Wildrose: What's new is still old - the Alberta Firewall Concept

Kim Campbell once said that an election is no time to debate serious issues. There is no better example of this axiom than the current Wildrose election campaign in Alberta. Frankly, the four main planks in the Danielle Smith's election platform raise more questions than the answer and set a new standard for vagueness and political double speak. And if you are one of the undecided voters in Alberta, then questioning what Smith and the Wildrose really stand for and what their promises mean is the most important thing you can do before you vote on Monday.

I reside in Alberta but have never voted for the Progressive Conservatives. Nor have I voted for the Conservative Party of Canada. What follows are a series of comments on Wildrose promises.

3. Alberta Firewall revisited

Throughout the Alberta Election campaign, the Wildrose have relied on several old ideas, erecting a firewall around Alberta to protect the province from interference from the federal government and other meddling forces like the Supreme Court of Canada. Others include "blowing up" Alberta Health Services and returning Alberta to the days when local hospital health boards ruled the day circa 1975.

The idea of a firewall was proposed following the 2001 election in a letter from several well-known academics in Alberta and Stephen Harper, then president of the National Citizens' Coalition. The other signatories include Ted Morton, current provincial finance minister and former professor of political science at the University of Calgary, Tom Flanagan, senior adviser to both Preston Manning and Stephen Harper during the Reform Party years and current professor of political science at the University of Calgary, among others. You can read the letter here, ironically, at CBC.ca

Essentially the authors sought to convince then Premier Ralph Klein that he needed to insulate Alberta from the machinations of Jean Chretien's meddling government. More specifically, the authors proposed that the time had come for the provincial government "to build firewalls around Alberta, to limit the extent to which an aggressive and hostile federal government can encroach upon legitimate provincial jurisdiction."

Ideally,  Harper, Morton and Flanagan et al wanted Alberta to opt out of the Canada Pension Plan and instead offer a specific Alberta Pension Plan in order to gain more control over how money was invested, and one would think, achieve better returns. In addition, Klein was urged to collect our own taxes rather than rely on Ottawa to collect and remit money back to the province, to replace the RCMP with a separate Alberta-based provincial police force, to opt out of Medicare and the Canada Health Act.

Today Harper is prime minister and Alberta no longer faces a hostile and powerful opponent in Ottawa. Just the opposite in fact. On healthcare and other matters Harper is deferring to the provinces, handing over fistfuls of cash without any required oversight or required outcomes. The Harper government is also changing how the federal government handles environmental reviews of major projects to hurry along the Northern Gateway pipeline which will carry Alberta crude to the West Coast.

So why does Alberta still need a firewall? We don't, unless you are a conspiracy theorist and see the day when a socialist prime minister from Quebec sits on the throne in Ottawa again. I can understand proposing a separate Alberta Pension Plan to augment the CPP but not replace it. Creating an APP will cost billions of dollars and take years to make self-sustaining.

There's no good reason to replace the RCMP with an Alberta Provincial Police force, unless you believe that the RCMP is a corrupt and hopeless institution? Alberta recently renewed its contract with the federal government for RCMP services in the province including an exorbitant increase in costs. This might be a key reason for an APP.