Alberta Election: NDP Wins Majority to End PC Dynasty

[Lockout Casualty]

Its an expression, not literal.

Anyway, with the NDP about to cripple the economic engine of Canada, where is Quebec going to get its money from?

This is the end

Beautiful friend

This is the end

My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end

Of everything that stands, the end

No safety or surprise, the end

I'll never look into your eyes...again

[thejazz97]

This is the end

Beautiful friend

This is the end

My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end

Of everything that stands, the end

No safety or surprise, the end

I'll never look into your eyes...again

Totally thought that was a Goodnight Nurse song for a moment...

[aGENT]

Its an expression, not literal.

Anyway, with the NDP about to cripple the economic engine of Canada, where is Quebec going to get its money from?

And the cycle continues.... The right screws everything up and gets booted, the left comes in and attempts to correct the screw ups, people see the long term repercussions of their previous short term thinking and *rabble, rabble* "See, the left killed the economy!" *rabble, rabble*... Then the right comes back, "Don't worry, we'll save you from the evil, economy killing, commies!"

Rinse and repeat...

Would be nice if the voting public could learn from their mistakes and actually see things through long term.

[thejazz97]

J.R., on 06 May 2015 - 2:05 PM, said:

And the cycle continues.... The right screws everything up and gets booted, the left comes in and attempts to correct the screw ups, people see the long term repercussions of their previous short term thinking and *rabble, rabble* "See, the left killed the economy!" *rabble, rabble*... Then the right comes back, "Don't worry, we'll save you from the evil, economy killing, commies!"

Rinse and repeat...

Would be nice if the voting public could learn from their mistakes and actually see things through long term.

Is this just your answer to all political arguments then?

[aGENT]

J.R., on 06 May 2015 - 2:05 PM, said:

Is this just your answer to all political arguments then?

Just the recurring "the left will ruin the economy" one.

Newsflash: The right already ruined it and the left is coming in to pick up the pieces. Blaming the left for the impending mess is incredibly short sighted and ignorant.

[RonMexico]

Just the recurring "the left will ruin the economy" one.

Newsflash: The right already ruined it and the left is coming in to pick up the pieces. Blaming the left for the impending mess is incredibly short sighted and ignorant.

Yup it's hilarious and disheartening at the same time. 40+ years of the same bozos who somehow managed to ruin the biggest cash cow this country has ever seen yet the new guys are 'going to ruin the economy'. It's so nonsensical it's hardly believable that anyone can form that point of view.

Embrace some change naysayers! This is a case where change for the sake of change really needed to be applied and did.

[Electro Rock]

The Progressive "Conservative" party of Alberta has hardly been right wing since the heyday of Ralph Klein, the only more or less right wing party in the province is the Wild Rose.

[aGENT]

The Progressive "Conservative" party of Alberta has hardly been right wing since the heyday of Ralph Klein, the only more or less right wing party in the province is the Wild Rose.

There's right wing and then there's RIGHT WING.

[Electro Rock]

Are the B.C. Liberals, liberal?

[johngould21]

Are the B.C. Liberals, liberal?

Now you're trying to tell us that Prentice isn't a PC???? No, the BC Liberals aren't Liberal at all. Reformers, PC's, Social Credit, everything but Liberal.

[ronthecivil]

Now you're trying to tell us that Prentice isn't a PC???? No, the BC Liberals aren't Liberal at all. Reformers, PC's, Social Credit, everything but Liberal.

No, liberals too. Same as Social credit was. You know, the big coalition. AKA put our differences aside and do what it takes to keep the NDP out of power.

[Electro Rock]

Now you're trying to tell us that Prentice isn't a PC???? No, the BC Liberals aren't Liberal at all. Reformers, PC's, Social Credit, everything but Liberal.

What I'm saying is that the Alberta PCs haven't been truly conservative for a while now.

Otherwise they would have been unelectable in a province that's been transformed by largely left leaning transplants from Eastern Canada.

Its the same thing that's happened to many U.S. states that have received huge numbers of California refugees seeking to turn the place they move to into another California.

[ronthecivil]

Just the recurring "the left will ruin the economy" one.

Newsflash: The right already ruined it and the left is coming in to pick up the pieces. Blaming the left for the impending mess is incredibly short sighted and ignorant.

While the conservative government of Alberta (and Canada for that matter) certainly have not done a bang up job of managing the economy, I still think the NDP will do even worse.

