Conservatism in Action (or Inaction) in Alberta

I want to talk about the ideology that permeates the life of Albertans today. The signs are everywhere and have been present from time immemorial.

The reining power today in Alberta is the UCP. The basic tenet of conservative ideology here in Alberta, as well as country wide in Canada, and elsewhere in the world, is the one that stipulates as religion the primacy of private entrepreneurs at all cost (even social) and that the economy is best to be left to its own devices, and that government should not interfere in the economy. There are other articles on this website that talk about this.

I want to give some actual examples in Alberta that underlines these doctrines. It has been announced that the sort of 3-4000 oil wells will be dug in Alberta in 2021. While a magnitude more wells need to be cleaned up that have detrimental effect on our environment and communities,  we allow to build new wells, even though we know that in the future the companies that operate them will not be around to cover the costs of shutting them down properly. They are allowed to operate, for private profit. We, the public, later, pay the bills. It is happening now, and nobody is blinking an eye. They do what they want. Private benefit, public cost. Yet, there are no serious attempts to regulate this. They say, “Government stay out!”

The UCP Government in Alberta is firing 11000+ healthcare workers amid the coronavirus pandemic. These workers are public service, for the benefit of everybody in the province, yet the doctrine dictates that they should cut the “lavish” public investment and made them private. Sure. The same amount of work needs to be done at least. Let’s see. Private firms do what they do for profit. So those companies will do the same work, plus profit. They either raise the price, which they might, but most likely what will happen is that they will do the work for the same amount of money by reducing the pay to their employees. So, we will have lost 11000 less public employees and we will have 11000 or less employees in private firms for less money. The difference goes to the pockets of the handful of owners of those companies. I have written elsewhere on this website also about other aspects of this. Here, again, the doctrine prevails: private is good, government is bad. Who loses? You!

We can not cope with the pandemic. The only “weapon” available, supposedly, is to restrict people from gathering. In other words, lockdown. But the UCP Government in Alberta can not mandate a lockdown, because it is against their religion. Governments don’t mandate. Governments stay out of business. They will do everything to protect the profit of private businesses by letting people do as usual, protecting their civil liberties. I agree, this is a mess. This is already bad. A lockdown is needed. There will be lots of casualties. But we did not get here overnight. We could have, at the beginning, employ the mass of unemployed in the province and make them contact tracers and testers. Test a whole swath of people continuously, and trace them, and isolate them. This way only the infected people won’t work. No need for lockdown. But we did not do this. The UCP ideology forbids such things. It would have cost the fraction of what is costing to cope with the sick and the costs of halting business life. We rather pay unemployment benefit to people for loosing their jobs. But we can not hire them to do the work. This does not make any economic sense. But economic sense is out the windows when it comes to ideology: government stay out. Don’t intervene! The worst thing that they can do is doing nothing. And the night bowl will spill.

But all this for profit adulation is not just the conservatives’ mantra in Canada. The liberals are also for it. To a somewhat higher degree, they think government intervention is sometimes warranted.