Your talking about the province that still holds a grudge against their provincial liberal party for what they apparently did like 40 years ago.
Yeah I heard about that.
Boils down to Trudeau stopping alberta from setting the price of gas to whatever ridiculous amount they desired at that moment.
Thus, they're forced to wipe there asses with fives instead of fifties.
Except the price of gas is set by the worldwide market and Trudeau basically forced Alberta to sell for less. Good or bad, he did it at the time when the oil market was about to collapse. The 80s were a dark time for Alberta - people weren't wiping their asses with fives, they were losing their homes en masse.
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Your talking about the province that still holds a grudge against their provincial liberal party for what they apparently did like 40 years ago.
Yeah I heard about that.
Boils down to Trudeau stopping alberta from setting the price of gas to whatever ridiculous amount they desired at that moment.
Thus, they're forced to wipe there asses with fives instead of fifties.
Except the price of gas is set by the worldwide market and Trudeau basically forced Alberta to sell for less. Good or bad, he did it at the time when the oil market was about to collapse. The 80s were a dark time for Alberta - people weren't wiping their asses with fives, they were losing their homes en masse.
Aye, Albertans didn't seem to understand the concept of a Bubble. (ie - it pops)
Which isn't to single them out, as many times since then, history has proven that most people don't.
Your talking about the province that still holds a grudge against their provincial liberal party for what they apparently did like 40 years ago.
Yeah I heard about that.
Boils down to Trudeau stopping alberta from setting the price of gas to whatever ridiculous amount they desired at that moment.
Thus, they're forced to wipe there asses with fives instead of fifties.
Except the price of gas is set by the worldwide market and Trudeau basically forced Alberta to sell for less. Good or bad, he did it at the time when the oil market was about to collapse. The 80s were a dark time for Alberta - people weren't wiping their asses with fives, they were losing their homes en masse.
I don't think you understand the National Energy Programme...
Your talking about the province that still holds a grudge against their provincial liberal party for what they apparently did like 40 years ago.
Yeah I heard about that.
Boils down to Trudeau stopping alberta from setting the price of gas to whatever ridiculous amount they desired at that moment.
Thus, they're forced to wipe there asses with fives instead of fifties.
Except the price of gas is set by the worldwide market and Trudeau basically forced Alberta to sell for less. Good or bad, he did it at the time when the oil market was about to collapse.
Trudeau "forced" Alberta to not fuck over the rest of our fellow Canadians. It's almost as though the National Legislature has a duty to the country as a whole beyond a bunch of greedy fuckers in Alberta.
The 80s were a dark time for Alberta - people weren't wiping their asses with fives, they were losing their homes en masse.
Which was largely their own fault.
If you grew up here you saw the "Lord let there be another oil boom, I promise next time I'll save some money" bumper stickers.
Which of course they didn't this time around, either. Nobody is quite as piss-poor at saving and counter-cyclical spending as an Albertan with oil money.
What I find funny is that everytime there is a a oil boom the liberals use alberta as there whipping boy... Trudeau did it and so was Dion.. Hydro electricity is a great resource for Quebec but i don't see any regulation imposed that they have to sell their electricity at anything but fair market value... Even if most of the dams where built with federal funding. The reason most albertans are voting CPC is that they are the only party that dosen't use "tax the fuck out of Alberta" in their platform.
Seriously, even the "Green Shift" was tax the fuck out of carbon, to pay for welfare, while they leave the top marginal income tax alone along with the regressive GST.
Trudeau "forced" Alberta to not fuck over the rest of our fellow Canadians. It's almost as though the National Legislature has a duty to the country as a whole beyond a bunch of greedy fuckers in Alberta.
That's an interesting take on the matter, especially considering the guy who came up with the NEP later admitted the entire point of it was to suck money out of Alberta and deposit it in Ottawa.
I think that the internet has been for years on the path to creating what is essentially an electronic Necronomicon: A collection of blasphemous unrealities so perverse that to even glimpse at its contents, if but for a moment, is to irrevocably forfeit a portion of your sanity.
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Trudeau "forced" Alberta to not fuck over the rest of our fellow Canadians. It's almost as though the National Legislature has a duty to the country as a whole beyond a bunch of greedy fuckers in Alberta.
