Create a Strong Alberta

This great province with all its riches in people and resources, is being mismanaged by the current government.  Make no mistake the current MLA’s have created a bad government.  The only way WE can change the state of decline in Alberta is to change the government.  The opportunity to do this is the next provincial election, which will unfortunately be called at the “whim” of the current ruling party.

You can make a difference in your future and the future of your children and grand-children.  Take the time to get involved by first joining the Wildrose Party, and then your local constituency association.  There are currently 83 CA’s in Alberta and this number will likely grow to 87 when the electoral boundary changes take effect in the very near future.

The current Provincial riding #36 is Edmonton-Meadowlark.  Within this riding are 64 separate polling subdivisions.  If you live in the riding I’d like to invite you to join our growing CA.  We’re building out an infrastructure that will include “poll captains” in each of the 64 polling subdivisions so this is your opportunity to have REAL INPUT into the political will of the riding.  Please visit our CA website at http://wildrosemeadowlark.ca to get more information, or just to follow the action as we prepare to defeat the PC government in the next election.

EDMONTON – Wetaskiwin RCMP say a search for two boaters who went missing Friday evening on Coal Lake has become a recovery mission.

Police received a report about 3 a.m. Saturday of two missing men on the lake, about 70 kilometres southeast of Edmonton.

The men, ages 19 and 26, had been fishing Friday in a four-metre metal boat when they failed to return home, said Cpl. Kevin Krebs.

Police don’t believe either man was wearing a life-jacket.

Search and rescue crews, police and hundreds of volunteers spent the weekend searching for the men, whose identities have not been released. Both are residents of the Camrose area.

Conditions on the lake were calm Sunday, but Krebs said rescue crews responding to the initial report were “chased off the lake by a snowstorm and wind.�

The men’s capsized boat was recovered Saturday from the weeds on the lake’s shore, Krebs said. Searchers also found a tackle box, clothing and other personal items.

One of the missing men is an avid fisherman who been on the lake several times, Krebs said.

“He knew the lake and had been out before. The other one was his friend and I don’t believe he had been out on this lake before,� he said.

Nearly 200 people, including family and friends, helped search and rescue crews throughout the weekend.

“It’s a very overwhelming response,� Krebs said. “The families have had lots of assistance and support. We’re hoping to bring this to a conclusion for them.�

The lake is murky, which has limited the efforts of search crews. The RCMP undercover recovery team was called Sunday to assist with the search by doing a sonar scan of the lake, Krebs said.

“It’s actually fairly dirty. You can see about four or five feet down into the water, but you can’t see the bottom,� Krebs said. “That’s why we’ve called out the underwater recovery team with their equipment, because, of course, they’re not hampered by that at all.�

Provincial lakes can be very cold this time of year, Krebs said. The surface temperature on Coal Lake was hovering around 14 C.

“If you end up in the water by accident, the time that you have before you start having issues with exposure is very limited,� he said.

He also urged boaters to wear their life-jackets while on the water: “The life-jackets don’t do any good if you’re not wearing them.�

CALGARY — Alberta’s teachers are calling on the provincial government to ensure that grants for schools keep up with the annual inflation rate.

At an annual conference of more than 400 delegates from throughout the province held this weekend in Calgary, the Alberta Teachers’ Association passed a resolution urging the government to make annual increases to per-student grants to school boards no lower than inflation.

“We are concerned, because anytime you fund less than inflation, it’s a cut,’ ATA president Carol Henderson said Sunday.

“We don’t want to see cuts to education — there are already pressure points,� added Henderson, mentioning class sizes and programs for special needs students as particular areas of concern.

In its 2012 budget, the provincial government projected per-student grants to increase a total of five per cent over the next three years.

Meanwhile, the government is projecting inflation to go up 7.1 per cent over the same period, Henderson said.

“We’ll be asking the government to reconsider funding for education,� she said.

The budget resolution was one of more than 170 voted on by teacher delegates at the conference, which sets policy for the ATA.

