By Wes Taylor
MLA Battle River-Wainwright
On July 12, the UCP won two by-elections. The winning was not remarkable as these were seats made vacant by Wildrose MLAs.
What was remarkable, particularly at a by-election, was the massive margin of victory.
Both results saw the conservative candidates gain a significantly larger share of the vote than their predecessors did in the 2015 election.
What do these results tell us? I agree with this analysis by UCP party leader Jason Kenney, “Tonight’s results are more proof that the United Conservative Party is on the right track, and that Albertans reject the NDP government’s failed high-tax, high-debt policies. Albertans want a common-sense government focused on jobs, not the failed high-tax ideology of the NDP.”
Without doubt, Alberta is drowning in a sea of red ink. The red ink debt that the province has accrued under the NDP, currently $43 billion, is forecasted to rise to $91 billion by 2023.
Incontinent borrowing has led to the downgrading in Alberta’s Standard and Poor’s credit rating from AAA in 2015 to just A+ today. Borrowing is, however, just the one part of the problem. The other major problem is the lack of investment.
Investment in Alberta has shrunk dramatically since the NDP came to power with over $36 billion in capital leaving Alberta. Companies such as ConocoPhillips and Shell have withdrawn to other jurisdictions such as North Dakota, Iran and Kazakhstan.
In total, 14 multinationals brokered deals to leave the Alberta’s energy industry.
The NDPs answer is to double down on their proto-Keynesian, socialist approach to economics. Yet, this approach is known to be a failure.
If you don’t believe me, perhaps you will believe John Maynard Keynes himself who, nine days before his death, said to a fellow Bank of England director Henry Clay, “I find myself more and more relying for a solution for our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.”
He referred, of course, to Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand metaphor.
Clinging limpet-like to policies which the architect himself disavowed leads only reinforces the widely held view that ‘Orange is the new broke.’
By contrast, the UCP believes that the best way to tackle the NDP’s sea of red ink is to grow the economy and get business to put their money into the province again. This, of course, means encouraging investment and letting them know that Alberta is ‘open for business.’
True conservatives understand that voluntary private markets are more productive than government managed, or government interfered in, economies. They also understand that policies such as increasing taxation on the wealthy, while sounding virtuous, are an illusion. Apparently, no one in the NDP has ever seen the Laffer curve.
Concerning the two by-election victories in already held conservative seats, I echo Churchill when I suggest that, “Now this is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
So, I do take great heart from these results and believe that Albertans will choose wisely at the next general election. To enable this, I will follow the advice Jason Kenney gave in his by-election victory speech, “If we work hard, stay humble and earn every vote, we will ensure that this deceptive, divisive, debt-quadrupling, tax-hiking, job-killing, accidental socialist government is one-and-done.”
Amen to that.