That's an interesting take on the matter, especially considering the guy who came up with the NEP later admitted the entire point of it was to suck money out of Alberta and deposit it in Ottawa.
No matter what else it was, the NEP is gone. Trudeau is dead. His people are not in control of the Liberal Party, and his policies only matter in history classes. Voting Conservative today because of something Trudeau did makes as much sense as voting Liberal today because of something Joe Clark did.
But you look at someone like Dion he again wanted to target alberta.... Not much has changed with Liberals polocies concerning the west.
No, Dion wanted to target carbon emissions across Canada, which is a sound environmental plan (and part of our responsibilities as members of the Kyoto treaty). It just so happens that Alberta unloads a shitton of carbon into the atmosphere by exploiting the tar sands, and quite possibly manufacture extra carbon just for the fun of annoying the central and eastern provinces. So they'd get hit hard by any sane and non-discriminatory environmental plan.
Any environmental plan is gonna hit Alberta cause they do Oil and only Oil and Oil pollutes.
Yeah. Of course, in this case, the heavy metal pollution from Ontario's manufacturing gets a free pass while carbon is heavily taxed. Ontario has some of the worst pollution in Canada, but the 'Green Shift' was going to raise the average Albertan power bill by $600 a year (That's not hyperbole. using the numbers from the Green shift and the average amount of carbon pollution for power generation in Alberta, that's the number I came up with). So, electrical bills alone were going to wipe out any help for Alberta's poor. That doesn't include all the other price hikes poor Albertans face. And yes, there are ALOT of poor Albertans. We're not all millionaire oil barons.
It's fantastic that Quebec runs on hydro and would see a net benefit from a Carbon tax, even though Quebec already receives more transfer payments than any other province. It's fantastic that Ontario's heavy industries would pay a pittance in carbon taxes while Alberta's economy is shit on. It's fantastic that the rest of Canada has a big 'fuck you' to all the Albertans who live in poverty and try to scratch out a living as best they can.
But of course, I'm just an Albertan. I must be rich and polluting the Earth like nobody's business while laughing, laughing at eastern Canada.
The NEP was introduced in the wake of the energy crises of the 1970s. Because of high oil prices, several economic problems that were beginning to manifest themselves through the 1970s were accelerated and magnified. Inflation was out of control and interest rates were through the roof. Unemployment was epidemic in the eastern provinces where the Trudeau government had much of its political support.[1] The NEP was designed to promote oil self-sufficiency for Canada, maintain the oil supply, particularly for the industrial base in eastern Canada, promote Canadian ownership of the energy industry, promote lower prices, promote exploration for oil in Canada, promote alternative energy sources, and increase government revenues from oil sales through a variety of taxes and agreements.[2] The NEP's Petroleum Gas Revenue Tax (PGRT) instituted a double-taxation mechanism that did not apply to other commodities, such as gold and copper (see "Program details" item (c), below). The program would "... redistribute revenue from the [oil] industry and lessen the cost of oil for Eastern Canada..." in an attempt to insulate the Canadian economy from the shock of rising global oil prices[3] (see "Program details" item (a), below). By keeping domestic oil prices below world market prices, the NEP was essentially mandating provincial generosity and subsidizing all Canadian consumers of fuel, primarily at Alberta's expense.[4]
For the period 1980 through 1985, government statistics show that while the overall number of bankruptcies per 1,000 businesses in Canada peaked at 50% above the 1980 rate.[29] During that same time the bankruptcy rate in Alberta's economy rose by 150% after the NEP took effect[30] despite those years being amongst the most expensive for oil prices on record (see figure Long-Term Oil Prices, 1861-2007).
EDIT: What the government does isn't going to hurt Rich Richy McRicherson and his daughter $Alberta. It hurts the people who are poor or middle-class. The ones who don't have the benefit of political parties campaigning for their money, the ones who live under the same conditions as other middle-class Canadians, with the same mortgages, the same car loans, the same taxes (Other than provincially, of course) and the same hairsbreadth away from losing it all.
While your first bit may have a point (I never cared to look too closely at the Green Shift stuff), the bit you highlighted from wikipedia here:
By keeping domestic oil prices below world market prices, the NEP was essentially mandating provincial generosity and subsidizing all Canadian consumers of fuel, primarily at Alberta's expense.
