go and educate yourself and you will understand just how much of an idiot he really is.