Alberta, Your Foundations Are Being Destroyed

By Shawn Jorgensen on July 18, 2016 • ( 1 Comment )

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley has done the unethical, unthinkable, impossible, unbelievable, and most destructive act she could conceive of – and soon, Alberta’s foundational economic engine could be destroyed.

And you are letting her get away with it.

Premier Rachel Notley should no longer be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to protecting the interests of Alberta and Albertans. Period.

I personally have plenty of suspicions about the timing of her cutting of the Alberta forest fire fighting budget on Tuesday, April 20, by about $15 million to an even $100 million. No real justification for this, when forest fires were already raging across the province, ever came. As the Edmonton Journal reported:

With dry conditions and dozens of blazes already burning across Alberta, Premier Rachel Notley said Tuesday her government’s decision to slash the wildfire budget by $15 million this year won’t impact the province’s firefighting efforts. [Emphasis mine]

The Fort McMurray forest fire looms like a demon in the distance ((Credit: Toronto Star)

However, just 12 days later, on May 1, 2016, the disastrous man-made Fort McMurray fire struck just outside the oilsands project (which she has always been vocally against), forcing all of the oilsands workers, along with the rest of the 88,000 residents of that city, to flee for their lives. The oilsands projects themselves began shutting down already by May 6 closed, and the entire oilsands project was completely closed down, and all workers evacuated by May 16. According to Warren Fraleigh, executive director of the Building Trades of Alberta, “2,000 to 4,000 members of the trade union umbrella group lost their jobs after many oilsands operations were shut down.“

What a bizarre, poorly/well-time “coincidence”.

At 6:25 PM on May 3, the entire city of Fort McMurray was put under a mandatory evacuation order. The optics of not even declaring a state of emergency until May 5, 2 days later, is not lost on some of us who were watching this Premier closely.

(Credit: CBC.ca)

Hearing that Canada’s biggest fire-fighting planes, the Martin Mars water bombers, were not even requested by the Alberta government, and though it was under inspection at the time, another water bomber was offered and not taken advantage of – it makes me question the comments the Premier made April 20 that fighting fires would not be affected by her budget cutting decisions.

We saw the heartbreaking story of the courageous South African firefighters that travelled across the earth to help us battle this 589,000 hectare fire – and then ended up having to go home because the basic arrangements for their pay were not properly made. It was a disgrace and I blame the government of Alberta.

Nonsense, you say. Speculation. Circumstantial evidence. There is no way that an elected official in Canada would do something that blatantly evil to her own province. It’s unthinkable.

Well friends it’s about time you started thinking. 100,000 oil and gas jobs are gone and who knows when or even if they are coming back.

And now, we learn today that Premier Notley has hired the proverbial wolf to oversee Alberta’s oil henhouse!

Here how the CBC introduces her:

“Alberta’s Opposition Wildrose Party is criticizing the NDP government for appointing someone to an advisory group who once compared the oilsands to “Mordor.” Mordor is a dark, scorched land of suffering in the fictional world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

On Wednesday, the province announced the members of an 18-member advisory group to implement Alberta’s climate-change plan. The group’s mandate is to provide advice on ways to ensure that initiatives created as part of the government’s climate-change plan, announced last year, are effective and widely supported.

One of the co-chairs of the group, Tzeporah Berman, an adjunct professor of environmental studies at York University in Toronto, has vocally criticized the oilsands in the past.

Wildrose energy critic Leela Aheer shared Jean’s disappointment, citing Berman’s opposition to pipelines in the past. “To see that this NDP government have appointed an individual from Ontario who openly opposes Keystone XL, Northern Gateway, Kinder Morgan and Energy East is deeply disappointing,” Aheer said. “Hardworking Albertans and their families deserve better”.

How does one come back from all these comments to develop a “climate change” policy for Alberta that doesn’t include the destruction of the oil industry? They didn’t hire her for her administrative forte, leadership abilities, or public speaking skills. They hired her because she’s a leftwing lunatic, oil-hating shrieking shrew that has had no problem wiping Alberta’s reputation around in the mud for awhile. You need to see her comments for yourself here. None of this was a secret before she was hired. It’s the reason she was hired.

God help us. The inmates have been hired to run the asylum. If you believe that a weakened oil industry would benefit from the influence of a woman like this, one of their greatest adversaries – then do nothing. If not, then you must fight back against this.

There is a petition developed by Rebel Media, demanding that this government reverse this idiotic decision. This woman wasn’t elected – she was hired, and she can be let go the same way.

The future of Alberta depends on it. Your foundations are being destroyed. What will YOU do about it?