[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

Up until about three months ago, every employer in this province paid at least 20 per cent higher for labour than their counterparts in other provinces. If you want to attract a welder or accountant from Ontario, you have to pay a lot more. If you want someone in Calgary to work the counter at Tim Horton's you have to pay a lot more than in Rimouski. Why would you expect the public sector to be different?

And I think it's critically important to acknowledge the role extensive oilsands development has played in increasing inflation in the province.

Which is all well and good except that part of the business model appears to be externalizing all those costs onto the tax payers of alberta, rather than seeing Alberta collect higher taxes to deal with the influx of residents, labour, and associated costs.

This is something Peter Lougheed talked about while Premiere and continued to talk about up to his death:

Lougheed, whose battles with Ottawa over the National Energy Program in the early 1980s are part of Alberta lore, said the province's current economy is leaving a lot of losers and few winners.

In particular, farmers, small-business owners and people of fixed incomes are struggling to keep pace.

"If you overheat an economy and you affect citizens generally in terms of the costs of everything they buy . . . you're to the detriment of the citizens today," he said.

Lougheed said "he wouldn't have envisioned" that the Klein government would have permitted so much oilsands development without more conditions, like greater requirements for companies to help fund capital projects in the mined areas.

During his time in office, Lougheed said his government established conditions for Syncrude to work in an orderly way with the government to develop the provincial facilities necessary in northeast Alberta.

"What conditions, if any, did the province put on the oilsands projects?" he asked of the Klein government.

Political scientist McCormick argued that Klein's long-held plan of letting the market prevail failed Albertans when it was clearly time for the government to step in and help manage the economy.

The government's inability to adequately plan in the last few years is best epitomized through the allocation of the $400 prosperity cheques earlier this year to nearly all Albertans -- at a cost of $1.3 billion to the provincial treasury.

But what apparently prompted Lougheed the reinsert himself into the political debate was the Klein government’s hands-off approach to the energy industry. In 2005-6, the oilpatch, especially the oilsands, were booming again and Klein’s policy was to let the market decide.

After taking a helicopter ride over the oilsands, Lougheed grew increasingly uneasy about the direction of policy and development and spoke out.

Royalties had fallen well below targets set in his day, said Lougheed. The oil boom brought inflation that was hurting consumers and other businesses and the province was about to ship thousands of value-added jobs down the pipeline by sending bitumen to U.S refineries, he warned.

The former premier called for “orderly growth” in the oilsands, one project at a time, rather than the black-gold rush unleashed by Klein.

“I feel strongly we should be processing bitumen in Alberta,” he said in a recent interview.

More recently, he came out against TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline to ship Alberta bitumen to the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Maybe everyone should give back their Ralph Bucks?