Nation, let's keep the good times rolling with a look at Question 2 in the UCP's $134,000,000 attempt to push through Stephen Miller's wet dreams as policy under the guise of a "democratic mandate".
Question 2: Do you support the Government of Alberta introducing a law mandating that only Canadian citizens, permanent residents and individuals with an Alberta approved immigration status will be eligible for provincially-funded programs, such as health care, education and other social services?
Essentially: Do you approve of the government forcing certain immigrants - we'll figure out which ones later - to pay out-of-pocket for health care, education, and social services?
I vote NO. And here's why:
We're being asked - again - to give carte blanche for a potentially brutal and - frankly - un-Albertan - policy to be implemented against groups without "Alberta approved immigration status". What in the seven hells is an "Alberta approved immigration status"? We'll figure that out later. TRUST us. Just give us the mandate, and we'll blame you for telling us to do it when it goes wrong.
That ambiguity, in and of itself, is enough reason to shred this question. But let's look a little deeper at what the implementation looks like:
A temporary foreign worker, let's call him "Stefan", who has permission to work in Canada but isn't deemed "skilled labour", comes to Brooks to work at the local WalMart as a merchandiser - stocking shelves for minimum wage. Now, as recently as yesterday, Danielle Smith has opined that low-skill jobs should be filled by Alberta youth. So, we're looking for a 16 year-old Albertan in Brooks who wants to work 10 pm to 6 am.
Stefan is 45. He met another TFW while he was here, and they have a 4 year-old son who was born while his mother was back in Jamaica in between work permits.
Stefan and his partner make minimum wage. They've been paying taxes on their earnings in Alberta off-and-on for 5 years. The Leader of the UCP feels they should each pay $1900 per year to have access to Alberta's public healthcare system. They work with 18 year-olds who were born in Brooks who are on their first real job and started paying taxes last month. Those 18 year-olds get all the healthcare they need, because they had the good fortune to pass through a Canadian birth canal on their way into the world.
Stefan's son should be starting school next year. The Leader of the UCP feels that Stefan should pay cash to get his kid into a publicly-funded school. Stefan doesn't have the money - cost of living and the $3800 in health premiums for he and his partner mean they aren't even breaking even. So Alberta - one of the richest jurisdictions in the world - lets the kid stay home, without an education, because his parents were born in the wrong place.
When my ancestors came to Alberta 120 years ago, they were farmers. They spoke German. They were encouraged to come west and populate the new province by the Canadian Government, and over the ensuing 12 decades I'd like to think they and their descendants have done their share and then some... but when they got here, they were dirt poor. They needed help. Help from the government, and help from neighours. Eventually, they started to get their feet under them, and became net contributors to their community. Their story is not unlike the story of Alberta itself, which (lest we forget) only started becoming a net contributor to Canada's economy in the mid 1960's.
That's right, "Bootstraps Guy" - we were on the dole, eating government cheese and living off the charity of other provinces, until Leduc Well #1 really started paying off.
If the other provinces had insisted in 1905 that Alberta pay cash for things like defence and the railroad, because we hadn't been paying into Confederation, we would have failed as a province.
Now that we have the good fortune to be able to live high on the hog, let's not forget where we were. And let's not consign an entire group of people - exact details to be determined later around a cabinet table - to a life of forced poverty based not on what they've actually contributed in taxes, but on where they were born.
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