Wildrose MLA for Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock Glenn van Dijken has come out criticizing Premier Rachel Notley’s “campaign style” state of the province address.
“It was more a campaign speech trying to tell the NDP ideological vision, as opposed to a state of the province address,” he said of the Oct. 19 premier’s address. “A state of the province of address will tell me where are we at with some of the issues that are being faced, especially from a financial standpoint.”
His takeaway was that Notley’s speech did little to explain the actual state of the province and what would be done to tackle the $10.4 billion deficit.
“We are continuing on a road that will lead to more deficit and more debt,” he said. “That is essentially being downloaded onto the next generation. Are we comfortable with downloading all those expenses onto the next generation?’”
The Wildrose have opposed two notable and controversial NDP platforms — the carbon levy and the minimum wage hike to $15 an hour.
“By imposing and implementing their ideological experiments on Albertans, it has put a lot of Albertans in a position of uncertainty, a certain amount of instability, and not knowing what their future holds,” he said. “It’s also put a lot of businesses in a state of uncertainty.”
He added that a carbon tax would also lead to more risk and less investment in the economy.
“When a government proceeds in a direction that’s not necessarily proven to work, when I talk about ideological experiment, I’m talking about this idea that a carbon tax is going to all of a sudden buy us a social licence we need to move our product,” he said. “We need to also understand that there’s also going to be other repercussions and put us in a non-competitive position, especially if it doesn’t give us the social licence that’s it’s promising to get us.”
Notley gave her state of the province address to an audience in Calgary last Wednesday. In it, she said that stability was the “watchword” and there would be “certainty in overall commitments from our government,” but the provincial budget would eventually have to be balanced.
In the meantime, there would not be much headroom for new spending proposals until the economy recovers.
She continued to push for access to tidewaters in order to diversify markets. Diversifying markets, she pointed out, would also involve creating new jobs in the agri-food sector, tourism, technology, manufacturing and in creative industries.
However, as commodity prices tumble, she said the government would not cut public-sector jobs and cause “a second crisis” in the province.
“This idea that we should deal with the international price of oil by imposing deep cutbacks to our healthcare and children’s education … Those days are over in Alberta.”
Later on, she criticized what she called the opposition’s “socialism for the rich and austerity for everyone else” ideology.
“Our friends on the other side of the legislature believe that if you give tax cuts to the rich and cut everyone else’s public services, somehow everyone will benefit,” she added. “The lie that looking after only the fortunate helps everyone else has been proved wrong everywhere in the industrialized world.”
However, van Dijken said that the public sector is linked to Alberta’s resource commodities — which fund the province’s budget, so the budget should follow suit.
“I’m not saying if oil goes down 50 per cent, public sector expenses need to go down 50 per cent,” he said. “But to think these happen in isolation of each other, I do not believe that.”
Notley’s speech also highlighted several other environmental initiatives the government would take, such as capping oil-sands emissions, a methane-reduction program,and replacing coal power with natural gas.
“As one of the world’s major energy producers, we need to take control of the climate-change issue before to takes control of us,” she said. “Leading on climate change is exactly what we are going to do. We’re going to price carbon exactly as more credible economists —many of them conservative — argue will create the right incentives to reduce emissions at the least economic cost. We are going to make sure low- and middle-income families in Alberta won’t be hurt by a carbon price by providing them with a rebate.”
She assured that her government would freeze tuition and cap Alberta Medical Association doctor’s wage increases to two per cent until 2018.