Is funny. Because, really, NO SHIT.
I'm fairly certain this was the PURPOSE of the damn thing. It was like a forerunner to transfer payments.
Our electricity bills would be a lot lower if it weren't for the deregulation gift The Tories gave to the industry, bub
But then again we're talking about the genius party that has been through two enormous boom cycles with a huge bust in between and still hasn't figured out that diversifying the economy might be good idea.
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MorgensternICH BIN DER PESTVOGELDU KAMPFAFFE!Registered Userregular
edited September 2009
Seriously, there's a lot of deluded people in this thread. Do you honestly think that the the energy boom was a great boon for everyone in this province? That we're all living in mansions and driving luxury vehicles now? Is this the general consensus.
Tell me Richy, where did you pull this delightful little gem from?
and quite possibly manufacture extra carbon just for the fun of annoying the central and eastern provinces
And Senjutsu comes out with the brilliant assessment that the people losing their homes in the 1980s were losing them through their own doing. I seem to remember growing up in Ft. McMurray at the time and watching my parents have to walk away from their home thanks my dad being laid off by Syncrude and our savings shrivelling up since no one else in Ft. McMurray was hiring due to the bust. Not a single company. So, tell me, what do you think would happen to the average house price in a place like that when all the major employers are laying off people and no one is buying houses?
My parents chose to leave so they could actually afford to live. They walked away from a house they couldn't afford to live in and no one wanted to buy. Our neighbors did. People all throughout this province did it, but it hit certain cities and towns especially hard. Yea, maybe certain people just had piss-poor money management skills and had very little savings, but this economic downturn you're talking about lasted for years. Extend periods of time tend to eat up savings quite hard. But, yea, maybe they should have had some extra millions in the bank back then. God knows Syncrude and Suncor were just handing out the mega-bucks to everyone and their aunt.
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“Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.” - Loren Eiseley
But of course, I'm just an Albertan. I must be rich and polluting the Earth like nobody's business while laughing, laughing at eastern Canada.
Oh get off your cross, Nova. Nobody is crucifying Albertans in here, because I'm just as much of an Albertan as you are.
We're only pointing out that the Tories record in Alberta is largely one of flawed fuckmupetry and that most of the reactionary horseshit conservative Albertans spew about "those damn liberals we should have let freeze to death in the 70s" doesn't actually hold up to logic or sense.
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Our electricity bills would be a lot lower if it weren't for the deregulation gift The Tories gave to the industry, bub
But then again we're talking about the genius party that has been through two enormous boom cycles with a huge bust in between and still hasn't figured out that diversifying the economy might be good idea.
I'm not disagreeing and I don't support the Conservatives, either provincially or federally (Not anymore, anyway), but acting like Albertans complaining about the NEP is because they're a bunch of rich, selfish bastards is flat out wrong. And yeah, it's still a sore spot because stuff keeps showing up on Liberal platforms that looks suspiciously like finding more ways to take from Alberta to give to themselves.
Why should I trust the Liberal party?
The Conservatives have proven themselves bastards and this thread rails against them mightily, but most of you guys are trying to suck the collective dicks of the Liberals why asking Alberta why she isn't joining in. Alberta still has the bruises of the last 'lesson in national unity' and we're not quite ready to sit down for the bukkake party once again.
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MorgensternICH BIN DER PESTVOGELDU KAMPFAFFE!Registered Userregular
Our electricity bills would be a lot lower if it weren't for the deregulation gift The Tories gave to the industry, bub
But then again we're talking about the genius party that has been through two enormous boom cycles with a huge bust in between and still hasn't figured out that diversifying the economy might be good idea.
You're talking about a government and a labour force that are higly attuned to making money off just one industry. The trade unions recognize that any push to diversity the economy will result in less upgraders being built, meaning less oil money for union rates and pushing those trades people and unions into industries where the rates will be lower than they're used to. There's an intertia affect in most of the levels of management and even in the work force itself in the skills trades and there's not a lot of serious effort put into saying "Yea, let's do this. Let's find other industries so we can have our people employed down the road."
Morgenstern on
“Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.” - Loren Eiseley
Seriously, there's a lot of deluded people in this thread. Do you honestly think that the the energy boom was a great boon for everyone in this province? That we're all living in mansions and driving luxury vehicles now? Is this the general consensus.
