Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Paul Jackson: Blaming The Liberals Makes Us All Richer


Calgary Sun columnist Paul Jackson would blame The Liberal Party for Alberta's abject financial woes.

Alberta -- sitting on near Saudi-sized reserves of petroleum -- has clearly been screwed economically. The clear evidence is there. Paul mentions that Alberta has the country's strongest economy (oh, right, no he doesn't) while mooning over his big autographed picture of Brian and Mila Mulroney.

A note for non-Albertans: back in the 70s and 80s there was a thing brought in by the Federal government called The National Energy Program. Long story short: Alberta was making a lot of money, the rest of the country was hurting, so some of the wealth was redistributed. Ever since then, Albertans like Jackson have complained that the NEP "collapsed Alberta's economy and started a recession that swept coast-to-coast."

In fact, the NEP was so evil that it did that to most of the world's economy. Of course, during the same period of time I was a college student, so maybe that's why Germany's economy was running so rough at the time.

Paul Jackson goes on to complain that the NEP cost Alberta "a good $100 billion, or so is the case when one gets all of one's statistics from Brian Mulroney. By my math, that means someone owes me about 50 grand.

Lousy left-wingers, where's my SUV?

With luck Paul will pick up his own paper today and read the front-page story about how Alberta's oh-so-Conservative government sat back knowingly while losing out on nine billion dollars in oil revenue over a three-year period alone. Auditor-general Fred Dunn says, in a masterpiece of Canadian understatedness: "The principles of transparency and accountability, I believe, were not followed." Or in other words... "folks, looks like you got screwed."

Good thing I don't have that SUV. The infrastructure around town is starting to look pretty shaky. I suppose all the road crews are Liberals too...

No comments: