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The amount of horseshit per square centimetre in this Edmonton Journal editorial must violate the laws of physics, it just isn’t reasonable to pack this much fail into one column of newspaper. Who wrote this tepid work of Tory apologia? To me it smells like the business owners out East decided they needed to nobly stand up for the privileged in our province.
I’ve excerpted the parts I wanted to comment on, but you really should read the entire slavering, propagandistic ode the PC party over at the lowly esteemed Edmonton Journal. Duly note that this is corporate boot-licking at its finest, we should expect nothing less from the fearlessly-besotted-lick-spittles of what passes for editorial board over at the EJ.
“The choice, then, in Tuesday’s provincial election, comes down to competing economic visions.
We need a premier who can be our chief executive, piloting a $48-billion public company through a fiscal minefield for at least the next two years, while the world price of Alberta’s lifeblood, its oil, remains below $75 per barrel.
That person is Jim Prentice.”
I’m not looking for a fracking CEO to run our province. The last thing we need is more business bullshit that erodes our values and sense of community, and more to the point our sense of humanity.
“In his March budget, Prentice came to grips with the issue of the province’s dependence on volatile oil revenues, and took the bold move of ending Alberta’s anti-tax political culture.”
Boldly raising the sin taxes and the gas tax. Visionary stuff there, filled with visiony things and stuff…
“Is it a perfect plan? No. Even he’s admitted that, having reversed a decision to cut a charitable tax credit in half. There’s more room for improvement; many voters believe he should have spread the tax pain to the corporate sector.
Those types of changes could come if Prentice listens to the apparent groundswell of discontent that’s being revealed by recent polls.”
OH OF COURSE, our allegiance to the status quo has been serving the people of Alberta so damn well over the last 41 years. Please note that changing the status quo never starts with electing more of the status quo.
“No one wants another costly and divisive election, hard on the heels of this one.”
Then don’t vote PC and we won’t have any problems with another divisive election, you know kinda like this election called opportunistically before the legislated date.
“only the PCs have campaigned on a vision that balances revenue generation with spending cuts in a way that will allow Alberta to weather this fiscal crisis and be better prepared to avoid future catastrophic swings in oil prices.”
Oh you mean where we balance the books on the backs of the poor and middle class while the elites and the corporations continue to unjustly prosper in our society. I’m tired of that particular PC corporate provincial strategy.
“That sort of thinking is a clear sign that Prentice isn’t leading the same old Tory party; he’s a leader with clarity of vision and the aptitude to chart a new course for Alberta.”
How come this ‘new course’ sounds and looks exactly like the old course from yesteryear, only with different clowns at the wheel? There is no ‘new course’ only more of the same BS that has been and will be bad for the average Albertan.
Let us hope the NDP surges to victory finally sweeping the rotten PC dynasty into the dustbin of history. I’m still very wary though, we might need round “N” of PC guided political seppuku, as 41 years of one party rule might not be enough.
From the CBC –
Of course, this is all based on the premise that the polls are accurately gauging the state of the race in Alberta. With the 2012 debacle still in everyone’s mind, that is a risky proposition. No wonder, then, that many Albertans think the PCs will still win.
While voters will have the final word on the accuracy of the polls, there is good reason to doubt that the same phenomenon that saved Alison Redford in 2012 will work in Prentice’s favour in 2015.
Only two parties, Redford’s PCs and Danielle Smith’s Wildrose, were in the running in the last election. And with both parties being adjacent to one another on the political spectrum, a swing from Wildrose to the Tories in the final days was hardly unimaginable. The PCs may have also benefited from Liberal voters moving over to support a centrist like Redford to block a right-wing Wildrose government.
But those dynamics are no longer at play. There are now three parties in the running, and their supporters do not so easily move from one party to another. If there is a shift in the final days to block one party, it is not so clear that the move would occur all in the same direction as it did in 2012. In many parts of the province, the NDP has become a better option to block Wildrose than the PCs. Similarly, any move to block the NDP might go to Wildrose rather than the Tories.
Vaccination is one of those medical topics in which people tend to lose their shit. As it happens, you can also risk losing your children if you decide to embrace the foolishness that is the anti-vax movement. Here is a story of a mother’s close encounter with easily preventable childhood diseases.
Learning the Hard Way: My Journey from #AntiVaxx to Science
“I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me. Emotionally I’m a bit raw. Mentally a bit taxed. Physically I’m fine. All seven of my unvaccinated children have whooping cough, and the kicker is that they may have given it to my five month old niece, too young to be fully vaccinated.
We’d had a games night at our house in March, my brother-in-law had a full-blown cold, so when the kids started with a dry cough a few days later I didn’t think much of it. But a week after the symptoms started the kids weren’t improving, in fact they were getting worse. And the cough. No one had a runny nose or sneezing but they all had the same unproductive cough. Between coughing fits they were fine.
