{"id":567,"date":"2015-05-11T10:22:39","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T14:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=567"},"modified":"2015-05-11T10:49:52","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T14:49:52","slug":"albertan-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/?p=567","title":{"rendered":"Albertan Apocalypse?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ndp<\/a>The NDP sweep in Alberta has been described as an \u2018Orange Crush\u2019, with the NDP colour smothering the Conservative blue and Liberal red.\u00a0 Others are calling it an Albertan apocalypse.\u00a0 There is a connection there, for Orange Crush is also a song by REM, who also penned the apocalyptic ballad ‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It’.<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s the end of some kind of world, for Alberta at least.\u00a0 And since the province\u2019s oil industry has been the energy and economic powerhouse of Canada, it is also, if not the end of, at least a dire change in Canada’s world as we know it.\u00a0 There are already anecdotal stories of the possibility of millions of dollars in contracts being cancelled<\/a> with news of the NDP majority.<\/p>\n

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The National Democratic Party was founded on socialist principles:\u00a0 the governmental usurpation of private property and income, to be redistributed as the government sees fit in lavish funding of liberal pet projects, such as universal daycare, universal education, universal health care, including unrestricted access to abortion, a pro-homosexual agenda, and, particularly bad for the Albertan economy, a radical environmentalist policy. \u00a0Curiously, the founding father and first leader of the NDP in Canada, Tommy Douglas (voted the \u2018greatest Canadian of all time\u2019) and the one who instantiated universal health care, also defended eugenics and forced sterilization of the \u2018mentally and morally unfit\u2019 in his Master\u2019s thesis, modifying his views after witnessing the horrors of Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n

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Of course, you won\u2019t find eugenics in the current NDP policies, but they are still no friends of conservative, moral principles.\u00a0 Then again, as I consider this, I wonder how friendly the Conservatives themselves were to such principles, and how \u2018apocalyptic\u2019 this NDP sweep will really be. \u00a0Canada’s socio-moral policies could hardly get more ‘liberal’, and none of the major political parties, including the Tories in whom many people I know place such hope, has a truly ‘conservative’ stance. \u00a0 Moral questions, such as abortion, same-sex ‘marriage’, artificial reproduction and so on, have been \u2018decided\u2019 by Canadians.\u00a0 Just to be sure, however, at the federal level, NDP leader Tom Mulcair has declared unequivocally (as has Justin Trudeau for the Liberal) that none of his MP\u2019s will ever be permitted to vote for any limiting of access to a woman\u2019s \u2018right to choose\u2019.<\/p>\n

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The central issue here, which none of the political parties is willing or able to address, is the role of government itself. \u00a0Its metastatic growth, myriad employees, unmanageable salaries, benefits and pensions, all the interfering laws and polices, have grown under the Tories, as they will under the NDP.\u00a0 As Rex Murphy<\/a> has written, the complacency of government is a big part of the problem, exemplified in the \u2018let them eat cake\u2019 attitude of Alison Redford, who apparently treated Albertan\u2019s tax money as her own private treasure trove, and Jim Prentice\u2019s too-clever politicism, removing the true conservative voice of Albertans by absorbing the Wildrose party into the one, big, bland Tory tent. \u00a0Like King David, they have had their forty years of governance, and Murphy says that the NDP shake-up is a good thing.<\/p>\n

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Although I sympathize with Murphy\u2019s analysis, and with disaffection with the political class in general, I also ponder the words of a wise man I know, that as bad as things are, they could always get worse.<\/p>\n

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At least the Conservatives, for example, allowed the partial funding of private schools and even homeschooling.\u00a0 I would rather government get more or less out of education altogether, but these policies are a step in the right direction.\u00a0 Jim Prentice also recognized the dire economic situation facing Albertans (and Canada as a whole),\u00a0 and tried to implement a prudent budget controlling costs to some extent.<\/p>\n

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Both of these may go under Rachel Notley and her untested, but zealous, NDP neophytes, who, from the utopian policies they are willing to make public, seem to consider money no object.\u00a0 Most Canadians, especially those with a proclivity to the NDP, live in an economic dream world, and most young voters in Alberta and Canada have grown up highly dependent upon the governmnet teat. \u00a0All \u00a0I can hope is that some kind of wake-up call is imminent.\u00a0 Who, pray tell, is going to pay for yet-further universal access to prescription drugs, daycare, and university education, as well as the lucrative ‘government jobs’ everyone is vying for these days?\u00a0 Canada is already more than halfway to a trillion dollar debt, with no end in sight, and the oil money is drying up like a old Texan well.<\/p>\n

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Reality is a very effective, but also often a painful, teacher.\u00a0 Albertans will know what they have voted for soon enough and I hope that they will realize, with the rest of Canada, that only within the reality of the moral law (and that includes a prudent economic policy) can a province or country be governed well.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

May 11, 2015<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The NDP sweep in Alberta has been described as an \u2018Orange Crush\u2019, with the NDP colour smothering the Conservative blue and Liberal red.\u00a0 Others are calling it an Albertan apocalypse.\u00a0 There is a connection there, for Orange Crush is also a song by REM, who also penned the apocalyptic ballad ‘It’s the End of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":572,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions\/572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnpaulmeenan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}