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Shut up you pinko bastards.  Calling for the twinning of a perfectly fine road that will cost taxpayers millions of dollars.  The nanny state can’t take care you and all of your damn problems.   It’s a free country if you don’t like driving highway 63 to Fort McMurray then take an alternate route, or drive extra defensively, be responsible for yourself for once.

Now breathe, the above is only a hyperbolic example of the amazing thinking that goes on in liberturdian and conservative minds when it comes to many issues that face society.  Replace twinning the road with funding health care, or housing for the poor and you can see how particularly despicable this line of thinking actually is, because it happens all the time.   “Oh no”, sayeth our right-wing friends, “It isn’t like that at all, we just want smaller government and more freedom to pursue profits, we certainly do not want people dying on our account.”

    Bullshite.  Actually you do.  The aptly named ‘Highway of Death‘ has been a concern for years and private industry has done nothing to alleviate the situation.  Twinning the highways is strictly an externality for them, or the government’s problem.  Certainly not a project worth the change on the bottom line of the ledger.  One common tawdry verse I here from the right is how responsive private industry is to the ever changing needs of people and the market… what they don’t add is “as long as it profitable” to their sage pronouncements.   Clearly, worker safety is of little concern to the oil companies otherwise the highway would been completed a long time ago.

The people of Alberta should be represented by the government, their interests should be protected first over the interests of private industry.  Denying the government the money it needs to protect the people of Alberta is criminal.  If we had anything even resembling reasonable royalty rates, Highway 63 would have been twinned years ago, heck we probably could have rail service by now.  But, we here in Alberta seem to think that the freedom to plunder and profit comes ahead of the freedom to live safely and securely(most firmly in Southern Alberta where they heartily endorse the Wild Fascist Rose Party).