Quote:
Originally Posted by Iowa_Flames_Fan
As it is now, the Tories will give us nothing because it makes no difference, the Liberals will give us nothing because we'll never vote for them anyway, and the NDP are irrelevant. How does that serve Alberta's interests?
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That's tough to say without seeing the platforms. The last Liberal election platform would have been disasterous for Alberta's economy. Under that regime, the one area that is still functioning at all (Oil Sands) would have been faced with enough taxes to make the in-situ extraction uneconomical while seriously threatening the pit mines. This would have killed probably 80% of the drilling that will be happening this winter in the province plus the billions in construction plans that are ongoing.
I'm sure I sound like a broken record but until I see what Ignatieff plans to do with Alberta's economy, I cannot conceive of voting for him. My biggest worry is that there will be a Lib-NDP-Bloc coalition along the lines of the previous one, which included as part of the coalition document a plan to implement a 1990 standard for a cap-and-trade GHG plan. 1990 was before any of the current projects in the Oil Sands were underway and would effectively result in another tax shifting money out of our province's main industry elsewhere.
As we have seen with the changes in the royalty regime, what seems like a very small change in terms of % makes a huge difference in the resulting drilling activity. Projects that were planned with 100's of wells before last winter were knocked back to a handful. This has led to us losing more than half of the drilling crews, service company jobs, head office jobs and consultant work. These projects might be back up this winter because the provincial Tories have backed off of the royalty changes having seen their revenues plummet as a direct result.
I cannot vote myself out of a job. I cannot vote to gut the industry that drives city in which I live. We may not be getting economic "action" out of the Conservative government but we sure are preventing something much worse. They are doing what a good capitalist wants them to do - staying out of the way and letting us get down to the business of business.