Then a few days later at midnight I snapped. My youngest three children were coughing so hard they would gag or vomit. I’d never seen anything like this before. Watching our youngest struggle with this choking cough, bringing up clear, stringy mucus – I had heard of this before somewhere. My mom said I had it when I was a kid. I snapped into ‘something is WRONG’ mode.
I jumped on Google to type in “child cough.” My kids had all but one symptom of pertussis, none of them had the characteristic “whoop.” But they had everything else.
We had vaccinated our first three children on an alternative schedule and our youngest four weren’t vaccinated at all. We stopped because we were scared and didn’t know who to trust. Was the medical community just paid off puppets of a Big Pharma-Government-Media conspiracy? Were these vaccines even necessary in this day and age? Were we unwittingly doing greater harm than help to our beloved children? So much smoke must mean a fire so we defaulted to the ‘do nothing and hope nothing bad happens’ position.
For years relatives tried to persuade us to reconsider through emails and links, but this only irritated us and made us defensive. Secretly, I hoped I would find the proof I needed to hold the course, but deep down I was resigned to only find endless conflicting arguments that never resolved anything. No matter if we vaccinated or not, I thought, it would be nothing more than a coin toss with horrible risks either way.
When the Disneyland measles outbreak happened my husband and I agreed to take a new look and weigh the evidence on both sides. A friend suggested I write out my questions so we could tackle them one by one. Just getting it out on paper helped so much. I only ended up with a handful of questions. But more potent than my questions were my biases.
I just didn’t trust civic government, the medical community, the pharmaceutical industry, and people in general. By default, I had excluded all research available from any major, reputable organization. Could all the in-house, independent, peer-reviewed clinical trials, research papers and studies across the globe ALL be flawed, corrupt and untrustworthy?
The final shift came when I connected the dots between a small, but real measles outbreak in my personal circles this time last year. But for the grace of God, our family was one step from contracting measles in our mostly under-or-unvaccinated 7 kids. Maybe we could have weathered that storm unscathed in personal quarantine. But in the 4 highly contagious days before any symptoms show we easily could have passed on our infection to my sister’s toddlers or her 34-week-old son in the NICU.
When I connected the dates for everyone involved it chilled me to the bone. I looked again at the science and evidence for community immunity and found myself gripped with a very real sense of personal and social responsibility before God and man. The time had come to make a more fully informed decision than we did 6 years ago. I sat down with our family doctor and we put together a catch-up vaccination schedule for our children.
That schedule that was supposed to start the week after I found myself in the waiting room of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) with my 10-month-old son, waiting to confirm if he had whooping cough.
I said before that the irony isn’t lost on me that I’m writing this from quarantine. For six years we were frozen in fear from vaccines, and now we are frozen because of the disease. My oldest two are getting better, the youngest four are getting worse and fast. Ottawa Public Health has been so helpful and communicative, trying to get us the help we need while keeping the community safe. We are under quarantine and starting antibiotics. Tonight, the baby started ‘whooping’. I did the right thing going to the hospital when I did. I can only hope this painfully honest sharing will help others.
I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest. Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk. I want them to know that we tried our best to protect our kids when we were afraid of vaccination and we are doing our best now, for everyone’s sake, by getting them up to date. We can’t take it back … but we can learn from this and help others the same way we have been helped.
Vaccination is a serious decision about our personal and public health that can’t be made out of fear, capitulation or following any crowd. No one was more surprised than us to find solid answers that actually laid our fears to rest. I am confident that anyone with questions can find answers. I would only advise them to check your biases, sources and calendar: Time waits for no parent.
– Edited by Leslie Waghorn
Rolling the dice with your children is irresponsible – making that choice for other children is reprehensible.
We here in Canada often like to think of ourselves as the ‘good guys’. Our history somehow a few degrees shinier, more pristine than the the bloodstained record our American neighbours seem to bandy about with pride.
Like any colonial narrative though certain distortions are present and sometimes the distortions are encouraged. Let’s take a look at one incident in our history through the lens of Thomas King in his work The Inconvenient Indian – specifically about a land grant in 1717 by the French Crown of a parcel of land by the Ottawa River to the Sulpician Missionary Society:
“The gift did not sit well with the Mohawk, since the land in the French Grant was their land, and for the next 151 years, this piece of real estate wold be a thorn in the side of Mohawk and Sulpician relations.
