The Fair Deal Panel is coming to Calgary on Dec 10. If you plan to attend you’ll need to register. Here’s the link: https://www.alberta.ca/fair-deal-panel.aspx
Hope to see you there!
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Susan on the Soapbox 
Thank you Susan.
On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 08:56 Susan on the Soapbox wrote:
> susanonthesoapbox posted: ” The Fair Deal Panel is coming to Calgary on > Dec 10. If you plan to attend you’ll need to register. Here’s the link: > https://www.alberta.ca/fair-deal-panel.aspx Hope to see you there! ” >
The Calgary “Fair Deal” panel was filled up as of yesterday. They really ought to have more sessions in our largest cities.
They do this intentionally so that the number of people in the opposite side have little or no time to disagree. It has always been his strategy and it is not going to change.
Yesterday I wrote to prime minister Justin Trudeau telling him that Jason Kenney’s request for money is nothing but trying to balance the enormous hole he created with lowering corporate taxes. I asked him not to agree with the request. Jason Kenney has to learn responsibility. Enough lies and propaganda. Balancing the budget with money we do not have is cheating and that is his specialty. He is trying to get a boom to resolve all the issues while he keeps feeding his corporate bosses.
Carlos, writing to the prime minister was brilliant. I’d love to be a fly on the wall at the Kenney/Trudeau meeting. Kenney keeps peddling the story that Alberta is ready to walk (and the media amps it up) but many Albertans understand that Kenney won’t lift a finger to bring stability to Alberta (no sales tax, no increased personal or corporate taxes, no meaningful diversification efforts). All he’s doing is demanding the feds fork over billions of dollars to fill the hole in the budget he and his predecessors the PCs created while they waited for Big Oil to come back. Not going to happen.
Kerry: I agree with what Carlos Beca said.
Absolutely right Kerry. Calgary’s population is close to 1.3 million and they’ve allocated us as much time (2 hours) as they’ve allocated to Grand Prairie with a population of 63,000.
Thanks, Susan. Looking forward to it.
Sent from my iPhone
Thanks Nan. As I said to Mike the government hasn’t given us anywhere near enough time to weigh in on proposals to:
– set up provincial revenue agencies to collect provincial taxes
– join Quebec to collect federal taxes in the province
– study withdrawing from CPP and creating an APP
– study creating an Alberta police force
– play a larger role in international negotiations
– require municipalities to get provincial approval before they can enter into agreements with feds
– appoint a provincial Chief Firearms Officer
– opt out of federal cost sharing programs and demand full compensation for opting out
– set up a formalized provincial constitution
NOTE: This is how Jason Kenney described the panel’s mandate at the UCP AGM that was held last weekend.
I’m going to show up with a little Canadian flag, hopefully it will send the message that I’m a Canadian first and have no interest in becoming a sovereign province within Canada, let alone a separate country.
No problem Mike. I’ve been watching the government website for days. When the dates were first published, the site only allowed you to register for the session being held in Edmonton. That meant you had to check the site every day to see when they opened registration for Calgary and the other locations. The website was recently changed to allow registration for any session regardless of the date.
The Government bills the Panel as a matter of “public engagement” but 10 hours of public engagement (5 sessions restricted to two hours each) with limited registration doesn’t give Alberta’s 4.3 million people much opportunity to engage. I suppose they justify this limited public engagement by saying we can submit our feedback on line–a poor substitute for getting input on such weighty matters in my opinion.
Susan: I missed the event in Edmonton. I was at a Christmas concert. I think this is an orchestrated event, and will be recorded. Will you be speaking at this? Whether or not you are, please let us know how this goes. You would figure that because Edmonton and Calgary have a large enough population, there would be more than one day for this. I have a feeling that this will be like their safe injection site forums. It will have a predetermined outcome. The way the forum was set up in Edmonton, (date location & time), was clearly done on purpose. I think it will reflect how the others will be. I could go to Calgary for this, as I have a lot of family there, and I could stay with a relative, but what’s the point? Given who would be there, they would not like what I had to say. Calgary has been a Conservative heartland for decades, no matter how bad they were. The irony is that we have Preston Manning at this forum, which Peter Lougheed despised. We also have Peter Lougheed’s son, Stephen there. If Peter Lougheed were still alive, I think he would disdain this event, and lecture his son about it. Hope you and your family have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
There is a session in Fort Saskatchewan, Dwayne.
Bob Raynard: How does someone get there, without driving?
Dwayne, you still have an opportunity to respond to the survey on the government website. There’s only one question: “In your opinion, what could help Alberta get a fair deal in Canada?” My answer was this: “You’re asking the wrong question. What you need to ask is what would make Alberta’s economy more stable and less reliant on fossil fuel revenues? The time, energy and taxpayer dollars you’re wasting on the Fair Deal Panel, the Canadian Energy Centre, and the public inquiry into Anti-Alberta Energy Campaigns is shameful. This is nothing more than “bread and circuses”. Do your job.”
Here’s the link: https://extranet.gov.ab.ca/opinio6//s?s=FairDealforAlberta
PS I didn’t fill out the personal information asking for age and gender. I don’t like to be profiled.
