About that 117-page “full platform” released by United Conservative Party Leader Jason Kenney on the billionaire Southern Family’s back stoop south of Calgary yesterday, the first thing it’ll do is raise the deficit.
That’s right! Raise it. Increase it. Make it bigger. Because that’s what happens when you eliminate at least $5.7 billion in revenue no matter how many pieces you move around the chessboard.
Quick! Somebody call the Calgary Herald, the Fraser Institute, the taxpayers’ federation!
What do you mean they’re not picking up? The relentless deficit scolds who’ve been screeching at the NDP about the deficit for the past four years? Really?
Oh, wait. I get it now. The NDP were spending our money on crazy stuff. Like health care, schools, university educations for our children, and making sure we still have an economy when the fossil fuel market fizzles out. (Don’t worry about it. Never gonna happen.)
Rachel Notley’s even been talking about $25-a-day child care, for crying out loud! We can’t afford that!
None of that social licence baloney for our UCP, though. They’re going to hose away money, but they’re going to hose it away smart!
You know, like those tax cuts for our poor billionaires, like the Southerns who so kindly loaned Kenney their private Spruce Meadows equestrian park, and for the foreign fossil fuel corporations that have been raking it in at their U.S. refineries thanks to that price differential thing, laying off their Alberta workers in droves, and letting the NDP take the rap.
Sorry, kid, you’re going to have to take a pay cut to finance this stuff. But, trust me, little buddy, you’re going to love it. You won’t feel a thing — unless you’re on the streets because your folks found out you’d joined the gay-straight alliance at your school, of course.
That tax cut, see, it’s going to create jobs, and that’s going to create tax revenue! Just you watch! It says so right in those 117 pages. There’ll even be a surplus by ’23. Really!
Never mind those economists who say this is magical thinking that never works. What do they know, for crying out loud? They’re college professors. Some of ’em even wear bow ties! Forget about that New York Times guy who won the Nobel Prize for economics, the one who says there’s no pot of gold at the end of the corporate tax cuts rainbow. Of course there is! Nattering nabobs of negativity, and socialists too, every one of ’em. (Except for Jack Mintz, of course.)
And when it creates jobs, the cash’ll come pouring back into the economy like it did in the good ole days when we had Ralph Klein and the Alberta Advantage, never mind that natural gas prices are in the dumpster now too.
Hey! Kenney might even give you all a cash payment big enough to buy an iPod Shuffle — too bad they don’t make those funny little things any more. What were they for, again?
And if you’re feeling blue about those foreign-funded eco-radicals in Vancouver, like the mayor, well Mr. K’s going to spin up some dough to shut them up till the sea rises and they all float away. Wait! Scratch that bit. That stuff about the climate changing? Just alarmism.
Now, where was I?
(Takes breath.)
Dave here. I’m back. Sorry folks, I was having an Alberta moment.
Seriously, I’m not making this up. This isn’t an April Fools story that slipped in a day early. It’s an actual fact. It was a real news story in Alberta yesterday. You can read about here, and here, and here, and here. See what I mean? Even those cynical journos are taking it seriously.
Of course, it wasn’t really the Full Monty. You’re not going to find much in there about the UCP’s plans for women’s reproductive rights, for example. For hints about how that plays out, look east.
If the UCP gets elected, we — ordinary Albertans — are going to pay big time.
If they win, though, it’ll be because an awful lot of our neighbours want to believe Kenney because, as a friend of mine puts it, “they blame the NDP for chasing off the foreign capital that kept them wealthy for most of their lives rather than accept that the fall in world oil prices is caused by U.S. fracking flooding the North American market with cheap high quality oil and natural gas.”
“If they don’t blame Premier Notley for their misfortune, then they have to accept the fact that a Premier Kenney will be powerless to restore their income,” he said in a comment on this blog last week. “And that would mean they have to abandon hope.”
Yes, Toto, if this guy gets elected, I don’t think we’ll be in Kansas any more. Or, more to the point, that’s exactly where we’re going to be. And magical tax cuts don’t work there, either.
Looking on the bright side, though, maybe you really can save a province by destroying it!
David Climenhaga, author of the Alberta Diary blog, is a journalist, author, journalism teacher, poet and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with The Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. This post also appears on David Climenhaga’s blog, AlbertaPolitics.ca.
Photo: Facebook
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