Not sure how it will work in Alberta. Maybe there they are like a big tent trying to keep the conservatives out of power and the radicals have to suck it up to make sure they stay in the fold, like a reverse BC.

I just know that in BC whenever they start trying to do moderate things the grass roots start acting up and anyone that tries for the middle road is inevitably replaced with a radical socialist, with predictable results.

But maybe Alberta is different. We will see.

What will be VERY interesting is if they are exactly the same, and people still hate them, but you still have the right fractured due to the Wild Rose party and they end up with two terms of NDP! (Just as history managed to do right here not too long ago).

Ah Canada, la plus ca change........

[johngould21]

What I'm saying is that the Alberta PCs haven't been truly conservative for a while now.

Otherwise they would have been unelectable in a province that's been transformed by largely left leaning transplants from Eastern Canada.

Its the same thing that's happened to many U.S. states that have received huge numbers of California refugees seeking to turn the place they move to into another California.

I would think that California is probably one of the fastest growing States, population wise. Legal or illegal. If anything, people are flocking to California.

[aGENT]

I just know that in BC whenever they start trying to do moderate things the grass roots start acting up and anyone that tries for the middle road is inevitably replaced with a radical socialist, with predictable results.

The BC NDP are their own worst enemy. Utter ineptitude and constantly putting forward un-electable candidates/leaders. How they managed to screw up the last election is as hilarious as it is sad.

Whoever is pulling the strings in that party needs their hands cut off so they can no longer do so (I can't see the "grass roots" having that much influence personally). Hard and fast ideological governing doesn't work on either side of the spectrum.

As you say, hopefully Alberta's NDP are little less moronic and myopic.

[Electro Rock]

I would think that California is probably one of the fastest growing States, population wise. Legal or illegal. If anything, people are flocking to California.

The poor and the old are flocking to California, but the productive are flocking to other states. The net growth rate is now very small.

[Hugor Hill]

The poor and the old are flocking to California, but the productive are flocking to other states. The net growth rate is now very small.

Source?

Didn't think so.

[johngould21]

The poor and the old are flocking to California, but the productive are flocking to other states. The net growth rate is now very small.

Say what?

[Heretic]

Interesting comment from the editorial page in last Friday's Province.

Alberta premier-elect Rachel Notley has to pick a cabinet for her NDP government — a cabinet that will oversee revenues of $44 billion per year. Only four of the 54 NDP MLAs have legislature experience. Ten are in their 20s.
Notley needs to pick 11 people for her cabinet, each of whom will be paid a taxpayer-funded salary of $142,050 per year.
Her choices are an application engineer, an airline worker, a bus driver, a business consultant, a cashier, two civil-service employees, an electrician, two health-care workers, an insurance manager, four lawyers, a doctor, four nurses, a psychologist, a restaurant manager, five retirees, a realestate agent, a salesman, a school trustee, a secretary, a service technician, a shipperreceiver, four social workers, a software consultant, five students, four teachers, six union reps and a yoga teacher.
Imagine trying to pick a management team from those choices for a $100-million private company. The majority of Alberta voters wanted change and they got their change with a bunch of nobodies to watch over revenues of $44 billion per year.
Looks like Notley will be spending millions on high-paid consultants to provide training to a lame-duck cabinet.
Joe Sawchuk, Duncan

[Heretic]

The BC NDP are their own worst enemy. Utter ineptitude and constantly putting forward un-electable candidates/leaders. How they managed to screw up the last election is as hilarious as it is sad.

Whoever is pulling the strings in that party needs their hands cut off so they can no longer do so (I can't see the "grass roots" having that much influence personally). Hard and fast ideological governing doesn't work on either side of the spectrum.

As you say, hopefully Alberta's NDP are little less moronic and myopic.

Fully agree with that.

Though I wonder if the same can be said about the voters in general, I just read the following and I can't believe how no one caught the Liberals over it:

Campbell Misled Public on NDP Finances In 2001 the incoming premier called NDP finances “worse than we anticipated.” His briefing binders, gained by The Tyee through an FOI, told him the opposite.

By Will McMartin, 20 Apr 2005, TheTyee.ca

Inherited $1.5 billion surplus

Mere days after winning the 2001 general election with promises of honesty and accountability, incoming premier Gordon Campbell misrepresented the province’s finances by portraying the massive surplus he had inherited from the defeated NDP as an enormous deficit.

