People don’t seem to notice (or take seriously) the ways that it isn’t working, though. Education and healthcare have been gutted in Alberta and are still floundering, trying to recover, and people pay lip service to the idea of fixing these ongoing problems, then keep on voting for the people who broke them and continue to not fix them. I guess the idea is that everything else is so good that we’ll just overlook the two glaring problems here.
I keep hearing about education and healthcare being major issues in Ontario too. I wonder though how major these problems really are. Most people I know are worried about their job, if they even have one, their ever-shrinking paycheque due to energy price increases, and their prospect of living a decent life after retirement. No one I know walks around talking about hospital wait times and the state of education, no one.
Polls ask people what their biggest concern is, and along with the economy, healthcare, education you’ll also get the environment, and the deficit/debt etc. I think people just pick these off the top of their head without any thought because that’s what they keep hearing in the media.
What specifically is wrong with healthcare and education in Alberta? Because I hear the same polls in Ontario, but again, no one I know personally talks about these two at all. Well, maybe you’ll hear that Bob’s uncle had to wait 6 months for an MRI, or Tom had to wait 8 months for hip surgery, but I’m not personally aware why the overwhelming catastrophic deficiencies these programs are reported to have keep coming up in polls or the media. Maybe it’s because my family’s health is good, and we like the schools our kids go to. I dunno.
Are you sure you’re Albertan? :dubious:
According to the Government of Alberta, education spending is now 63% higher than it was ten years ago, despite the fact that enrolment has stayed flat (well, it’s up three percent.)
It is very difficult for me to understand how an after-inflation increase of 29% constitutes “gutting.”
But maybe health care is gutted… um, no. Health care spending constitutes two fifths of the Alberta budget and is either the highest of any province or very close to it (depends on the source.) Health care spending in Alberta has increase by 105% in the last ten years, which accounting for population and inflation is a 33% increase per capita.
Where’s the gutting?
As Leaffan points out, people always, always complain about education and health care. If you ask people what they think could be impoved, they’ll say more education, more healthcare, and lower taxes. But the fact is that in Alberta, education and heakth care are NOT being gutted by any reasonable definition of that term, taxes are low, and jobs are plentiful. What evidence is there that change is desperately needed?
OH. MY. GOD. Lloyd Robertson is retiring, after only 150 years anchoring the national news. Wow.
Shares in makeup are down drastically in off-hours trading.
I love Lloyd Robertson, mostly because I have fond memories of sitting with my dad while he watched the news. Him and Bill Haugland, on CFCF12 (CTV Montreal).
“And that’s the kind of day it’s been”
Happy retirement, Mr. Robertson!
Oh, come now. 144 years, isn’t it?
That’s gross.
That can’t be the original Lloyd Robertson - surely he must have regenerated, like a Time Lord, since he first started doing ‘The National’.
Apparently, he’s the longest serving network news anchor in television history (Cite to Wikipedia).
Enjoy your retirement, Lloyd. You’ve sure earned it!
So there won’t be any news anymore. How can there be?
I assume Sandy Rinaldo and her weird hair will be taking over the news.
Lisa LaFlamme actually.
Hmmmm . . . the signal moves from analogue to digital and Lloyd retires. Coincidence? I think not – definitely Time Lord involvement.
…and for those who haven’t noticed yet, Northern Piper started an interesting thread about favourite and least favourite Canadian novels - Canadian Novels: Name Your Favourite and Least Favourite - Cafe Society - Straight Dope Message Board
Speaking of which, I need to get a set top box for the bedroom (rabbit ears). This is a standard definition TV. Best Buy and Future Shop appear to have the same unit on sale till the end of today for $50, regularly $60.
Is this the best price I can hope to find? Anyone else have to buy one recently?
The problem is that the gutting happened more than ten years ago. It all began in 1992 when Prince Ralph ascended to the Premier’s throne on a platform of balancing the books (Alberta was already in the black as a province, incidentally). During his first term as premier, the Alberta government slashed health care and education spending, as well as funding for most everything else, in an effort to deliver a balanced budget and eliminate the provincial debt. As part of the health care package, numerous hospitals were shut down (Calgary went from six hospitals to three, with no hospital service for the downtown core) and, most particularly, nursing and support positions were eliminated by the thousands. Doctors who were displaced by the shut down of hospitals also found themselves out of work. The net result was a decent health care system emptied of a significant portion of its front line staff, leaving long lines in the remaining emergency wards, a scarcity of GPs, and a massive bureaucracy running it (as they suits at the top of the food chain did not see fit to eliminate their own jobs). Twenty years later, the government has dumped a ton of money back into the system in an effort to stabilize things, but a big chunk of the money has been allocated to rebuilding structures that were wiped out in the early 90s – Calgary has a (wildly overbudget and badly behind schedule) new hospital being built and the other three existing hospitals have received significant additions in an attempt to add space to an overcrowded environment. The government still hasn’t given us a straight answer as to where the staff will be coming from to man all this new space.
Similarly, education was aggressively downsized in the Klein era. Apparently our high school dropout of a premier did not see the value in all that fancy book learnin’. Schools were closed, positions were eliminated, and the overall education budget has never recovered – in 1994 it represented 26% of the total provincial budget; according to the Globe and Mail, education is projected to be 23% of the budget in the coming year. Class sizes are expected to be at an all-time high in Alberta schools this year and tuition costs for university students at my alma mater (the University of Calgary) have quintupled since I started there in 1987.
The good news, I suppose, is that Alberta is essentially debt-free as a result of Ralphie’s economic policies, and the Heritage Trust Fund is still sitting around $15 billion, in case we need it. The bad news for the province is that clearing the debt off our books makes us look inordinately prosperous to the federal government when it comes to calculating transfer payments, so we give out a shit load of money and take in not so much.
So yes, I will concede that since the oil boom of the mid-late 2000s, the provincial government has seen fit to open the purse strings on health (not so much on education), but the damage was done long before that and no real plan has been developed to address either problem, aside from throwing money at the executives at the top of the food chain and asking them to deal with it.
That’s disappointing. Lisa LaFlamme’s hair isn’t nearly as joke-worthy as Sandy Rinaldo’s. 
I don’t know if this has a simple answer, but a random poll on the side of an unrelated article I was reading in the Calgary Herald made wonder…
Calgary is looking to charge $50 (a year? a month?) to residents for garbage collection. Is this simply a Calgary-only city management issue or do the lower taxes and lack of PST in the province mean that most municipalities end up with less money and have to raise their money through higher taxes and fees than in other provinces? I guess I’m wondering if in the end you guys are actually spending comparable amounts of money on stuff, just through payments to your municipality instead of to the province? Or is it just the city of Calgary being a dick?