There is sooo much to post about – elections, Bill Clinton, Speech from the Throne review, Tory Leadership gossip, etc etc etc…. but that will have to wait as I have two major papers to get done…
In the meantime, I shall leave you with this:
Your results:
You are Green Lantern
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Hot-headed. You have strong will power and a good imagination.
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For those of you interested, I have decided to break my semi-blog of silence to inform you that Alberta PC Leadership candidate Mark Norris and his “Grassroots Leadership Group” have lauched his campaign website.
Mr. Norris was also at the Speech from the Throne on Wednesday this week (I had a nice chat his office manager).
If I have the chance this weekend, I’ll post a quick recap of the SFTT.
The Public Interest Alberta PSE conference is this weekend, so mixed with other stuff, I should be sufficiently busy this weekend.
Well, in a moment of thought, we found ourselves thinking about the day we decided that it might be interested to write in the first person plural (or whatever Steve Smith called it after he threatened to punch us in the throat).
Fortunately for Mr. Smith (and our throat), we’ve decided it was once again time that “we” blogged as an “I.”
So, I am back blogging tonight for the first and the last time in a bit. The upcoming forecast of daily events looks like it should be getting a little busier in the next few weeks, so the blog posts will most likely be sparce and few, if any.
Tomorrow afternoon, I will be attending the opening of the Alberta Legislature which is highlighted by the Speech from the Throne. I didn’t get a chance to watch Premier Klein’s Address to the Province this evening, but I hear that for the first time since about 1987, the Government of Alberta will be investing new funds into the Heritage Savings Trust Fund.
I will also be facilitating two discussion sessions at this weekend’s Public Interest Alberta Post-Secondary Education Conference here in Edmonton. The sessions I will be facilitating are the Student Finance session with the lovely Clare Ard and the Rural PSE Access session with Dr. Roger Epp, Dean of the U of A Augustana Campus.
I’ve done quite a bit of research on student financing and rural PSE issues over the past year, so I’m very interested to hear what people have to say about the subject.
As well, the guest speakers for the weekend include Globe & Mail columnist Jeffery Simpson and Peter MacMenamin, the Deputy Secretary General of the Teacher’s Union of Ireland. It looks to be an interesting weekend.
Well, it looks like the temperature has risen to a balmy -10C here on the prairies…
We watched the Canada-Switzerland game this morning and all we can say is wow. Canada got wooped by SWITZERLAND! SWITZERLAND?
We didn’t even know they even had an Olympic Hockey team… oh well, good for them…
It looks like the glorious summer of January and February 2006 is bidding us farewell…
Current forecast from the Weather Network:
Right now: -24C
With windchill: -35C
It was +8C last week. So, that’s a 43C temperature change in a week.
Lord we love Alberta…
Here is part of an editorial that was in the Calgary Herald this weekend. It pretty much sums up what we’ve been talking about for the past couple years…
Alberta has been given a vast array of gifts — of natural resources, of hard-working people with entrepreneurial spirit, of markets eager to do business. It has been wise enough to steward these riches well to this point. It now faces a greater challenge: to build a better future, not just for Albertans, but for Canada and the world.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Start saving. In the past 30 years, only 8.6 per cent of royalties have been set aside and more than 90 per cent spent. The Heritage Fund is worth $2,500 per capita, compared with $6,000 per capita in 1991.
Now that its debt is paid off, Alberta must start a serious savings plan. Canada West suggests half of all resource revenue go to an endowment fund; whatever the percentage, it needs to be substantial.
2. Manage spending. Alberta needs to invest in a strong health-care system, education and infrastructure for cities. The cuts that were necessary to bury the debt in the 1990s are no longer needed and Albertans have said they favour reinvestment.
So do we, but with a measure of stability. The greatest obstacle these sectors face is the roller-coaster of funding they’ve had to contend with as the provincial government lurches between surpluses.
These areas should be funded properly over the long term; the wild and wacky splurges of the past year have to stop.
3. Think big. If Alberta spends wisely and saves for the future, there will be still be ample opportunities to leave a proud legacy. Forget prosperity cheques and vanity projects — let’s aim higher.
The Canada West Foundation thinks Alberta could lead the world in research and development in alternate forms of energy, rival Harvard with a post-secondary endowment fund, or fund a national centre of excellence in wellness.
Albertans will have other ideas, if they are challenged to be visionary.
There was a bumper sticker popular in Alberta in the 1980s that read: “Please God, let there be another oil boom. I promise not to piss it all away next time.”
Albertans have been given that second chance with riches and potential that are the envy of many. It must not be wasted.
As far as university endowments are mentioned in the article, we are in the midst of writing a policy brief on North American university endowments – Harvard is the largest up around $25 Billion and Yale is second with around $15 Billion (the University of Alberta‘s endowment is currently sitting around half a billion – according to 2005 figures).
Endowment funds are where-it-is-at, dawg.
heh heh.
– Buzz Hargrove got the boot from the NDP (we can see the ads now… “this February, give Buzz the boot…”).
We don’t find this surprising seeing how the rift between Hargrove and the NDP has substantially grown in the past few years (we remember listening to an argument between Hargrove and then-NDP leader Alexa McDonough on CBC Radio One‘s As It Happens following her stepping down as leader – wow, she kept calling him “Basil” – you could have cut the tension between them with a knife).
Though were sure that his endorsing the Liberals in the last election (and his kind of endorsement of the Bloc…) had more to do with it than anything else.
If anything, we think this is a good move. Distancing the NDP from twits like Hargove and the grip of big labour (even symbolically) could help them expand their base of support.