Susan: The online survey is likely rigged. What could help get Alberta a fair deal in Canada? Having an end to blindly electing and supporting fiscally inept Conservative governments in Alberta. I’m of the age where I remember how good Peter Lougheed’s PC government was. What Peter Lougheed built up, was wrecked by any “Conservative”, governments that came after him.
It’s like living in an alternate reality. After blowing $4.3-billion on corporate tax cuts, Kenney goes cap in hand to Ottawa begging for $2.4-billion in “fair deal” money. The nerve of some people.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-premier-heads-to-ottawa-asking-for-2-4b-in-fiscal-stabilization-1.5387348
The “fair deal” for the people of Alberta might have been not to hand out cash willy-nilly to corporations, then threaten massive job cuts for the citizens later. Will the 2.4-billion go into the “Alberta Enema Plan”, too?
This man is like a magician with money. He makes it disappear.
Excellent points CallmeHal: I’ve seen a lot of comments on social media along the lines of: “Alberta, when you implement a sales tax and a competitive (ie. not the lowest) corporate tax in the country, then we’ll talk.” My mother had a Hungarian word for brazen self-serving and entitled people like Kenney. I’m in polite company so I won’t use it 🙂
Smart mother
I can imagine all the federal ministers and others in Ottawa making comments about us.
I am sure they include the words that your mother used as well and rightly so.
What a darn clown – this brings back all that Redford scandal time.
Susan: I have heard bad words before, from my Slavic relatives, including my dad, and even from his mom. I won’t use those either, to describe the UCP, because I want to keep my responses clean, (even though the UCP makes me quite upset). As you likely have, I also still have relatives in Eastern Europe. They have endured bad governments for a long time. My relatives who left there, did not want to go back there. My dad’s mother had not so pleasant words to say about Poland, the Ukraine and Russia, not in English either. From what I gathered, she was glad to get out of Eastern Europe. I’m certain her husband was too. My mother’s dad was also glad to get out of Eastern Europe. He also would never return to where he came from, because it was so bad there. What do we see with the UCP? A type of dictatorship. This is not any good. It seems to be like the governments we see in other countries, where democracy is not present.
Dwayne, this was a very poignant comment. My parents and my aunts and uncles considered themselves extremely lucky to leave Hungary and Austria and settle here in Canada. They loved this country. Most of them are gone now, but they would have been horrified to learn that Alberta is seriously considering leaving Canada because, heaven forbid, the “have not” provinces aren’t forking over enough money to Alberta, the richest “have” province in the country. Jason Kenney (in my opinion) created the victim mindset for his own political purpose but he messed it up because he’s lost control of the separatists who truly believe they’d be better off outside of Canada. It’s shameful.
A béka segge alatt?
GoinFawr, that was hilarious. Actually it’s not what Mom used to say but for the benefit of those who don’t speak Hungarian (and according to Wikipedia) it means a situation when things can’t get any worse: “under a frog’s arse, down a coalmine”. 🙂
Well I cannot understand that one but here is one for a needed smile
http://www.youtube.com/embed/V _gOZDWQj3Q?rel=0
How about those full-page “fair deal” ads on the front pages of all the Ottawa newspapers? Cha-ching. Oh, and the Ottawa reception at Alberta taxpayer expense? Cha-ching. Sure worth firing 750 nurses for that. Heckuva deal.
CallmeHal2000: The UCP seem to think money grows on trees. What their idea of essential, is way off the mark.
Jason Kenney is good at what he is doing right now – bullying people and he knows how to get people when they are down
Justin Trudeau is walking a fine line with the west and JK puts him against the wall begging for money and the approval of more tar sands along with the threat that it is time for Justin Trudeau to show the west he is with us. This is the only language this crook understands and it is hard to endure this kind of attitude and control.
I went to the Fair Deal Panel in Calgary last night (I’ll be blogging about it this weekend). Seems to me what Kenney is doing is sowing confusion and division to keep the entire province off balance. The people who stepped up to the microphone to comment on Kenney’s “fair deal” were all over the place. There is no way the panel (assuming it is sincere) could build a coherent picture of what the majority of Albertans want. This will allow Kenney to tell us what we said we wanted (even though we said no such thing) and then do whatever he wants to deliver this thing that he says we say we want. It’s nuts.
CallmeHal2000 and Dwayne, on the point of money growing on trees, one could argue that Kenney’s visit to Trudeau to demand a “fair deal” was premature given that his Fair Deal panel is nowhere near finishing its work. Kenney is demanding five things from the feds. These are: (1) a firm deadline for completion of TMX, (2) encourage Indigenous equity in TMX, (3) Repeal C-48 (the partial tanker ban), (4) Lift the cap on fiscal stabilization and (5) expand the use of flow through shares so companies can raise more money. Not one of these points is on the Fair Deal panel’s agenda.
In addition to these two fair deal conversations (one internal and one with the Feds) we have the “fair deal” the Project Confederation people want, the “fair deal” the Advantage Alberta people want, and the “we’re walking, pay us out” deal the separatists want.
And people wonder why investors don’t want to invest in Alberta. We’re a mess.
What is happening in Alberta? This.
https://www.vox.com/2018/9/19/17847110/how-fascism-works-donald-trump-jason-stanley
Such a shame.