SANITY is breaking out IN ALBERTA

6,085 UCP members debated policy resolutions at the party's annual meeting in Red Deer. Premier Danielle Smith justifiably garnered near unanimous support for leadership.

Refreshing

Journalist Omar Ghereshi of the Epoch Times wrote ‘Recognizing Only Two Genders, Cutting Income Tax Among Policy Aims Adopted by Alberta UCP Members’. This is how he opened the article which you can find online.

Merit-based hiring, reducing income tax, and recognizing on government documents that there are only two biological sexes are among the policy resolutions adopted by Alberta UCP members on Nov. 2.

The passed resolutions serve as an indication of the wish of the party supporters, but are not binding for the UCP (United Conservative Party) government to adopt

All 35 policy resolutions tabled at the two-day party convention, which drew a record 6,085 members, were adopted.

Most resolutions passed with overwhelming support.

These included upholding merit-based hiring, saying provincial employees shouldn’t be hired based on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles.

“The use of public funds for DEI must stop,” said one member.

The article went on to show that sanity still lives in the minds of Albertans under the following highlighted subsections:

• Parental Rights, Female-Only Spaces

• No Carbon Tax

• Digital IDs

• More Doctors

• Provincial Jurisdiction

A Stellar leadership review.

Great leaders are rare.

Alberta the best in Canada.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith passed her leadership vote with 91.5 percent support at the UCP annual convention in Red Deer on Nov. 2.

What’s an Ontario voter to do?

Residents of Ontario face many of the same issues that Albertans face.

In Ontario, however, there are no major party leaders who have the courage, intelligence, wisdom, grit or resourcefulness of a Danielle Smith.

While a Conservative provincial government under Doug Ford has been an improvement over the preceding Liberal government, Ford and his caucus compare poorly to the UCP team under Smith. It takes time, effort and talent to move a mountain and the existing behemoth of the Ontario government certainly qualifies for one. However, you will never even begin to remove the first boulder until you put forward a plan backed by the resources to get it done.

Imagine the federal or a provincial government as a forest.

Imagine that each tree of the vast forest represents a piece of legislation - a law or regulations that requires huge investments in enforcement resources - employees, equipment, vehicles, fully furnished workspaces, etcetera. Now image that you want to build a new community of affordable homes, but the forest stands in your way. What do you do?

Would you…

a. Assemble a task force of trees situated inside the forest to create a plan?

b. Engage citizens who are prospective new home owners to create the plan?

c. Do nothing because every tree has been declared essential to consume CO2?

d. None of the above while tent cities proliferate in your community?

e. Hold endless community discussion sessions where the issue is discussed repeatedly but the ‘HOW to get it resolved’ remains frustratingly elusive.

Does your vote matter?

If the future can be expected to follow the trends of the past, the political party that you elect will not improve upon the most pressing issues that perennially face society by any noticeable amount.

The decades-long trend has been to produce larger, more expensive and more authoritarian regimes of governance. For example,

• Were DEI policies in effect in government institutions twenty years ago?

• Did carbon taxes exist in 1999 to drive up the cost of everything?

• Were concerns about gender and bathrooms a topic discussed over your dinner table a decade ago?

Strategic voting

As a Libertarian candidate, I was frequently told by voters that, while they like and approve our ideas, they would not “waste” their vote on a party that stood a “snowball’s chance in hell” of forming the next government; or else they said that they had to vote Conservative to strategically improve the likelihood that Kathleen Wynne and her social-democratic Liberals would be defeated. I understood and empathized with their position.

For me, only LESS GOVERNMENT matters. I know that the excessive growth of government power over decades is the source of the serious problems we face today.

Any vote for the BORG (Blue, Orange, Red or Green) parties is a vote in favour of MORE GOVERNMENT. This is the worst of all outcomes and I, in good conscience, cannot intentionally inflict this upon my fellow citizens.

While a LESS GOVERNMENT Libertarian platform is unlikely to be embraced by the voting masses anytime soon, I always get the satisfaction that I did not contribute to our problems by endorsing BLOG policies at the ballot box. My conscience is clear and I still reserve some hope that my fellow citizens may someday become so frustrated by the “creeping BLOG authoritarianism” that Libertarianism may finally attract some genuine attention in Ontario, and nationwide.

Dare I hope?

I don’t know if Premier Danielle Smith would describe herself as a Libertarian, or even a Libertarian-Conservative like me, but she sure shows signs of acting like one. I sure hope that she can clear away the significant political and legislative obstacles to see much of her policy vision implemented successfully.

Ontario’s Premier, Doug Ford is certainly unlikely to identify his gender as anything other than ‘male’, but maybe I can hope that he may someday self-identify as a Libertarian-Conservative and begin to emulate the popular Alberta Premier.