Tell me Richy, where did you pull this delightful little gem from?
and quite possibly manufacture extra carbon just for the fun of annoying the central and eastern provinces
And Senjutsu comes out with the brilliant assessment that the people losing their homes in the 1980s were losing them through their own doing. I seem to remember growing up in Ft. McMurray at the time and watching my parents have to walk away from their home thanks my dad being laid off by Syncrude and our savings shrivelling up since no one else in Ft. McMurray was hiring due to the bust. Not a single company. So, tell me, what do you think would happen to the average house price in a place like that when all the major employers are laying off people and no one is buying houses?
My parents chose to leave so they could actually afford to live. They walked away from a house they couldn't afford to live in and no one wanted to buy. Our neighbors did. People all throughout this province did it, but it hit certain cities and towns especially hard. Yea, maybe certain people just had piss-poor money management skills and had very little savings, but this economic downturn you're talking about lasted for years. Extend periods of time tend to eat up savings quite hard. But, yea, maybe they should have had some extra millions in the bank back then. God knows Syncrude and Suncor were just handing out the mega-bucks to everyone and their aunt.
And yet these people kept electing the local governments whose flawed management of the first boom put in place the single-industry dependencies that let an oil bust devastate everyone in the first place
And they kept electing that party after the bust, kept electing them through the bullshit budgets deliberately engineered to manufacture "surpluses" by lying about earnings, kept electing them through the horribly conflicted and corrupt energy deregulation that cost the poor and middle class (whom you have the gall to accuse the Liberals of attacking) millions upon millions, kept electing them while they pissed away Alberta's water resources for spare change to the oil companies, kept electing them when they mismanaged the revenue collection from said oil companies to the tune of billions of dollars, kept electing them when they didn't think to learn the lesson from the last boom/bust and use this boom to diversify against the inevitable bust now upon us, and will undoubtedly keep fucking electing them ad nauseum.
But yeah, it's those darn Liberals who haven't held power provincially since 1921, and the Federal ones who weren't in power when this bust hit.
Conservatives sure are all about personal responsibility, as long as they never have to take any for their actions.
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But of course, I'm just an Albertan. I must be rich and polluting the Earth like nobody's business while laughing, laughing at eastern Canada.
Oh get off your cross, Nova. Nobody is crucifying Albertans in here, because I'm just as much of an Albertan as you are.
We're only pointing out that the Tories record in Alberta is largely one of flawed fuckmupetry and that most of the reactionary horseshit conservative Albertans spew about "those damn liberals we should have let freeze to death in the 70s" doesn't actually hold up to logic or sense.
Well, Gaddez was pretty clear about Albertans all being rich (Wiping their asses with fives instead of fifties). You've never noticed a distinct hostility from Eastern Canada towards Alberta? I know that the feeling is mutual, but I can't make everyone be nice to each other. What I can do is try to impress on people that the NEP really did yank the rug out from under Alberta's economy, and yes, real people suffered as a result.
Also, the NEP was supposed to increase federal revenues, but the deficit doubled as a percentage of GDP while it was in effect. That was during a huge recession, yes, but was it worth it? Was the NEP worth the price that was paid?
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
The Conservatives have proven themselves bastards and this thread rails against them mightily, but most of you guys are trying to suck the collective dicks of the Liberals why asking Alberta why she isn't joining in. Alberta still has the bruises of the last 'lesson in national unity' and we're not quite ready to sit down for the bukkake party once again.
It's been 40 fucking years and you haven't wiped off the jizz yet? Christ almighty, the Cold War ended only 18 years ago and the US and Russia play friendly.
Our electricity bills would be a lot lower if it weren't for the deregulation gift The Tories gave to the industry, bub
But then again we're talking about the genius party that has been through two enormous boom cycles with a huge bust in between and still hasn't figured out that diversifying the economy might be good idea.
I'm not disagreeing and I don't support the Conservatives, either provincially or federally (Not anymore, anyway), but acting like Albertans complaining about the NEP is because they're a bunch of rich, selfish bastards is flat out wrong. And yeah, it's still a sore spot because stuff keeps showing up on Liberal platforms that looks suspiciously like finding more ways to take from Alberta to give to themselves.