– Second, United States Vice-President Dick Cheney shot someone with a shotgun!
Was Dick Cheney hunting people? No.
But it is slightly funny in a sick sort of way.
(Props to Anonymotron for “establishing [his] conservative credentials” by emailing us the story and gun links…)
UPDATE! Tomorrow’s headlines: “Cheney caused friendly fire incident“
Spruce Grove mogul skier Jennifer Heil has won the Gold Medal in her Olympic competition just moments ago in Turino, Italy!! Congrats!
WOO HOO! Canada rocks!
For interests sake, here are the books we are in the midst of reading at the moment…
– What’s the Matter with Kansas ? by Thomas Frank
– War by Gwyn Dyer
– Alberta Politics Uncovered: Taking Back our Province by Marc Lisac
– The Return of the Trojan Horse: Alberta and the New World (Dis)Order edited by Trevor W. Harrison
– Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State by Alan C. Cairns
– Whose North: Political Change, Political Development, and Self-Government in the Northwest Territories by Mark Dickerson
– Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution by Paul Hawken, Amoury Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins.
– Jarhead by Anthony Swofford
– Excuse Us! Herr Schicklgruber by Clifford Chadderton.
If you haven’t checked out this video, you should. It’s fun!
For those of you interested in democratic reform in the great province of Alberta, we are pleased to inform you that the Alberta Liberal Opposition is taking the bull by the horns and hosting a forum on this topic on Monday (February 13 from 7-9pm at the Stanley Milner Library in Edmonton).
Speakers will include Liberal leader Kevin Taft, and Craig Henschel and Shoni Field from the B.C.’s Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.
The forum will be moderated by Edmonton McClung MLA Mo Elsalhy and attended by MLA’s Hugh MacDonald, Bridget Pastoor, and Maurice Tougas.
We will be attending, so if you want to talk about democratic reform AND get a glimpse of the original daveberta…
Well, there are many people who will testify that Alberta’s Health & Wellness Minister Iris Evans is “waaaay out there,” but now, she is officially out of the Alberta PC leadership race.
To give daveberta readers an example of the “way outness” of the Sherwood Park Progressive Conservative MLA, the first time we met her, she was clinging to a plastic SIDS baby doll. Now, as weird as it was for her to be clinging to a plastic SIDS baby doll in the first place, it was at a conference dealing with international development – why she was there we still do not know (she was Minister of Children’s Services at the time) – but she spoke on behalf of the Alberta Government following an terrific speech by then-Senator Doug Roche. The topic which she spoke of was just as bizarre… you guessed it… she spent her 5 minutes at a conference on international development and the third world talking about SIDS… it was really bizarre.
Not to mention the weirdness of the Tory Caucus video at the most recent Alberta Legislature Press Gallery dinner which had had Minister Evans making reference to “sausages.” This is made even weirder when you understand that she typically raises (at some very inappropriate times) that she is single and looking for a man…
Not that she was a “real” contender anyway, but it looks like the Tories may have an “all-white all-penis” leadership race on their hands once Premier Ralph Klein decides to go to pasture.
As you may now know, Martha Hall Findlay has beat us to the punch and is now the first candidate to officially enter the Liberal leadership race. Good for her! She has the guts to do what Frank McKenna, John Manley, Allan Rock, and Brian Tobin didn’t!
Hall Findlay is a Toronto lawyer who ran for the Liberals in 2004 against then-Tory MP Belinda Stronach in Newmarket-Aurora.
When Stronach crossed the floor to the Liberals last May, one of our favorite blogging Tories, Steve Janke of Angry in the Great White North, had this to say about Hall Findlay:
“(May 18, 2005) Who is Martha Hall Findlay? She was the woman found run over yesterday. Forensic analysis of the evidence suggests two vehicles — one was a Stronach Aspiration Special, outfitted with wide tread tires for extra grip in an environment of slimey and slippery power-grab politics, and the other was a Martin Desperation Wagon, the sort without doors so that anyone can just jump in as he drives by waving money and cabinet appointments.
Seriously, Ms. Findlay was the Liberal candidate for Newmarket-Aurora, ready to fight Ms. Stronach in a re-match of the 2004 election, which Belinda barely won (by a mere 689 votes).
Good thing the Liberals tossed Ms. Findlay. I’ve looked over her experience and skills, and I’d say she was far worse fit in the Liberal Party than Belinda Stronach was in the Conservative Party.
“(May 20, 2005) On another front, Martha Hall Findlay, the frighteningly qualified Liberal candidate for Newmarket-Aurora who was pushed out when multi-millionaire Belinda Stronach came to take her job away, still has her web site up. Good for her.”
Foothills-Rockyview MLA, Firewall letter signatory, and Alberta PC Leadership candidate Ted Morton spoke to a crowd of 130 people last Friday at a leadership campaign dinner in the Town of Cochrane.
Here’s a bit of it from the Cochrane Times…
In what turned out to be a night that just reinforced the support of Conservatives in Foothills-Rockyview area, Morton explained his platform of ideas that he wanted people to keep in mind when it comes time to vote for the next premier of Alberta, which at the very latest, will be in 2009, but is likely to be sooner.
“There are new challenges for our new century,” he said. “They require new ideas and new leaders.”
To which he received applause and nods among the audience.
Morton’s main challenge he believes must be faced, is that Alberta receive a “fair deal” in Ottawa.
While he explained that Alberta alienation could be far in the past, with the selection of the new prime minister, Stephen Harper, as his riding is in fact, in Calgary Southwest, he said choosing him would further the process.
Yes, Albertans will feel less alienated with a nutbar like Morton as Premier… sure…