In 1868, a year after Confederation had overtaken Canada, Joseph Onasakenrat, a chief of the Mohawk, wrote a letter to the Sulpicians demanding the return of the land within eight days. The Sulpicians ignored the warning, and Onasakenrat led a march on the Sulpician seminary, weapons in hand. After a short and rather unpleasant confrontation, local authorities arrived and forced the Mohawks to retreat. Then, in 1936, the Sulpicians sold the property and left the area. The Mohawk protested the sale, and again, the protest fell on deaf ears.
Twenty three years later, in 1959, a nine-hole golf course, Club de Golf d’Oka, was built on the land, right next to the band’s cemetery. This time the Mohawk launched a legal protest, hoping that the courts would provide them with some relief from White encroachment. The authorities and the courts dillied back and dallied forth, and in the meantime, the developers went ahead with the construction of the course, and happy golfers began roaming up and down the fairways in their little carts.
Finally in 1977, the Mohawk filed an official land claim with the federal Office of Native Claims in an attempt to recapture the land. Nine yearts later, the claim was rejected because it failed to meet certain legal criteria. Which was a fancy way of saying that the Mohawk couldn’t prove that they owned the land, at least not in the way that Whites recognized ownership.
For the next eleven years, relations between the town of Oka and the Mohawk were spotty. Then, in 1989, the mayor of Oka Jean Ouellette, announced exciting news that the old golf course was going to be expanded into an eighteen-hole course, and that sixty luxury condominiums would also be built. In order to manage this expansion, the town prepared to move on the Mohawk, taking more of their land, levelling a forest known among the Mohawk as “the Pines”, and building new fairways and condominiums on top of the band cemetery.
That did it. After 270 – odd years of dealing with European arrogance and indifference, after trying every legal avenue available, the Mohawk had had enough. On March 10, 1990, Natives began occupying the Pines, protecting their trees and their graveyard. Their land.
Five months later, in the heat of July, the confrontation became a shooting war. Neither the provincial government not the federal government wanted to deal with the situation. Jean Ouellette had no intention of talking with the Mohawk and said so on television. Instead, he insisted that the province send in the Sûreté du Québec, and in they came, storming the barricades that the Mohawk had erected with tear gas and flash-bang grenades. Shots were fired. No one knows who fired first. Not that it would have made much difference. And when the smoke cleared, Corporal Marcel Lemay had been mortally wounded and a Mohawk elder, Joe Armstrong, had suffered what would be a fatal heart attack trying to escape an angry mob.
So began the Oka Crisis.”
-Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian. p. 233 – 234
A mere 270 years-ish of lag time to get a land claim resloved, of course with loss of life and bloodshed. And Canada still claims to be one of the “good” colonial powers…
Why isn’t unabashed self interest paying of for meeeeee?
The politics in Alberta usually annoy the hell out of me. How can the people of this province continue to elect a party that is puts the interests of Big Oil first in every fiscal decision. For the latest example please see the latest Alberta budget, after we all have been looking in the mirror, where everyone except corporations got a tax hike. Because jobs. Keep voting PC Alberta blue zombies, keep voting blue. Alberta voter idiocy aside; we’re actually here to look at the slow motion career seppuku going on for the Wild Rose defectors.
“Danielle Smith has lost her bid for the Progressive Conservative nomination in her riding of Highwood, losing out to Okotoks Coun. Carrie Fischer. “
What? The former leader of the Wild Rose Party just failed to get her ass nominated. How is that even possible after betraying your hard right conservative base? Hard right-wingers are known for their forgiveness and short memories when it comes to what they see as treasonous behaviour. I have to say I am quite shocked at this outcome.
Smith was quite gracious in her failure:
“This is, of course, a mixed-emotions day for me. I did want to get a mandate to be the PC candidate for Highwood, but residents felt otherwise,” she said. “I look forward to supporting Carrie in her efforts to win this riding for the Progressive Conservatives.”
She said her decision to leave the Wildrose for the PC party, which may have contributed to her loss, was “absolutely not” a mistake.
Oh lordy, call in the LOL-copters Danielle Smith. In fact, call in the LOL-legionairs. We’ll need all the guffaws as your garrulous words are fooling exactly no one. You just got burned for your brash political opportunism.
I’ve never been a fan of the Wild Rose party, but they were the official opposition in Alberta and they did their best to slow down the PC corporate gravy train. The exodus of Smith and the others devastated the party and the WRP is still rebuilding thanks to these floor crossers.
Make no mistake – I shed no tears for the WRP – but my animus lies with the resulting political vacuum created because the damn Opposition just joined the damn Government. Who is left to keep our Big-Oil loving PC government in check?
Friends, Albertans – you’ll just have to look in the mirror.
GSA’s OK!
Allow me to put on my cynical hat for just a second to analyze the recent legislative flip-flop by the Alberta Government. I’d like to investigate why it is wrong to paint the narrative of this picture as anything other than shameless pandering to the people of Alberta.