The ATA also passed a resolution calling on the government to establish a fully-funded all-day kindergarten program for parents who want to enrol their children.

All-day kindergarten was a plank in Premier Alison Redford’s platform when she ran for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives, and the ATA wants the government to make it policy.

“Alberta is a wealthy province, yet Alberta’s lagging in early intervention programs and all-day kindergarten,� Henderson said.

The head of a Calgary parents’ group said all-day kindergarten would be beneficial to many children, but should be optional if the government moves in that direction.

“Every child is different,� said Robert Hurdman of the Calgary Association of Parent and School Councils.

“A lot of children would do just as well in a family setting.�

Another political promise the ATA is seeking action on is Redford’s pledge during the leadership campaign to end provincial achievement tests for Grade 3 and 6 students in time for the next school year.

“They are not reflecting learning for today’s children,� Henderson said, adding the multiple choice exams don’t provide a picture of students’ ingenuity and problem-solving skills.

“They’re long past their ‘best before’ date. We think there’s a much better way,� Henderson said.

Parents appreciate provincial achievement tests as a means of keeping schools accountable, but Hurdman said he’d be open to replacing them with something else as long as they give an accurate gauge of students’ and schools’ performance.

“That’s not to say (provincial achievement tests are) the best way of doing it, but parents would like to see that kind of communication and accountability maintained,� he said.

jvanrassel@JasonvanRassel

During the peak of Alberta’s most recent economic convulsion, Peterson Dy came to feel that if a rising tide was indeed lifting all boats, his vessel must have a hole in it.

He saw the river of money flowing through the province and thought he was missing out. So the baby-faced Edmontonian quit his job training executives at the University of Alberta’s Centre for International Business Studies and became a pipefitter.

Two years later, he moved with his young family out of a condominium and into a newly built home in Silverberry, Alta., a mushrooming suburb in southeast Edmonton with a median household income 29 per cent higher than in the city as a whole.

Dy, now 36, moved to Canada at 10 months old when his parents emigrated from the Philippines.

His father worked as an architect, his mom as a nurse. His younger brother and sister are engineers.

The decision to leave an office job at a major university for work as a journeyman tradesperson contradicts the conventional narrative of social ascension. Dy’s choice highlights the remarkable strength of the Alberta labour market for those who don’t mind calluses on their hands.

“It’s been good to me,” he says of his work. “I’ll go as long as it’s treating me well.”

And in the land that oil built, blue-collar work can treat one very well indeed.

—-

Consider the numbers. According to StatsCan, last year the average oil-and-gas worker in Alberta made $2,220 a week, higher than any other occupational group. Across Canada, construction workers’ weekly wages measured about 10 per cent less than those in the professional sector, but in Alberta that gap shrinks to two per cent. Construction and energy combined make up more than a third of the provincial economy, driving activity in other sectors.

And Alberta’s unemployment rate regularly clocks in around five per cent, two or three percentage points below the national average and a fraction of the 10- or 15-per-cent rates seen in the Maritimes. Alberta’s only rival for lowest unemployment in the country is usually Saskatchewan.

The economic stats take on a decidedly different tone internationally.

The American Bureau of Labour statistics measured unemployment at 8.1 per cent in April, slightly higher than Statistics Canada’s number for Canada, but long-term unemployment — those looking for work for more than a year — was facing 41 per cent of job-seekers last month in the States. The most recently available Canadian rate was less than a fifth of that, while the labour-force participation rate in Canada has exceeded that of America since May 2002, and by more than two per cent since November 2009.

Meanwhile, Europe continues to grapple with high debt, unemployment and the travails of monetary union without fiscal concord.

The latest crisis zone is Spain, in recession for the second time in as many years and with an unemployment rate nearing 25 per cent. In February, the Economist magazine constructed a “Proust index” to tally up economic time lost since the financial crisis. It calculated that Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Britain and the U.S. have all lost seven or more years’ worth of economic activity since 2007.