No, I'm reacting against the "let the bastards freeze in the dark" mentality that defines anti-NEP sentiments that haven't been relevant for 30 years.
Because that's really all it amounts to, in the end. A claim that Alberta had the right as a province to fuck over the rest of the country, destroy their industries, homes, and livelihoods, with price gouging, in order to make as much money as possible over those evil, evil people who were stupid enough to let themselves be born east of the One Chosen Province.
It is a disgusting, pernicious axe that the ignorant fucks that make up the Progressive Conservative's power base continue to grind for no good reason whatsoever to this day.
Conservatives sure are all about personal responsibility, as long as they never have to take any for their actions.
?
So because my province votes Conservative I'm not allowed to criticize the Liberals anymore?
No?
You're just criticizing the wrong people, like so many conservative voters in this province who keep blaming others for the results of the policies put in place by the people they keep voting in.
Seriously, get off the cross. You're not a persecuted minority.
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edited September 2009
"Let the bastards freeze in the dark" became a popular bumper sticker after the NEP was enacted.
Also, price gouging? How about a cite, please?
AND, aren't resources the sole purview of the provinces? Why hasn't the federal government ever gone after nickel, or coal, or uranium?
Or right, because there isn't as much money in it. And you might have to fuck with a province you actually like. You know, like Quebec. Or Ontario.
Hippo, the US and Russia aren't playing friendly. :P And the Green Shift was painted as a new NEP, and the numbers I ran showed it was at least partly true. So hey, they were about to jizz on us again, but we dodged that one. Whew.
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Conservatives sure are all about personal responsibility, as long as they never have to take any for their actions.
?
So because my province votes Conservative I'm not allowed to criticize the Liberals anymore?
No?
You're just criticizing the wrong people, like so many conservative voters in this province who keep blaming others for the results of the policies put in place by the people they keep voting in.
Seriously, get off the cross. You're not a persecuted minority.
What cross? Minority? What the fuck are you talking about?
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edited September 2009
Senj, are you saying that the NEP had no effect on Alberta's economy and the huge bust was the sole result of mismanagement by the provincial government?
This isn't about liking or not liking. Easterners aren't evil monsters that hate westerners. That's just the infantile crap that passes for political discourse in our sorry excuse for a political system at the moment.
Seriously, results. 38 years of Tory rule: high energy prices, yet another oil bust, huge infrastructure debt, no economic diversification, bungled revenue collection, the list goes on and on.
There's nobody to blame but the party in power and the voters that keep putting them there. Stop fretting over the evil Liberal NEP monster under your bed
Senj, are you saying that the NEP had no effect on Alberta's economy and the huge bust was the sole result of mismanagement by the provincial government?
In the original one, not as much as claimed, in this one, none fucking whatsoever.
Posts
Yeah I heard about that.
Boils down to Trudeau stopping alberta from setting the price of gas to whatever ridiculous amount they desired at that moment.
Thus, they're forced to wipe there asses with fives instead of fifties.
Except the price of gas is set by the worldwide market and Trudeau basically forced Alberta to sell for less. Good or bad, he did it at the time when the oil market was about to collapse. The 80s were a dark time for Alberta - people weren't wiping their asses with fives, they were losing their homes en masse.
It's already crashed. I haven't heard 'them' blaming anyone, really.
Aye, Albertans didn't seem to understand the concept of a Bubble. (ie - it pops)
Which isn't to single them out, as many times since then, history has proven that most people don't.
Funny that....
Anyway, you keep putting yourself up as the real expert on Alberta, why do Albertans keep electing the Provincial Conservatives?
That is actively bullshit
They don't, at least, not nearly as homogeneously as people think they do.
I've explained the electoral boundaries thing ad nauseum, but a rural vote in Alberta is worth damn near twice as much as an urban vote.
Also there are a lot of "vote conservative or get the fuck out" mouthbreathers.
Aren't ridings calculated by population? Or does it not work that way in Alberta?
I don't think you understand the National Energy Programme...
Trudeau "forced" Alberta to not fuck over the rest of our fellow Canadians. It's almost as though the National Legislature has a duty to the country as a whole beyond a bunch of greedy fuckers in Alberta.
