Many years ago, I think it was This Hour Has 22 Minutes were trying to explain how to set you VCR for DST and never quite managed, finishing with, “Or you could just move to Saskatchewan, it’s a nice place to live — if you’re wheat.”
(Makes me wonder how they manage it in Lloydminster.)
There’s a little bubble of area around Lloyd that goes on DST.
The Time Act of Saskatchewan specifically provides that Lloyd is on Alberta time.
There’s an interesting sidebar to this whole thing, and that’s what just happened in Ontario. I thought about it in the context of Harper’s federal conservatives having a hard time with this unprecedented NDP victory in Alberta of all places, the land of right-wing cowboy-hatted gun-totin’ straight-shootin’ steer-raisin’ oil-drillin’ proponents of Liberty.
Ontario didn’t have an election, but the Conservatives did just elect, as their party leader, a former Harper backbencher, an undistinguished backbencher who had been largely ignored in the Harper power hierarchy and in fact, the kind whose social conservative views the Harper government has been trying hard to play down among some of its embarrassingly extremist backbenchers.
But now this lunatic, a sort of cross between the intelligence of Rick Perry and the social progressivism of Rick Santorum and Michelle Backmann, has just been elected the leader of the Ontario Progressive Conservatives.
Stephen Harper isn’t stupid. He’s a closet far-right extremist wrapped in a comfortable bundle of political pragmatism, but he’s not stupid. He must be really lamenting BOTH these provincial developments. Rachel Notley in Alberta will likely establish sane and successful policies and build the credibility of the NDP, while in Ontario, Brown will likely be embarrassing both himself and the conservative cause. It’s frustrating that his election within the party was the result of the canvassing of massive numbers of “new Canadians”, which is code for immigrants from places that have medieval social values. Fortunately, this is not yet mainstream Ontario. I hope it never is.
But I could be wrong about Brown because the information out in the media so far about this newcomer is limited. Or he may turn out to be another Harper, who succeeds by hiding his true values in the interest of pandering to the majority. But I strongly suspect he’s going to be just another failed leader in the successions of failures the PCs have had in Ontario in the last couple of decades.
Harper is done. If they were wise, they’d start their paper shredding in the off season, when no one is watching.
So, Texas, but cold and no bar-b-q?
Texas, but with fewer guns and armadillos.
Texas.
We got gas BarBQ’s that we can use in the wintertime.
Fewer guns? Per capita?
Haven’t found a break-down by province, but the global small-arms survey in 2007 estimated that the gun ownership rate in the US is 89 guns per hundred resident, making the US #1 globally.
Canada came in at 13 on the list, with 31 guns per hundred residents.
Yeah, we don’t have a lot of homicides here in Alberta. We do however have an unusually large number of “hunting accidents.”
God I hope you are right. I do not see them as the bogey men that many do, but I do worry. A lot of the newly elected MLA’s are very young, very green candidates that are usually chosen by the NDP to just fill the ballot with no real chance of being elected. It is pretty thin pickings for cabinet talent. The PC ballot was always filled with a lot of entitled good 'ole boys, and I had the impression the government was mostly run by momentum and free lunches. I don’t know whats worse, but I do know as a middle age dude that things are almost always harder to do than it looks from the outside.
This is a delicate time in Alberta’s economy. People with good jobs are being laid off left and right. Maybe that is laughable to the rest of the country without a ridiculously lucrative oil industry to prop things up, but the vast majority of much less lucrative jobs here rely on those oil patch folk spending their money, and they aren’t spending it now and for the foreseeable future. For me, as a carpenter it means there are going to be not only hundreds (thousands?) of carpenters laid off but also oodles of half-skilled dudes picking up a hammer and making a mess of things for a fraction of what it really costs.
Ms Fluffy is the big earner in the household, she runs her own business that relies on monthly enrollment, and a scary number of people are leaving due to layoffs. We are worried, everyone is worried. Before this election I had a ‘weather the storm’ mentality, Alberta’s economy will turn around with the price of oil. It still should, but I put no limit on hubris and human stupidity to fuck things up royally. I hope Notely is an exceptional talent because she is going to need to be.
Those are fair comments, but at the same time, critiques that the incoming government doesn’t have much experience, if taken too far, means that once a dynasty is in place it shouldn’t be defeated because no-one else knows how to run a government.
Prior to the 1971 election, the PC caucus was Peter Lougheed and 5 other MLA’s, none of whom had ever been in government, if I remember correctly. They managed.
Well it’s two weeks after the election now and the sky has not fallen. When the price of oil rebounds (and it will eventually, as it always does, though it could be a while) the oil jobs will return. It’s nothing the gov’t controls anyway. Perhaps this is a good time to learn to diversify. It’s either that or sit and complain.
So it would seem the Notley Crew wants to raise AB’s minimum wage to $15/hour. This led to an interesting discussion with a co-worker of mine in which he immediately assumed prices would rise accordingly.
