Thanos Thanos:
Too bad it's the nature of the UCP to wreck everything it touches. The truth is that there was, and still is, a lot of well-co-ordinated foreign money that went into destroying Alberta. From the US producers doing it to derail & impoverish a competitor to benefit their own boom to the far-left celebrity eco-fascist elitists who did it because, well, because it the sort of thing they like to do while sitting on their self-righteous high horses. It's all true, and everybody knows it. Too bad Kenney & Co do so much ingenuous stunt-booking of their own, from the embarrassment of the "war room" to the idiocy of scrapping the oil-by-rail contracts just because they were a Rachel Notley policy, that it renders pretty much anything they do or say as completely unreliable. And done solely for their own ideological reasons and not for the good of the province.
Alberta's lost almost every battle in this fight that began with the Arabs deliberately destroying the oil price back in 2014, with the only real win coming from TMX courtesy of a couple of "lefties" like Notley & Trudeau. It's over for us. There's not going to be a trial to find anyone guilty for killing us. They ALL killed us, each in their own malicious and hate-filled way. But one of those who should have been charged with the murder of this province definitely should have been the last thirty-plus years of conservatism (including the UCP brand) that doubled-down on oil and turned us into a one-horse economy that only needed one successful torpedo hit beneath the waterline to succeed in sinking us. At this stage it's become pathetic, like listening to some old veterans from an army that lost a war squabbling with each other in an endless "we would have won it all if only we'd done this instead..." sort of argument.
The reason Alberta has lost all these battles isn't because of the Americans or environmentalists or the Arabs, it's because 95% of our oil is heavy oil and very carbon intensive to refine into other products.
If the Western Canadian Basin was still pumping out high quality light crude like it did in the 60s, 70s and 80s, we'd have everyone lined up to buy it, even with US shale. That oil was far cheaper than shale and sold by a western nation. Do you ever hear of oil from Norway or the UK getting protested like oil sands oil? Or Newfoundland's offshore oil?
Of course not, because it isn't heavy oil.
We had a chance to save something of our wealth in the Heritage Trust Fund, but Alberta (through its voting history) chose to ensure their lives now were better than that of their children and grandchildren. As a society, we chose to live like the grasshopper and spend, spend spend, instead of living like the ant and saving something for the future.
It's the typical "Fuck you, I got mine' attitude that is so common amongst conservatives around the world and it's why Alberta's finances and economy are such a shitshow. And I'm not saying that the Alberta Liberals or NDP would necessarily have done much better, but they certainly would have looked to the future instead of the present like the PCs and UCP have done.
I wasn't a huge fan of Notley, but I will give her credit for trying to diversify the economy with tax credits for other industries, investing in infrastructure for the future (schools, hospitals, roads, transit, etc.), and bringing in a carbon tax (even if I didn't agree with the rebate structure) that was just starting to get some buy in from opponents that we were serious about dealing with the effects of selling heavy oil. Then Kenney undid most of it in the first month or two he was in office, and got pissed off when environmentalists ratcheted up the protests against his policies.
Well what the hell did he expect?
Sadly, Albertans worst enemies are not foreigners or environmentalists, or politicians from down east, but themselves.
CKA Moderator 
CKA Uber 
