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Originally Posted by GP_Matt
I read through the Liberal plan and will admit that some of it looks interesting. I don't like the loan forgiveness for student debt as it rewards and encourages debt. The foreign credentials program is a lot more complicated than they are making it seem. I don't like the proposed personal tax increases or the corporate tax increases. Increasing the taxes paid by the higher income earners is punitive towards single income families and encourages dual income families. (I suppose his two year pre school helps out there as well) I also don't understand why they feel the need to bump taxes on everything but small businesses, why are large companies so bad? The elimination of private school funding seems aggressive, I am not sure what the issue is with private schools, but if a parent decides to send their child to a private school why shouldn't they be able to have their tax dollars support it? Why is a Catholic education acceptable but a Muslim education a waste of tax payers dollars? What about sports schools that build the class schedule around athletic events, are those bad too?
I don't like their plans to switch elections to a single transferable vote. I think that is an important enough issue that it should be determined via a referendum rather than party platform. There are lots of good ideas for reforming the electoral process but I think the issues are complicated enough to demand a full debate and referendum before a major part of our democracy is altered.
Sorry that the above is a bit scattered, I wrote it while reading the platform.
Slava, as a courtesy, would you consider picking out the actual portions of the WRA platform that you don't like for discussion?
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I woud gladly go through and do this. Its going to take a lot of time though as they have these things all separated into different PDF's. In general though:
Education: I don't care for the funding of schools with religious agendas, and don't want to see incresed funding for private schools at all. In truth, I love the Liberal policy on these; if you want to send your children to private school, great, you cut the cheque. I'm on the fence about having the school boards pick where the schools are built as well. I get what they are driving at here, but I have some reservations about this....maybe I'll just leave it at that rather than go on a tangent with my thoughts on the CBE here. They have some policies which are more student-focused and I do agree with the ideas here, but frankly there are already some of these alternatives in the current public system. Its not a huge point of departure from the current system in some cases. I also have some reservations about the idea of keeping special needs students in the "normal" classroom. This isn't totally fleshed out, but thats the idea in their policy document.
Healthcare: This is a pretty simple one. I disagree completely that we can reduce costs by paying private care providers rather than public. Its really not likely to be effective in Alberta. I know that the Wildrose talks about Europe (which is obviously better than the other often quoted comparison to the south of us), but I have a lot of questions. We don't have anywhere near the population density that the Europeans do; can we know that this delivery method would be as effective here? Thats the tip of the iceberg though. Its just a policy I disagree with on a number of levels.
I'm not going through each plank on an issue by issue basis. I just don't see a lot of new ideas being offered up here though.