One of the big reasons that turned me off the P.C.'s was the fact that they have added almost nothing to the Heritage fund despite years of record growth and high surpluses. Instead they spent the money on things like a $2B bribe for the teachers and put the rest into a new sustainability fund. The sustainability fund seemed to me like a stick your head in the sand fund. Yes, I agree with the idea of putting money away to smooth budgets out over the ups and downs of the economy but we did not have that bad of a run and they have bled it down to almost nothing and are still drawing from it this year when the oil patch is looking to break records for spending and drilling.
Another issue that I have with them is the fly by night way they seem to create a contentious policy defend it for a while and deny that there is anything wrong and eventually tweak it a bit before starting again and repeating several times before they have a law that gets passed. The most obvious example of this is the royalty review, they promised that they would review the royalty rates so they issued new royalty rates after closed door meetings. These rates also included veiled threats that if certain oil sands companies didn't renegotiate existing contracts they would have trouble with future applications and expansion. Since the royalty rates came out they received backlash and found that E and P money was shifting to B.C. and Saskatchewan and internationally so they changed the rates to encourage one form of drilling after another before finally settling on rates that were similar to what we had at the start. The other issue that is more important to the rural population is the Land Use Framework. They issued it and faced immediate criticism but rather than step back and review the complaints they went on a speaking tour and toured the province to declare that the bills were flawless and the sections about preventing appeals to the courts superseding all other acts were just lawyer speak and that we should trust the government that they wouldn't abuse it. After a few months of touring and sending out speakers (all of whom refused to debate the bill with anyone informed and chose instead to give a speech) they modified the bill. I think it had been modified three times now and the current ads highlight the fact that you do have access to the courts despite an entire speaking tour assuring people that there was no need to access the courts.
Looking at Alison Redford's leadership promises two come to mind that were broken almost immediately upon gaining power. The first a lot of people don't care about, but she promised fixed election dates and after thinking about it decided that election seasons were good enough. The second is the money that she promised to inject into the school boards after the election. She assured voters that the money ($130 million I think) would come from savings that she would find in the budget and the money would not come from the Sustainability fund. Once elected she decided that it was easier to just pull the money from the Sustainability fund and ignore the promise to find the savings from current spending.
Going more in depth, I don't like the trend towards centralization that has been happening over the last decade or so. Alberta Health went from local boards to regional boards to the health super board but I don't think that anything has improved. Bill 2 seems like an attempt to do the same with the school board and most other departments are doing the same. Looking at forestry, it used to be that new small scale projects like a single wellsite or short pipeline were approved locally by the forest officers who visited the sites. Now everything is approved by employees in Edmonton who don't visit the sites and the local forestry officers are turning into compliance officers.
There are quite a few reasons that I have turned away from the P.C. party but the above is a few of them.
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