The Canadian Taxpayers Federation has started a campaign featuring a photo of Ralph Klein and the message: “Dear Premier Prentice, Be Like Ralph!”
This leaves me no choice but to start my own campaign. The message? “Dear Premier Prentice, Don’t Ever Be Like Ralph.”
What’s with the Ralph worship? Is amnesia so rampant in Alberta that people would want Prentice to be like Ralph Klein, and re-create the bad old days of the 1990s? Amnesiacs, here’s a little jog to your faulty memory banks: Ralph never had a plan. He said so himself.
Do you want Prentice to run this province with no plan? Is that what you’re saying? Should a sign be hung above the entrance to the legislature saying: “Abandon your plan, all ye who enter here”?
Besides having no plan, Ralph was utterly obsessed with eliminating the debt, to the detriment of ordinary Albertans. He sacrificed school maintenance, infrastructure, nurses, teachers, hospital beds, long-term care, social services for the most vulnerable Albertans — you name it, he slashed it, or in the case of the Calgary General Hospital, he blew it up — all for his mania of slaying the debt.
That blood-letting took place 20 years ago, and we’re still paying the price. Is that what we want? We want to see the new Tom Baker Cancer Centre never built, because having no debt is more important than providing services to Albertans with cancer? Bad enough the new centre has been put on hold, while $18 million is spent renovating a golf course. Let’s not wade one inch deeper into the murk of those Klein-like waters, please.
The CTF is also urging that union contracts be reopened and public sector wages rolled back. I guess they’re saying that contracts are only legally binding if they’re signed with people of the correct ideology, but all others can be broken any time the government pleases. Sounds dishonourable at the very least, and like right-wing anarchy at worst.
“When Premier Klein was in office, he faced numerous challenges, but he didn’t raise taxes. He rolled up his sleeves and got spending under control in a number of different areas,” said Colin Craig, prairie director for the CTF.
No, he rolled up his sleeves and set about destroying the most basic services, including health care and education. And he certainly didn’t control his own wastefulness of taxpayer money; the Edmonton Journal documented 10 years ago, the hundreds of thousands of dollars Klein spent abusing his use of the government fleet of planes, for which he was blithely forgiven because, well, that’s just Ralph being Ralph.
Who wants to go back to those days? We should shake off that era the way the Israelites shook the dust off their sandals when they left Egypt.
Prentice, thankfully, is no clownish, uncouth, good old boy with a parochial attitude toward Eastern Canada. He’s a smart, savvy, polished individual who is alien to Klein’s tiresome Martha-and-Henry shtick. That stuff is so corny and outdated; it’s like something out of a skit on Hee Haw.
The fact is people are moving to Alberta, and a growing province needs to provide services to its population. Frankly, I’m tired of the self-righteous chorus from the I’m-OK-Jack crowd who leave the distinct impression that services for the sick and the vulnerable can fall by the wayside as long as they themselves don’t have to pay more taxes, or they can proudly claim Alberta has no debt.
What would there be to celebrate if Alberta had no debt, but Calgary at the same time had no new cancer centre? Nothing.
Ralph Klein was a terrible premier. Let him rest in peace. Premier Prentice, don’t be Ralph. You’re much smarter than Klein ever was. Don’t insult us by dumbing yourself down to Klein’s no-plan, slash-and-blow-up style of ersatz leadership. Premier Prentice, just be yourself. Everyone else is taken.
Naomi Lakritz is a Herald columnist.
