Quote:
Originally Posted by Tron_fdc
In all honesty, I'm a born and raised Calgarian, and I've been taught pretty much my entire life to be so anti-liberal that even the thought of voting for them provincially (no matter how different they may be from the feds) conjures up visions of the NEP and my dad coming home one day wondering if we were going to lose our house that month.
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That image wasn't exclusive to just people in Alberta unfortunately. Trust me, the average middle-class person in the rest of the country was not enjoying the highlife because of the NEP. The country was in a severe energy crisis because of international events outside of our control. The NEP may not have been fair to Albertans who were pretty much living in a bubble at the time, but it was a serious life line to people in the east and in remote areas. I get the impression that many native Albertans think that the NEP was designed so that easterns could profit from Alberta, when in fact, it was just meant to be a temporary way for the country as a whole to hold its head above water until the crisis subsided.
It's easy to point to the Liberals when it comes to the NEP, but I do think the federal Conservatives would have done something similar. The fact that Brian Mulroney kept the NEP until it was time for him to start worrying about the next election says a lot about the necessity of it at the time.