On Saturday February 14th, Premier Jim Prentice paid Chestermere a visit. With a brief interview session with the media to start the visit off, followed by a get together at Lakeside Greens Golf Course for some public interaction where a couple hundred people, elected officials, and local business owners were in attendance.
Premier Prentice began his address by stating, “There are a lot of incredibly wonderful things about being the Premier of Alberta, but none of them matters as much to be as being able to put my jeans and my cowboy boots on and travel around the Province speaking to people and having a chance to chat with them”. In a more serious moment though, the Premier stated that these are serious times and there are hard tasks ahead.
“There is something very exciting taking place in our Province right now. Something really positive going on in Alberta right now that we should all be excited about because young men and women are coming forward to serve us in government, to do a ‘tour of duty’ I call it in public service. “, commented the Premier.
Of course the topic of discussion that was on everyone’s minds is the budget and the financial future of Alberta. “We are facing some challenging times. We will get through this. We’ve got through this before. We have a very strong, diverse, multicultural society. We’re grounded in this Province, we have strong communities, strong families, we’ll get through this” explained the Premier.
Although Albertan’s have gone through this commodity cycle before, the Premier stated that this is more severe and will last longer than we have seen in the past but feels that due to the strength of Alberta and its residence, it will get better.
“We’ve had the best of everything. You do not win a bigger lottery then being an Albertan. Nothing is ever perfect when it comes to public services, but we have the best of everything. There’s improvements for sure that we need to make in healthcare, it’s the biggest challenge we have. I know in places like Airdrie, here (Chestermere) and on the west side of town (Calgary), the quality of hospital care but at the end of the day, as Albertans, we have the best of everything”.
With regards to Education, the Premier said that there are changes being made that will continually improve in all aspects of the Education happening in Alberta. All of these luxuries of living in Alberta definitely come with their price. The Premier went on to explain that the cost of the public services that we have in Alberta are by quite a margin, the highest anywhere in Canada at the same time having the lowest taxes of anywhere in Canada – but a significant amount. With Alberta having no provincial sales tax, which the Premier strongly states he is not in favour of implementing, the lowest corporate income tax, and the lowest personal income tax. The Premier explains, “We have managed to keep this going because we have just been taking more and more money out of our oil and gas revenue every year. And every government since 1986 has been taking more of Alberta’s oil and gas revenue and channeling it in to covering the cost of public services for all of us this generation. Reaching the point that this year it will reach $10 billion of oil revenue that went to the cost of our public services so that we can have the lowest taxes in the country and the best of everything. It all works, until one day the oil revenue stops. It doesn’t just slow down. It doesn’t weaken. It just stops.”
Premier Prentice went on saying that Alberta is in the most serious financial situation it has seen in twenty five years and that people need to stop believing that isn’t the case or that things are going to bounce back next year and so Alberta’s should just ride it out. “There’s not a single person that we’ve talked to in industry or the banking world or the energy world that says oil prices are coming back next year. Nobody. If we do nothing, we will run this province so far into debt that it will make everyone’s head spin. Basically, we have a $5 billion rainy day fund that we built up – we would blow through that in about eight months. We would blow through the entire Heritage savings trust fund in less than two years that follow. So in three years, if we do nothing, we’ll be in a position where there will be no savings, we’ve wiped out the Heritage fund and we would be running up debt the same way they’ve done in other provinces, that we as Albertans have been critical of for a long time. So we can’t do that. So we have to dig down and deal with it”.
The next plan is the Finance Minister and the Premier are constructing a ten year financial plan that will get Alberta off the roller-coaster that it always seems to find itself on. The Premier says that this plan will protect those core services without destroying the health care, education and senior care programs that are so vital to Albertans. “In the long term, this province is just fine”, confirmed Premier Prentice.
In the days before this visit from the Premier, it had been announced that PC MLA, Bruce McAllister had received an endorsement from Premier Prentice to be the PC Candidate in Chestermere Rocky View. “I could not be prouder than to have Bruce at my side. There has been a lot that’s been said about what happened before Christmas in terms of people working together. I put it like this, when times get tough, good people stand beside each other. It’s not about me, it’s about Alberta, it’s about the circumstances that we’re in, and it’s about being resilient, standing together as conservatives. We do our best when we work together and in tough times people come together and that’s how I see it. It’s not about philosophy or right or left. It’s about people that care about the province, standing up and Bruce McAllister has done the right thing. He’s working with a team of people that are passionate about the future of the Province and there is nobody that is more passionate, more able, that has a brighter future in Alberta politics than Bruce”.
