University students marching to legislature protesting post-secondary cuts
The University of Alberta and MacEwan University are reporting $44-million and $17-million shortfalls, respectively.
Bill 207, as has already been argued here, has the look and feel of legislation drafted in the Premier’s Office and handed to Peace River MLA Dan Williams, one of many anti-abortion hardliners in the UCP Caucus, to present as if it were his own private member’s bill.
But it was Mr. Kenney’s pension machinations, accompanied by noisy cheerleading from mainstream media and in particular Postmedia’s plethora of market-fundamentalist pundits, that really got me thinking about this.
It turns out this isn’t as easy to do as the right-wing commentariat would like you to believe. So while Albertans need to remain on guard against Mr. Kenney scheming to hijack their CPP, it’s too early to despair that their pension funds are about to disappear into thin air like 50 years of Alberta’s oil and gas royalties.
Kenney said he wants to acknowledge that some Western Canadians no longer feel at home in their own country, and suggested “Laurentian elites” have both benefited from Alberta’s wealth and abandoned the province in its time of need.
“How perverse is it to blame the victim in a sense when we have been doing so much to share our wealth with the rest of the country?” he asked.
Alberta’s leaders should take some blame for not coping better with current slump
Alberta’s current malaise could more justifiably be blamed on previous provincial
conservative governments. They could not have averted the sharp drop in
oil revenue and the ensuing economic slump, but they could have ensured
that the citizens of Alberta remained financially and socially secure
while withstanding the crisis. Here’s how.
Ignorant and disloyal? Alberta’s Kenney and Notley swap personal attacks | CBC News
Kenney
has said he will hold a referendum on equalization payments if there is
not progress on initiatives, such as pipelines, to get more of
Alberta’s oil and gas to market.
Notley suggested a referendum
would be a potentially divisive, grandstanding power play, which would
echo Quebec’s votes on separation.
“You claim that you’re a
federalist, but do you honestly think it is responsible to ask Albertans
to cast their ballot and to get worked up over an equalization
provision … when you know that the likelihood of being able to amend
that Constitution is about zero?” Notley asked Kenney.