Kenney said he made an error by not issuing a clear directive earlier urging them to remain in the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic. He said those in public positions should be held to a higher standard in their personal conduct but said he won’t sanction them.
Source: Alberta leader won’t punish gov officials for pandemic trips – The Washington Post
What About Fair Play?
David Climenhaga, in his article yesterday, said it was a “slap in the face to ordinary citizens who can’t travel, visit their loved ones, or take part in activities they enjoy because of pandemic restrictions.”
On Twitter, @Blurg5 is keeping a list of all the MLAs that have travelled outside the province for non-essential reasons. Here is the list so far.
Tracy Allard (UCP cabinet member, MLA Grande Prairie – confirmed, Hawaii)
Jeremy Nixon (UCP cabinet member, MLA Calgary-Klein – confirmed, Hawaii)
Pat Rehn (UCP MLA, Lesser Slave Lake – confirmed, Mexico)
Jason Stephan (UCP MLA, Red Deer-South – confirmed, Arizona)
Tanya Fir (UCP MLA, Calgary Peigan – confirmed, Las Vegas)
Matt Wolf (UCP Political Staff – confirmed, Saskatchewan)
Michael Forian (UCP Political Staff – confirmed, Hawaii)
Eliza Snider (UCP Political Staff – confirmed, Hawaii)
Jamie Huckabay (UCP Political Staff – confirmed, United Kingdom)
Ron Liepert (CPC MP, Calgary Signal Hill – confirmed, California)
Nathan Neudorf (UCP MLA Lethbridge-East – rumoured)
Tyler Shandro (UCP Cabinet member, MLA Calgary Acadia – rumoured)
Roger Reid (UCP MLA Livingstone-Macleod – rumoured)
Sheena Hughes (St. Albert City Councillor – rumoured)
Governments based on capitalism may have been designed to be unfair. The government and those who are well off enough to hire people to work for them in factories and businesses, would make up the first tier. Everyone else is lumped into the proletariat, the social class of wage-earners, hence the second tier.
The Capitalist Manifesto is a 1958 book by Louis O. Kelso, a lawyer-economist and Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) inventor, and Mortimer J. Adler, a neo-Thomist philosopher. Kelso and Adler detail the three principles of economic justice, Participation, Distribution, and Limitation. These principles laid the foundation for what eventually came to be called “binary economics.” The term “binary” comes from attributing all production (participation) and just distribution of income to two factors, the human, classified as labor, and the non-human, classified as capital. In the preface, Adler acknowledged Kelso as the originator of the theory.
The base principal appearing as early as page seventeen, claims:
We are initially addressing ourselves to Americans –– to men who feel well-off –– and not to the starving, downtrodden victims of injustice and oppression. We cannot exhort them to engage in violence, and to do so without fear because they have nothing to lose but their chains. We must persuade them, in much calmer tones than that, to act rationally, with insight and prudence, because they do have something to lose––their freedom––which an abundance of creature comforts may have lulled them into forgetting.
Men who think they already have all the liberty and justice they can expect, in addition to plenty of material goods, cannot be emotionally exhorted to take radical measures for the improvement of their society. They can only be asked to think again.
The only difference between 1950 and today is that those who rule or govern in North America don’t try to hide their flagrant differences from the masses. They seem to relish the fact that those who have, and those who have not, don’t follow the same rules.
Whether you support or oppose Jason Kenney’s policy decisions, as an Albertan you should be concerned about his government’s dishonesty, secretiveness, lack of ethics, unrepresentative decisions and wastefulness. These five areas of abuse violate international democratic standards for good government.
