The State of Alberta

I would like to write a concise, well-researched post about the state of Alberta.
Unfortunately I don't have the time to comb through the hundreds of pages of documentation I would need to look through in order to do that (researching the state of funding for graduate students in Alberta post-secondary education is quite enough, thank-you) nor do I have the energy to put up with the weeks-long bout of increasingly perplexed depression that researching would no doubt cause.

Onto baseless anecdotal blog-drivel then.

This province is in trouble.

And it's not in trouble because I'm an Alberta-hating hippie who is just pouting because the PCs have been in power my whole life or because I'm some kind of socialist nut-job who hates oil, Stephen Duckett, and the private sector.

Some part of why it's in trouble is that writing down the sentence "this province is in trouble" anywhere and daring to allege that even some small sliver of the blame may rest at the feet of the current government will get me called all these things and worse. But that's not really the point - there's partisan political fundamentalism at work in systems other than ours, and I'll save my thoughts on the damage that does for another day.

The vision for a future Alberta is in trouble. No political party is offering an inspirational or even coherent vision for Albertans to get behind. The PCs don't have to and the Liberals and NDP both seem thoroughly convinced that, despite all evidence to the contrary (including their respective performances in the last elections), the most effective way to get their message out to Albertans is to harp loudly and often about how they're not the Conservatives. I don't care what the Opposition parties are not: I want to hear about the Alberta they want to build. The Green Party is folding in on itself (for shame). That leaves the Wildrose Alliance Party - and in the midst of a leadership race, time will tell if they can come up with something that isn't pandering smoke and mirrors. Here's hoping they can.

The quality of representation and respect that (most of us) get from the members of our Legislative Assembly is in trouble. I have been insulted twice in the past four months by public offhand comments made by elected officials - once by Minister Iris Evans, who thought it would be appropriate to say that I wasn't raised properly and once by Doug Elnisky, who thought it would be funny to make a blog joke that I along every other woman in Alberta should get our 'Equal treatment' in little packets at Starbucks. There have been other denigrating outbursts, like Dave Taylor's garbled 'Scopes monkeys' reference... and I have no doubt many that I've missed. The point is, showing such callous disregard for the basic dignity of constituents through comments that have little if anything to do with the actual jobs of elected officials is saddening and absurd behavior.

Our democratic integrity is in trouble. Voter turnout in this province is embarrassing - we sit in roughly the same boat as places like Colombia, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. And people who vote in those places are risking their LIVES to cast their ballots. Since the last election, both the Chief Electoral Officer and the Auditor General have called it quits, and both did it amidst an embarrassingly small furor over government attitudes towards their department that, for me at least, leave serious questions about the ability of our system to behave in a transparent and impartial way when called upon to do so.

Our system is making bad decisions for us. There was a 16 billion dollar forecasting error in the current budget. Let that sink in a bit: the government was wrong about their budget forecast by about 16 billion dollars. That is a lot of money to screw up with, and the consequences are severe. Cuts to education and health both seem to be on the radar - sectors that can ill afford the loss, given that they're both absolutely essential to the success of our province in caring for its citizens and in assuring economic prosperity in the future and given that neither sector has ever really been given the resources needed to recover from the last round of devastating deficit-inspired cuts. All this on the heels of record-breaking surpluses and certain knowledge that the royalty-revenue boom was not going to last forever. What happened? Seriously, guys (and girls - sorry Minister Evans) - we trusted you with this and you should have known better.

The decision has been made to close Alberta Hospital and the government has said (though I don't know if they still stand by this position) that they're working on a strategy for dealing with the patients that would subsequently be bedless - not that they already have one, but that they're working on it after the decision has already been announced. This all in spite of the fact that Alberta has been through the debacle of closing a psychiatric hospital without adequate planning once before (in Red Deer in 1977) and knows what the consequences of that kind of action are (they're bad).

That's not to mention the rest of the health care system. Unless you believe that 'it has to get worse before it gets better,' recent decisions regarding health provision are doing serious damage to the province's health care system that it will take years and an extremely unlikely policy reversal/regime change to fix. At the top of my list is the amalgamation of the health boards into one mega-board which can't possibly be as familiar with local conditions province-wide as their regionally based predecessors were, and it's already starting to show.

And Bill 44 is a nightmare. Regardless of whether or not you think parents should be able to shield their children from controversial curricular content, this piece of legislation is shoddily worded, largely redundant, and causing more trouble than it's worth on all sides.

Even without the research, this sucks. So much so that, other than sending pointless little rants out to sail on the over-saturated waters of the worldwide web, I don't even know where to start with fixing it.