What Happened to Alberta?

Seriously, folks – what happened to Alberta and British Columbia? In both provinces the voters elected free enterprise governments and instead they got government by technocrats, devoted to various soft-left pieties.

Apparently the top priorities of the next session of the Alberta Legislature will be allowing for speeding tickets to be issued based upon red light camera photos and banning smoking in public places. Are we talking about Edmonton here or are we talking about Montpellier? A few years ago, we used to admire Albertans for their free-spirited nature. Now, not so much. For all that their rhetoric sometimes offends me – and as much as I wish they had gone further in slashing through the wreckage of a decade of socialism in British Columbia – at least one of the first things that the Liberals did here was to junk the abomination against God and man that is photo radar.

I’ll leave the issue of the obscene great oil cash grab to Ezra and others – to whose superior knowledge I defer. I’ll only say that I often see people –Liberals, NDP’ers, and PC apologists – claim that the Alberta government needs more revenue for “urgently needed infrastructure” or some other such nonsense. I would love for someone to enumerate for me what infrastructure needs cannot be accommodated by the more than $10,000 per capita that the government of Alberta spends each year – or could not have been dealt with by the $7 Billion surplus the government registered last year. Actually, I would really be curious to know – is Ed Stelmach planning on building an Earth-to-Orbit elevator? Because that’s the kind of proposal I could back, the oil companies be damned.