Quote:
Originally Posted by belsarius
I would reject that whole idea of people being ill-informed, I am very informed and voted NDP based on their platform. I believe a lot of people did also. There is something to be said for the social issues, the government has more to do than just balance the books.
Their policies are as valid as any other party's and have been validated on numerous occasions by industry. It is a ####ty situation that no other government would be doing well in. I am not going to say they haven't made mistakes, but I think it is a fools dream to think the Wildrose would have lifted Alberta out of this recession any faster, but that we will never know.
Sure there are some people that regret their vote and did not know who they were voting for but a lot of Wildrosers did too I'm sure. To blame the whole election on ill-informed or uneducated is unfounded and sour grapes, especially considering it was a swing by the educated that helped the election.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...ticle24352152/
"Big shifts in voting patterns were related to education levels. Ridings that have above-average proportions of university-degree holders went overwhelmingly PC in 2012 – 32 of the 43 ridings – and 29 of them went NDP this time. Ridings with lower levels of university education, according to Statistics Canada, shifted toward the NDP as well, but remained a strength of the Wildrose in both elections." |
There is a very large difference between being an educated voter, and voting in an educated manner.
Presenting the NDP victory as some form of well thought out and reasoned outcome by the educated is naive. Just because you are educated does not mean you are any less prone to bias or flawed decision making. If anything, it places a far higher responsibility to truly weigh, without bias, what is in the best interests of the province.
If you truly believe that saddling the province with a massive debt burden, driving away business, and blindly seeking "environmental social license" is in Albertas best interest, I'm not sure what to say.
A protest vote yielded this province an incompetent collection of MLAs driven by ideology.
The argument that "any other government would be struggling" is equally naive.
The NDP from the start have done nothing but increase costs to Albertans and corporations.
My expectation for a government faced by an unprecedented recession is to do everything in their power to incentivize businesses in the province to continue investing and operating here.
The reality is that from the start the NDP government has operated to increase costs, increase uncertainty, and reduce the attractiveness of investing in Alberta.
So no, they can't control the hand they were dealt when elected. They sure as hell can control how they responded. And to date, that response has been disastrous, filled with incompetence, and will ultimately result in a massive and unacceptable debt burden on future generations of Albertans.
When you say that voting for the NDP was educated, that truly concerns me.