We’ll let the Edmonton Journal set the stage:
“EDMONTON – In a stunning about-face, the Progressive Conservative government Tuesday passed a new law making the approval of gay-straight alliances mandatory in Alberta schools, a move celebrated as a leap forward for human rights in the province.”
This is good news. I’m all for more support systems for people who are often marginalized and bullied within the school system. I have no contention with the actual passing of this bill.
“Education Minister Gordon Dirks tabled a surprise amendment to the government’s Bill 10 on the first day of the spring session. Dirks said he spent months consulting with Albertans since Premier Jim Prentice put the legislation on hold in December. Some of those moments were very moving moments as you heard students telling their stories of being bullied, discriminated against, feeling suicidal, even attempting (it),” Dirks said. When that happens and you have those kinds of intimate, frank conversations with students, it goes from your head to your heart.”
I’m going to call bullshit right here. This is the same government that is dismissively slashing the funding to the Child and Youth Advocate of Alberta. You know, the people responsible for the welfare of children in Alberta, and also tasked with inquiring into why so many children are dying when they become wards of the state. Let’s get the money quote here on the supposed benevolence of your government –
“Afterwards, Progressive Conservative MLA Genia Leskiw was asked by reporters why there is money available for the Auditor General but not the child and youth advocate. […] She said she doesn’t believe the advocate’s office “sharpened their pencils as sharp as they could have.”
First it is “Look in the mirror” and now we have “sharpening their pencils...” The duplicity and arrogance of this Tory government is quite appalling.
Of course slashing the budget of the Youth Advocate has nothing to do with said advocates’ involvement in bad PR tidbits like this:
“The Alberta government has dramatically under-reported the number of child welfare deaths over the past decade, undermining public accountability and thwarting efforts at prevention and reform. A six-month Edmonton Journal-Calgary Herald investigation found 145 foster children have died since 1999, nearly triple the 56 deaths revealed in government annual reports over the same period.”
Yep, they (The CYA) had better start manning the pencil sharpeners, stat! Clearly, they lost their funding because of the glaring inefficiencies in their department…
Ah, but let us return to the sunny and fresh idea that we have democracy and our leaders listen closely to the peons people who elected them.
“Passage of the law Tuesday all but took the issue off the table weeks before Prentice is expected to call a spring election. This is a case of a government responding to what they are hearing from the citizens of the province, including — I would emphasize — young people, who have had a significant say in this, who have moved me, and who have moved the minister,” Prentice said. “
WOW! Watch our keen government action; responding with adroit swiftness to issues that, to the government, have no meaning outside of the opportunity for some beneficial PR on the embarrassing social conservative front (hey look at us, we are not completely regressive ftw!).
Citizens of the province have been demanding more royalties from oil companies.
Citizens of this province have been demanding an end to the environmental chaos being sown in the Tar Sands region.
Citizens of this province have been demanding a fair and progressive tax structure.
Citizens of this province have been demanding prudent use of oil revenue and the establishment of a fund that would benefit all Albertans.
Citizens of this province have been demanding a rational plan of action to facilitate the ‘boomer bump’ in demand for medical services.
On these issues dear friends – there are no fucks to give – because these all involve diminishing the status of the moneyed few that help our elected officials ‘properly’ govern this fine province. So, hoi-poli, revel in your amazing victory and in making the government really “listen” to your concerns, especially you, younger Albertans.
Meanwhile, back at the Child Advocate office:
“Last May the government expanded the responsibilities of the advocate’s office, effectively doubling the number of child death reviews that need to be done each year, Graff said. In July, the committee agreed to increase Graff’s budget, “so there was acknowledgement that the additional work demanded additional resources,” he said. This is an absolute example to do more as a result of legislative amendment and then with the decision yesterday being provided with less resources to do it.”
Graff [Alberta’s CYA] is worried they may have to reduce their workload.
“The very best we can do is delay some of investigations,” he said. “We wouldn’t want to be making decision about whether or not they’re ever done based on dollars.”
Yes, I believe we should celebrate the GSA ruling, but realize that this small victory and frame it in a context of a government that will “listen” only when the perceived cost of doing said thing, is politically expedient.
Del Graff, Alberta’s CYA looking sombre in as he contemplates getting more work *and* less funds.
Well it had to happen sooner or later, the viciously anti-woman contingent of local forced birth brigade came to campus with their misleading fetus porn and all the lovely related argument for women to be incubators first and people second.
Thankfully the feminist and queer communities counter demonstrated to help push back some of the nonsense being spread.
Life-Site News has a sad. Too bad fetus-fetishists.
Helpful hints for the local forced birth advocates.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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