Near the end of U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s bungling administration, his press secretary Jody Powell read the latest polls, ground his teeth and said, “Fire the people.”
On her return from Paris, Premier St. Rachel Notley, according to her statements in the legislature and her press conference Dec. 3, wants to fire Alberta’s farmers.
According to the NDP government’s view of the world, Alberta’s farmers abuse the human rights of the hired man and routinely put their children at risk of life and limb doing farm chores. In an email to the CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener, Debbie Devlin, who describes herself as a former Alberta Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) advisor, said the concerns about Bill 6 expressed on the radio were “whining” and “reminded me of that Gone with the Wind kind of pining for slavery.”
Apparently Devlin has not read Gone with the Wind or seen the movie because there is no “pining for slavery” in it.
Nor has she been on an Alberta farm – which is a safer place to work than on an Alberta construction site, drilling rig or telecommunications facility, that are all under the authority of the OHS.
In less than a year, St. Rachel has thrown a spanner into the spokes of oil and gas drilling and production, the oilsands, coal mining and, now, farming.
All because, with an arrogance surpassing that of the Progressive Conservatives, she won’t listen and won’t consult the very people who could help her achieve her policy objectives if only she would listen to them. It takes this Albertan back to the winter of 1980 and 1981 when the federal government made the same mistake.
The feds ran the draft National Energy Program (NEP) past at least two Canadian giants to see if it would work – Dome Petroleum and Alberta Gas Trunk Lines (Nova Corp.) – but would not show it to the Canadian Petroleum Association.
The oil and gas industry didn’t buy the main objective of the NEP – to get greater Canadian ownership of the industry – but could have shown the government how to do that without damaging the industry, including Canadian-controlled and Canadian-owned companies.
But Marc Lalonde, Allan MacEachan, Donald MacDonald and Pierre Trudeau thought they knew better. So they did the NEP their way and destroyed not only the oil and gas sector and its Canadian component but the “naturally-governing” Liberal Party that formed government for most of the 20th century.
So go ahead, St. Rachel. Fire the people. Fire the farmers. Do it your way because you think you know better. You will still be a young woman when your only term as premier of Alberta ends. You’ll have plenty of your life left to wonder where it all went wrong.
We could tell you now, but you won’t listen.
(Frank Dabbs is Editor of the Didsbury Review)