Alberta’s unemployment rate in April was 4.9 per cent, Statistics Canada says.

“Is there anywhere else in North America where a strong back can keep you in the middle class?” says Todd Hirsch, senior economist with ATB Financial. “It’s a good question.

“The traditional blue-collar worker, with education limited to high school or maybe a little bit of vocational training, in Alberta, yeah, there are still opportunities for now,” he says. “We’re being propped up by these energy and resource prices.”

But he cautions education of all kinds will become more important for workers across the economy in the future – a future he sees demanding a more creative workforce.

“The real danger in the medium to long term is we become very complacent and very fat and lazy off our energy resources,” he says.

“When the age arrives when oil prices are not high, and it might be next year, it might be 20 years, we’re going to be stuck. We’re going to be Detroit.

“If you had told Detroit in 1965 that in 50 years the city was going to be half its size and the saddest economic urban area that North America’s ever seen, they wouldn’t have believed you either.”

—-

Paula Paddison grew up in Fort Kent, a hamlet outside of Bonnyville, Alta. She worked as a subcontracting janitor for Encana until her employer lost its contract in 2006.

The mother of three began a trade apprenticeship shortly afterwards, and now supervises 12 welders, crane operators and Bobcat drivers at Canadian Natural Resource’s in situ oilsands plant north of Bonnyville.

“I worked a lot of low-paying jobs before I ever started into this,” says Paddison, 40, whose plans to become a medical technician after high school were disrupted by her marriage. “They offered to start me in the apprenticeship program at the same amount of money that I was making as a janitor, so I really couldn’t lose anything.”

She makes around $80,000 a year, working four 10-hour days a week.

Alberta’s prosperity stems from a geological lottery run millions of years ago and modern global price fluctuations over which it has no control. Dependence on resource revenues makes economic life a roller-coaster, with bust following boom as night follows day.

When Peterson Dy began work at Shell’s Scotford Refinery in Fort Saskatchewan, Alta., in 2010, he hoped for steady employment for eight to 10 years. He was out of work 10 months later.

He found another job in four months, and today works at Abraxus Construction near Sherwood Park, Alta., but his travails with trades employment have made him hard-headed about job security. “It would be nice if we could have steady work, but the reality is we could lose our jobs tomorrow,” he says. “We just take it a day at a time, day at a time. We can’t look too far forward.”

Alvin Finkel teaches Canadian history at Athabasca University. He sees Alberta as a stronghold for employers, with comparatively poor social support for working women and the lowest unionization rates in the country.

“They kind of get you by the nuts at 18,” he says of Alberta’s blue-collar employers. “They own your soul. They give you this job with a decent hourly pay and you go and buy all these man-toys and buy yourself a little cabin as well, and the banks own you. Does that make you middle class? I don’t think so.”

Finkel feels the travel demands often made of oilsands workers, along with the dangers their work exposes them to, makes many jobs available in the trades less desirable than they were when conventional manufacturing played a bigger role in the provincial economy.

“From the point of view of family life, I would say that the kind of blue-collar work that we mainly have in Alberta now isn’t as good as the blue-collar work that once existed here,” he says, pointing to the Celanese petrochemical plant that operated from 1953 to 2007 in eastern Edmonton.

“Sure, it pays better. You may own more toys, if all of your money hasn’t gone to drugs. You may be a little bit better provider for your family. But you probably don’t know your kids.”

—-

Manufacturing work, with its regular hours and promise of proximity to home, can be tough to find anywhere in Canada. Witness American industrial titan Caterpillar’s February decision to close its Electro-Motive factory in London, Ont. One month earlier, the company reported record annual profits of nearly $5 billion.

The closure of the plant, which made electric diesel engines for trains, put 460 Canadians out of work and boosted London’s regional unemployment rate close to 10 per cent. In September, Ford closed its St. Thomas, Ont., Assembly Plant in Talbotville, just south of London.

