Chicken Little Lied

I woke up this morning with trepidation, wondering what my province would look like after the election yesterday.  Looks like the sky didn’t fall after all.  Polls are done why?  So will life go back to normal or will the PC government do some serious analysis of the voting, the campaign and a sense of what Albertans want?   

       Perhaps, but they will be looking at the Wildrose scare and not about the strategic voting that went on from the centre and left wing elements.  I suspect we will see further reductions in social spending because that is apparently what the voters of Wildrose want.  Until their mother has Alzheimer’s or their grandchild is diagnosed with autism when suddenly they discover that there is no government assistance for these people.  But it won’t happen to you so you can be safe in preserving your pittance for a rainy day.  And let a 40 year old government continue to hamster away their own gravy.

       With politics, nothing changes.  The ordinary person will always be left holding the bag; that’s the bag where we have to put in our tax dollars to get . . . nothing much.  A footbridge leading to nowhere particular (and close to another footbridge).  Panda bears.  Artillery because apparently we have an army guarding us . . . in Asia.

       We are a population of some 36 million people, flung across a wide expanse of land but do we have up to date infrastructure to cope with distances?  No.  I’ve heard about “a fast train” between Calgary and Edmonton for the 35 years that I’ve lived in Alberta but no ground has even been broken.  And what about the rest of Alberta, why not a fast train from Medicine Hat all the way to Fort McMurray?  Is everything supposed to be about Edmonton and Calgary?  What about the other 2 million souls in this 3.5 million peopled province?

       Oh, and one final statistic flung out at us.  Currently Calgary has a little more than one million in population.  When I moved to Calgary back in 1976 there was 474,000 people.  It took more than 3 decades to reach one million people, slightly more than doubling it.  But the statisticians are telling us that Calgary will double in 8 years.  All I can say is, you do the math.