Moving forward..
... or back?
Well.
The Wild Rose just finished it's AGM last weekend, and came out energized and ready to engage in the first real battle Alberta politics has seen in 40 years.
That's 40 years of ups and downs under the PC Party, the party which brought us the good (Peter Lougheed, and Ralph Klein the first), the bad (Don Getty), and the blue NDP in Conservative clothing.
What will the future hold? Who knows - but it will be interesting to watch - for a change.
The two big changes promised under Danielle Smith coming out of the convention appear to be increased use of private delivery, public funded health care, and a dismantling of the Human Rights Commission. A Commission that even Lindsay Blackett - the PC Minister responsible, has acknowledged as being deeply flawed - even as he did nothing to improve it.
Most Albertans, I think, are at best ambivalent about the Human Rights Commission. They saw the stupidity of it when it put Ezra Levant on trial for daring to publish the cartoons that Islamic extremists used as the pretext to call for murder and mayhem all over the world. Imagine - a political cartoon pokes fun at their prophet, essentially, for being used as a pretext to spread violence and intolerance - and when Ezra Levant publishes the cartoon himself, to show the world why people are being murdered - the Alberta Human Rights Commission pushes him through the ringer, spending $100,000.00 to defend himself not for attacking Muslims - but for daring to question the sanity of killing people over a political cartoon.
Health care - however, hits us all closer to home. And there is plenty of fear-mongering going on with the left-oriented press and their friends this week. Talk of the Wild Rose bringing us "American style" health care - the rallying cry of anyone opposing changes to the "same old, same old" system which is rapidly falling apart (under "our future" see: "Greece").
To make it clear - what the Wild Rose Alliance is talking about is using the same delivery system that Alberta family doctors have been using for decades. You might call it the "traditional Alberta-style" health care. Where clinics are owned by doctors and staffed by doctors - but the patient care is paid for by the government.
It works.
It works much better than the pure socialist-style health care advocated by "friends of medicare".
Imagine if health care were truly public only. Every private clinic in Alberta would close down, and new building would be paid for by the tax-payer, would be repaired and maintained by the tax-payer, and all the staff members - nurses, receptionists, custodians - would, suddenly, become public sector union employees.
The Wild Rose is doing no more than suggesting we adopt the same efficiencies that family medical clinics have been using, to great success, for some time.
We have a party who's thinking of change, and a party who isn't.
Your choice.
1 comments:
I've been reading your blog over the past few years with great interest. Before, your philosophy on political parties could be summarized in one simple phrase...."Dance with the Lady that Brought you". Now, it appears your philosophy has been slightly modified to....."Dance with the Lady that Brought you, until she gets old and fat"
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