ATHABASCA — A focus on rural needs and standing up to Ottawa.
Those were the themes of UCP leadership candidate Danielle Smith’s campaign speech Aug. 31 at the Athabasca Regional Multiplex with a full room of listeners.
“We always talk about all these major multi-billion dollar investments in Calgary and Edmonton for LRT (but) what about the bridge program for rural Alberta,” said Smith. "Everywhere I go, we have bridges in need of repair or new bridges that need to be built and so that is just as vital.”
She added cell phone coverage was also a concern and something she has noticed herself on the campaign trail.
“Every time I dropped a call on the highway, I’d say, ‘We've got to fix this,’” she said. “We should really have the best wireless and broadband and fiber access in the entire world. We’re one of the richest jurisdictions in the world, why am I dropping calls when I'm going down major highways? I can only imagine as we've gone through these last two years of so much home-based learning how much more difficult that is in rural environments.”
Smith then went on to call on former premier Peter Lougheed, and said the government needs to get back to his vision for rural Alberta.
“The Lougheed vision was that we needed to make sure that everybody felt that they didn't have to just live in Calgary or Edmonton,” said Smith. “That you should be able to live anywhere and have access to a good local school because when you got that, now you're gonna attract businesses that are gonna attract workers because workers and families will come if they can have a good local school, once you've got the kids there, grandparents want to come and extended family members want to be there too.”
Smith called the years since Lougheed a "hollowing out of our services in our rural communities.”
Which was a question asked by Debbie Wood, the manager for Family and Community Support Services (FCSS) in Athabasca.
“One of our concerns here is we've noticed in the last couple of years, and not just COVID related, that there's a real movement towards centralized services,” Wood said. “What we're seeing is a centralized intake, a lack of walk-in services or in-person services, and it's having a huge impact on how we support our families that may be going through difficult times or the vulnerable population.”
Smith, however, supports the hub and spoke model.
“That seems like not a bad model, you’ve at least got the hub close to home,” she said. “It's only $100 million program. If you were to double that, make the provincial contribution, $200 million, and then allow for the local agencies to just be able to increase their funding and increase their reach, I think we’d solve a lot of those problems.”
Smith said she would also like to see a move back to a more regional control of healthcare citing Alberta Health Services (AHS) is either preventing new doctors and nurses from being hired or are just bad employers.
“Our problem is not that we can't attract doctors, we can't attract nurses it’s that AHS either gate keeps, or they’re such a horrible place to work where nobody wants to work for them anymore,” said Smith. "But we only fix healthcare if we go back to more local control, local decision making and do know that I feel a sense of urgency about this because this is at the heart of making sure that people feel comfortable in communities.”
She also would like to see a health spending account of $300 to help cover medical devices and treatments not currently covered by AHS, like chiropractic, acupuncture, therapists and more.
“We're coming off two years of a pretty serious crisis in mental health because of what happened during COVID,” said Smith. “Even if a person can only get four sessions, that'll go a long way towards helping to heal some of the anxiety and fear that a lot of people have suffered for the last couple of years.”
There were also the expected barbs toward Quebec, Ottawa, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
“We have to stop acting like a junior player, we have to start acting like that senior partner,” she said. “And that way that we get the same kind of powers, the same kind of respect that Quebec has is that we ask for the same things, and we do the same things that Quebec does, we can’t just talk the talk, we have to walk the walk as well.”
Resident Travis Olson asked Smith about affordable housing in the question-and-answer portion following her speech.
“I think it's important to every small community,” she said. “When I look at where we're going, we're growing to 9 million people, that doesn't mean that Calgary and Edmonton are going to be the destination point for all of that, it means that in places like Athabasca it’s probably going to double or triple, even quadruple in size.”
She would like to see the ability for land to be developed faster as well as embracing businesses.
“We have put out a call to the world saying come to Alberta, we're going to have an eight per cent corporate income tax rate,” said Smith. “And that's great but it doesn't matter a hill of beans what the tax rate is if it takes you five or 10 or 15 years to get a project approved.”
Another idea would be for municipalities to keep the education property taxes they raise and put it toward a local projects.
“(Fort MacLeod) is waiting on the provincial government to approve a $1 million interchange so they can open 70 acres of land to turn into industrial use, have an industrial business park area that’s right on the highway is gonna be hugely valued,” she said. "They cannot get an approval on this, but we give them $300,000 in MSI (municipal sustainability initiative), and we take $1.2 million in property tax revenue. Just let them keep it and bang, they've already got the money that they need, they can get on with their lives.”
Members of the UCP who signed up before the Aug. 12 cutoff were mailed ballots Sept. 2 and the completed ballot packages must be returned by Oct. 3 at 5 p.m. The results will be announced Oct. 6.