He had every reason to know otherwise.

The facts were plain to read in the transition binders that outgoing NDP Premier Ujjal Dosanjh gave Campbell right after the election. Those binders were obtained by this writer through a Freedom of Information request.

In the third binder of seven, prepared by finance ministry bureaucrats, was an up-to-date accounting of provincial finances.

The numbers in the binder confirmed the strength of B.C.’s economy at the time, and the astonishing transformation of the province’s fiscal situation. It was a financial picture even better, in fact, than the rosy scenario the NDP had based its budget upon three months earlier.

A surplus topping $1.5 billion. That is what the figures in the binder recorded for the fiscal year 2000-01, the last full fiscal year of NDP government.

Among the details: The newly revised forecast of the consolidated revenue fund surplus was nearly $1.4 billion — an increase of $85 million over what was estimated in the NDP budget three months earlier. Net income for B.C.’s Crown corporations was now pegged at $185 million — a gain of $21 million. And since the ‘forecast allowance’ was not required, another $150 million automatically went to the bottom line. (The ‘forecast allowance’ is a cushion built into the annual budget not meant to be spent except under unforeseen circumstances.)

Consequently, the surplus in the overall summary accounts was a whopping $1.573 billion — a $256 million improvement from the NDP’s revised forecast for the previous year.

No ‘fudge’

This wasn’t “fudge-it budgeting.” British Columbia’s economy was firing on all cylinders. The public debt had been reduced, the budget was balanced, and the treasury filled to overflowing.

One might think that the newly-elected Campbell government had found itself in an enviable fiscal position. But the positive picture painted by the third briefing binder presented a political dilemma of sorts. After all, the B.C. Liberals’ election victory in part rested on their often repeated assertion that the New Democrats’ final budget was in deficit and, like a previous NDP budget, “fudged.” The briefing binders clearly showed those allegations to be untrue, a revelation that might prove embarrassing for the new government.

Yet, the B.C. Liberals’ election platform had promised to "deliver real transparent, accountable government." With pledges such as these, surely the new premier had no choice but to accurately disclose the binders' contents to the public. Or did he?

Two days after the transition ceremony when the binders were handed over, Gordon Campbell met a scrum of press gallery reporters at Victoria's Empress Hotel. There, where the 77-member B.C. Liberal caucus was holding its first post-election meeting, Gordon Campbell gave his answer. "Some of the problems that we face are as we thought and some are worse than we thought," he said, "The finances of the province are worse than we anticipated." He added, "The magnitude of the losses we may face compared to budget is still up in the air."

Banner headlines in the following day’s daily newspapers fairly screamed that the defeated New Democrats had left behind a fiscal mess for the new government. "B.C. Finances Worse Than Thought, Campbell Says," blared The Vancouver Sun.

Five weeks later, without fanfare, B.C.’s public accounts for fiscal 2001-02 were released by the comptroller general and auditor general. They confirmed record-shattering surpluses in the consolidated revenue fund and the summary accounts. So great was the fiscal windfall that British Columbia was able to make what was then the largest-ever reduction to the public debt.

Campbell’s record deficits

Far from inheriting a fiscal disaster from the NDP, Campbell and his party were given a provincial treasury brimming with cash. But the voting public was led to think very much otherwise.

Where then to lay blame for the deep deficits that the BC Liberals racked up in their first three years? The radical tax cuts announced by Campbell’s party just after the election, coupled with external blows to the BC economy such as 9/11 fallout and the softwood lumber dispute, were to blame for those record setting deficits. Big miscalculations by the BC Liberals, and not the NDP, forced Gordon Campbell’s government to scramble, cutting deep into social spending and clawing back regressive taxes in order to avert a deficit meltdown.

Those who don’t believe this can find the facts right where I did. They can see the very positive picture contained in the third transition binder Gordon Campbell was handed, and presumably read, just before he inexplicably declared, "The finances of the province are worse than we anticipated."

This is adapted from Will McMartin’s chapter in Liberalized: The Tyee Report on British Columbia under Gordon Campbell’s Liberals.

McMartin is a regular columnist for The Tyee, creator of The Tyee’s Battleground BC seat projection feature, and has consulted for various political parties.

http://m.thetyee.ca/Views/2005/04/20/CampbellMisledPublic/