Which was largely their own fault.
If you grew up here you saw the "Lord let there be another oil boom, I promise next time I'll save some money" bumper stickers.
Which of course they didn't this time around, either. Nobody is quite as piss-poor at saving and counter-cyclical spending as an Albertan with oil money.
It was just a huge WTF for me.
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That's an interesting take on the matter, especially considering the guy who came up with the NEP later admitted the entire point of it was to suck money out of Alberta and deposit it in Ottawa.
If you ever need to talk to someone, feel free to message me. Yes, that includes you.
Those 2 views aren't contradictory...
Any environmental plan is gonna hit Alberta cause they do Oil and only Oil and Oil pollutes.
Yeah. Of course, in this case, the heavy metal pollution from Ontario's manufacturing gets a free pass while carbon is heavily taxed. Ontario has some of the worst pollution in Canada, but the 'Green Shift' was going to raise the average Albertan power bill by $600 a year (That's not hyperbole. using the numbers from the Green shift and the average amount of carbon pollution for power generation in Alberta, that's the number I came up with). So, electrical bills alone were going to wipe out any help for Alberta's poor. That doesn't include all the other price hikes poor Albertans face. And yes, there are ALOT of poor Albertans. We're not all millionaire oil barons.
It's fantastic that Quebec runs on hydro and would see a net benefit from a Carbon tax, even though Quebec already receives more transfer payments than any other province. It's fantastic that Ontario's heavy industries would pay a pittance in carbon taxes while Alberta's economy is shit on. It's fantastic that the rest of Canada has a big 'fuck you' to all the Albertans who live in poverty and try to scratch out a living as best they can.
But of course, I'm just an Albertan. I must be rich and polluting the Earth like nobody's business while laughing, laughing at eastern Canada.
EDIT: What the government does isn't going to hurt Rich Richy McRicherson and his daughter $Alberta. It hurts the people who are poor or middle-class. The ones who don't have the benefit of political parties campaigning for their money, the ones who live under the same conditions as other middle-class Canadians, with the same mortgages, the same car loans, the same taxes (Other than provincially, of course) and the same hairsbreadth away from losing it all.
Is funny. Because, really, NO SHIT.
I'm fairly certain this was the PURPOSE of the damn thing. It was like a forerunner to transfer payments.
But then again we're talking about the genius party that has been through two enormous boom cycles with a huge bust in between and still hasn't figured out that diversifying the economy might be good idea.
Tell me Richy, where did you pull this delightful little gem from?
And Senjutsu comes out with the brilliant assessment that the people losing their homes in the 1980s were losing them through their own doing. I seem to remember growing up in Ft. McMurray at the time and watching my parents have to walk away from their home thanks my dad being laid off by Syncrude and our savings shrivelling up since no one else in Ft. McMurray was hiring due to the bust. Not a single company. So, tell me, what do you think would happen to the average house price in a place like that when all the major employers are laying off people and no one is buying houses?
My parents chose to leave so they could actually afford to live. They walked away from a house they couldn't afford to live in and no one wanted to buy. Our neighbors did. People all throughout this province did it, but it hit certain cities and towns especially hard. Yea, maybe certain people just had piss-poor money management skills and had very little savings, but this economic downturn you're talking about lasted for years. Extend periods of time tend to eat up savings quite hard. But, yea, maybe they should have had some extra millions in the bank back then. God knows Syncrude and Suncor were just handing out the mega-bucks to everyone and their aunt.
Oh get off your cross, Nova. Nobody is crucifying Albertans in here, because I'm just as much of an Albertan as you are.
We're only pointing out that the Tories record in Alberta is largely one of flawed fuckmupetry and that most of the reactionary horseshit conservative Albertans spew about "those damn liberals we should have let freeze to death in the 70s" doesn't actually hold up to logic or sense.
I'm not disagreeing and I don't support the Conservatives, either provincially or federally (Not anymore, anyway), but acting like Albertans complaining about the NEP is because they're a bunch of rich, selfish bastards is flat out wrong. And yeah, it's still a sore spot because stuff keeps showing up on Liberal platforms that looks suspiciously like finding more ways to take from Alberta to give to themselves.
Why should I trust the Liberal party?