I’d like to poop on his argument because I think it’s nonsense. People would notice if every single thing around them went up $5 in price overnight. Businesses don’t all cater to the minimum wage earners, especially in a province like Alberta in which it occasionally rains cash. But my friend is convinced that the $15/hour will immediately be eaten by taxes and/or inflation. Is there any truth to his argument or is his showing me his University of Pidooma credentials yet again?
Link:
Well, first of all, that’s a rise from $10.20 (lowest in the country) to $15 OVER THREE YEARS. It will be incremental, not a giant leap, and one would imagine all jurisdictions will be raising their wages in the same time period.
Where it can get costly is if everyone’s wages will need to rise correspondingly over the next three years, which most likely they will to keep pace with inflation. An extra $5.00 an hour across the board is not really huge, but a 50% wage increase is. So it depends how they’re calculating it.
It’s not just their lack of experience in government. It’s their lack of experience in anything remotely resembling the management of a large organization - or a small one. Or in at least one case, a household since she still lives at home.
We’re talking about a caucus made up primarily of students, union representatives, social workers, nurses, a Safeway worker, a few teachers, an unemployed person with no education, A couple of college dropouts, a yoga instructor, a few that describe themselves as ‘social justice activists’ or community organizers…
There are people in that caucus I wouldn’t hire for any job at all. Most of them would be strictly entry-level or perhaps local management level. Only a handful have any management experience at all or any real personal accomplishments to speak of.
One article I read that was actually trying to play up the cabinet-level talent of this bunch came to the conclusion that we had a fine attorney-general candidate in a 28 year old woman with a newly minted law degree who had recently opened a ‘family practice’. Seriously?
Not only are they inexperienced and relatively uneducated, they don’t seem like a moderate bunch to me. Student activists, union reps, community organizers and social workers are not exactly the groups you’d call on for governmental moderation and consideration of the other side’s views.
I think Rachel Notley is going to have her hands full trying to corral this bunch and get them engaged in the mundane business of governing rather than the much more exciting and glamorous activities associated with activism and running for office. Is the 20 year old Comp-Sci student really going to be happy shuffling papers in a bureaucracy and showing up at town halls and local events to kiss babies and shake hands? Are the activists going to be thrilled with the idea of sitting in the back bench being told what to do or say while Notley negotiates ‘compromises’ with their hated enemies in the Wildrose and PC party?
How is the Yoga teacher going to fare in a negotiation with a senior bureaucrat with multiple degrees and 30 years of experience?
What I think is most likely to happen is that a lot of these people are going to be in over their heads, and as a result power is going to devolve to the bureaucracy, which will do what bureaucracies always do - use it to grow their own power and influence.
And I can hardly wait to see the ‘hard negotiations’ between the teachers and nurses unions and the government, when the people on the government side of the table negotiating on behalf of the taxpayers were recently representatives of those same unions…
The biggest risk Alberta faces is that the public unions are going to run roughshod over the process and gain huge concessions, which will be unaffordable and very hard to unwind. See: Ontario in the first two years of the Rae government, when a similarly inexperienced yet very sympathetic new government caved to outrageous union demands, throwing the province into a fiscal spiral that eventually required deep cuts to partially correct. Maybe the NDP has learned from that debacle, but has this bunch?
Great post.
The federal NDPs in Quebec are a similar bunch of unprepared ragtags.
There are so many problems with a $15 minimum wage it’s hard to know where to start…
First, it will cause unemployment. Guaranteed. This is not a tiny increase - it’s a 50% increase over three years. At a time when our economy is already slowing down.
Also, a raise that big does not just affect the minimum wage earners. It has trickle effects all the way up the job ladder. If the local supervisor is making $15, then she is going to have to get a raise to $20 if new hires with no skills are getting $15. And if she gets a raise to $20, then the people above her making $20 will have to be paid more…
Even industries that don’t have minimum wage workers will be affected because they have to compete in the same job market for employees. They will have to pay more to attract people.
Also, we are already reaching the point in Alberta where industries like fast food are hurting because our effective wage was more like $12/hr. Normally, when times get bad one relief that companies get is that the cost of labor drops slightly. We’ll be raising it during a downturn when we should actually be lowering it. I can tell you for sure that I won’t be paying $15 for a big mac, fries and a coke. I grab a Tim Horton’s coffee and a muffin every morning on my way to work, and it’s already a luxury I’m thinking of eliminating because $4.50 every day adds up to quite a lot per month. If that $4.50 becomes $7.00, I’m out of that market. I’m betting a lot of other people will be as well.
If that minimum wage throws a lot of people out of work, it will increase welfare and unemployment benefit costs at a time when the government will already be running a huge deficit. If the NDP government raises taxes to pay for it, it will cause further job losses.
Maybe the NDP will have a look at what’s happened in Seattle and San Francisco after they increased their minimum wages to $15, and think twice before enacting this horrible, job-killing legislation.
And yes, I am aware of studies claiming that there are no job losses from minimum wage hikes. Those studies looked at very modest increases - nothing like this. And there are at least as many other studies - and common sense - that link job losses to increased minimum wages.