Verbal daggers were thrown inside Athabasca’s Nancy Appleby Theatre Monday night during a provincial candidates forum.
Three of the four Athabasca-Sturgeon-Redwater constituency candidates attended the forum, before an audience of approximately 150 people, who were involved with the forum by applauding, shouting out comments and even standing and clapping to show support for candidates’ statements.
Wildrose Party candidate Travis Olson took a swing at the ruling Progressive Conservative party by saying Albertans were tired of the “culture of corruption, intimidation and bullying.”
“I’m a conservative, and I know that is going to leave some of you confused,” Olson said. “We already have a Progressive Conservative party, but we have conserved nothing.
“There is only one conservative party running in this election, and that’s the Wildrose.”
Incumbent PC candidate Jeff Johnson came under attack on several fronts, including the controversy over land use legislation.
“Why were these laws created in the first place?” asked New Democratic Party candidate Mandy Melnyk. “Whose interest is being protected in these laws, because it certainly isn’t the landowners’. They are a rubber stamp for development, to have the cabinet tell us and have total control over what happens when.
“Albertans want to be asked, not told and not bought or sold.”
Johnson fought to clarify the land use situation, explaining that since Premier Allison Redford has been in power, those bills have been suspended.
“The government isn’t going to steal your land, and not allow you access to the courts,” he said. “It’s in the Alberta Bill of Rights.”
He challenged the Wildrose Party’s repeated endorsement of lawyer Keith Wilson, who has lobbied extensively against the proposed legislation.
“(Wilson) is traveling the province, saying the government is stealing our rights,” Johnson said, noting, “those are views that are not supported by the rest of the legal community.”
Olson said the Wildrose believes that health funding should follow the patient.
But Johnson countered that such a formula would harm rural Alberta.
“(Wildrose proposes) a per-capita funding model, and it will see all the funding go to urban centres,” he said. “We’ll never build another small rural hospital if you have funding following the patient.”
Olson also pointed to inefficiencies in health care.
“I was in the hospital in Athabasca, and I was talking to a woman from the cleaning staff. She said she wanted to put a table in between the washer and dryer,” he related. “It took her three months and seven signatures later before she could put a table there.”
Melynk said when we look at health care, we need to look at the big picture.
“Creating a two-tiered health system in Alberta is not sustainable. It doesn’t work in the States and it doesn’t work in Europe, and it certainly won’t work here,” she said. “We are too wealthy as a province to be this insecure when it comes to health care.”
All candidates identified funding education in a rural setting as a challenge.
Melynk said with fewer students than urban centres, rural schools are at a disadvantage.
“Very few schools in this riding have a viable shop class,” she said, “and it broke my heart going to the County of Thorhild and not seeing a piano at the Christmas concert.”
She said the NDP “would fight to make sure that our students in rural Alberta are receiving the same type of education and the best possible opportunities that they can receive, just like our urban neighbours.”
Melynk said a lack of planning causes issues around schools.
“They (PCs) allow developers to build communities that are without schools,” she said. “It comes down to rushing and poor management.”
Johnson stated that program-based funding would allow schools to receive more money if they offer more programs.
Olson said this is where the PCs have it right.
Olson jumped on transmission line projects that he said are oversized and unneeded. “If we need a four-lane highway, don’t put in a 16-lane highway.”
Melynk said it would be her role as an MLA to listen and represent all people in the constituency.
“And by the way Jeff (Johnson), when I am elected, I’ll talk to you, too,” Melynk added, which got a laugh from the audience.
Liberal candidate Gino Akbari did not attend the forum.