The Conservatives have proven themselves bastards and this thread rails against them mightily, but most of you guys are trying to suck the collective dicks of the Liberals why asking Alberta why she isn't joining in. Alberta still has the bruises of the last 'lesson in national unity' and we're not quite ready to sit down for the bukkake party once again.
You're talking about a government and a labour force that are higly attuned to making money off just one industry. The trade unions recognize that any push to diversity the economy will result in less upgraders being built, meaning less oil money for union rates and pushing those trades people and unions into industries where the rates will be lower than they're used to. There's an intertia affect in most of the levels of management and even in the work force itself in the skills trades and there's not a lot of serious effort put into saying "Yea, let's do this. Let's find other industries so we can have our people employed down the road."
And yet these people kept electing the local governments whose flawed management of the first boom put in place the single-industry dependencies that let an oil bust devastate everyone in the first place
And they kept electing that party after the bust, kept electing them through the bullshit budgets deliberately engineered to manufacture "surpluses" by lying about earnings, kept electing them through the horribly conflicted and corrupt energy deregulation that cost the poor and middle class (whom you have the gall to accuse the Liberals of attacking) millions upon millions, kept electing them while they pissed away Alberta's water resources for spare change to the oil companies, kept electing them when they mismanaged the revenue collection from said oil companies to the tune of billions of dollars, kept electing them when they didn't think to learn the lesson from the last boom/bust and use this boom to diversify against the inevitable bust now upon us, and will undoubtedly keep fucking electing them ad nauseum.
But yeah, it's those darn Liberals who haven't held power provincially since 1921, and the Federal ones who weren't in power when this bust hit.
Conservatives sure are all about personal responsibility, as long as they never have to take any for their actions.
Well, Gaddez was pretty clear about Albertans all being rich (Wiping their asses with fives instead of fifties). You've never noticed a distinct hostility from Eastern Canada towards Alberta? I know that the feeling is mutual, but I can't make everyone be nice to each other. What I can do is try to impress on people that the NEP really did yank the rug out from under Alberta's economy, and yes, real people suffered as a result.
Also, the NEP was supposed to increase federal revenues, but the deficit doubled as a percentage of GDP while it was in effect. That was during a huge recession, yes, but was it worth it? Was the NEP worth the price that was paid?
?
So because my province votes Conservative I'm not allowed to criticize the Liberals anymore?
I should also note that the Conservatives won 52% of the popular vote. I guess the other 48% can go fuck themselves for living in the wrong place?
It's been 40 fucking years and you haven't wiped off the jizz yet? Christ almighty, the Cold War ended only 18 years ago and the US and Russia play friendly.
No, I'm reacting against the "let the bastards freeze in the dark" mentality that defines anti-NEP sentiments that haven't been relevant for 30 years.
Because that's really all it amounts to, in the end. A claim that Alberta had the right as a province to fuck over the rest of the country, destroy their industries, homes, and livelihoods, with price gouging, in order to make as much money as possible over those evil, evil people who were stupid enough to let themselves be born east of the One Chosen Province.
It is a disgusting, pernicious axe that the ignorant fucks that make up the Progressive Conservative's power base continue to grind for no good reason whatsoever to this day.
No?
You're just criticizing the wrong people, like so many conservative voters in this province who keep blaming others for the results of the policies put in place by the people they keep voting in.
Seriously, get off the cross. You're not a persecuted minority.
Also, price gouging? How about a cite, please?
AND, aren't resources the sole purview of the provinces? Why hasn't the federal government ever gone after nickel, or coal, or uranium?
Or right, because there isn't as much money in it. And you might have to fuck with a province you actually like. You know, like Quebec. Or Ontario.
Hippo, the US and Russia aren't playing friendly. :P And the Green Shift was painted as a new NEP, and the numbers I ran showed it was at least partly true. So hey, they were about to jizz on us again, but we dodged that one. Whew.
What cross? Minority? What the fuck are you talking about?
Seriously, results. 38 years of Tory rule: high energy prices, yet another oil bust, huge infrastructure debt, no economic diversification, bungled revenue collection, the list goes on and on.
There's nobody to blame but the party in power and the voters that keep putting them there. Stop fretting over the evil Liberal NEP monster under your bed
In the original one, not as much as claimed, in this one, none fucking whatsoever.