Mike Moffat, an economist at the University of Western Ontario, dates the peak of manufacturing in Ontario between the ’50s and ’70s. He argues a gradual decline has set in since then, with one or two minor upswings.

“It’s dueto productivity increases,” he says. “Over the last decade, we saw a 40-per-cent increase in productivity. But we’re not buying 40 per cent more manufactured goods. We simply don’t need as many workers to produce the same amount of goods.”

The corresponding decline in industrial employment this brings shows up elsewhere in Ontario.

“The steel industry is definitely still here, but it’s not nearly what it was 30 years ago,” says Arthur Sweetman, a professor of economics at McMaster University in Hamilton. Dofasco, a local mill established in 1912, “is still producing, and producing quite a bit of steel, and very high-quality steel. It just takes 10 times fewer people to produce that steel than it used to.”

The mobility of modern capital doesn’t help either. After the closure, Caterpillar moved the manufacturing that took place in London to a plant in Indiana, where workers earn half the hourly rate of the Canadians they replaced.

—-

Alberta’s oilsands, whatever their drawbacks, cannot be moved to Montana.

So Montanans come to them.

Peterson Dy sees the pull of the promise of wages and work every time he steps onto a new job site. The pipefitter says he frequently rubs shoulders with workers from Ontario, the U.S. and even Morocco on the job.

That influx contributes to Alberta’s relative youth. Provincial government figures peg the median age at 36, five years below the national figure. The newly retired tend to rank Kelowna or Victoria above Edmonton as destinations for their lives after work. Dy speaks of coworkers’ plans to “money up” in the province before heading back home to build a new house or start a business.

But Alberta, like the rest of Canada, will be home to more retirees in the future. Krista Uggerslev, an applied research fellow at NAIT, sees the aging of the baby boomers as a ticking time-bomb for the labour market. Their retirement will create a voracious demand for workers in the province, she says, that may be impossible to sate.

That appetite won’t necessarily translate into better wages or working conditions for tradespeople. Jim Stanford, chief economist with Canadian Auto Workers, sees labour’s bargaining power in decline.

“In general, I think life is getting tougher for workers, in spite of all this infatuation with the looming labour shortage,” he says.

Alberta’s GDP per capita leads all provinces and exceeds the national average by almost 50 per cent, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada. Stanford thinks that gaudy figure masks the real portion of the province’s wealth that winds up in the wallet of the typical tradesperson.

“I don’t think workers in Alberta are getting a fair share of the wealth that they produce,” he says. “Even though oil-industry workers are relatively well-paid, that pay premium is not remotely proportional to the profit-premium in the industry.”

Ultimately, the question of economic prosperity gets answered in individual lives. Dy learned in May that Abraxus plans to keep him on for a number of years, helping him pay off his mortgage and save up money to give his children the opportunities every parent wants to provide. But injury, on the job or not, could throw a wrench in his plans — over Christmas, he tore his Achilles tendon playing hockey and couldn’t walk without limping until March.

Paddison hopes her three children pursue a trade in the province as they move into the workplace.

“I’ve encouraged them to do apprenticeship programs. It is the most affordable way to get an education. Now that I’ve been through it, I would not do it any other way,” she says.

“I tell them the sky’s the limit as far as what Alberta offers for work.”

lkelly@edmontonjournal.com

Twitter.com/LewisHKelly

When Canada’s young, dashing governor general made the arduous journey from Ottawa to Calgary in 1881, there wasn’t much more to the future metropolis than a lonely police outpost.

But the big skies, rolling foothills and majestic Rockies so moved the 36-year-old Marquis of Lorne, he decided the region should be named for his wife, Louise.

Albertans today can perhaps count themselves lucky their future home wasn’t dubbed Louiseland or even Lu-lu-land (her childhood nickname).

Her lengthy moniker, Princess Louise Caroline Alberta, fortunately provided other alternatives.

People who wanted a more rugged name – such as “Buffalo” – were still disappointed.

But as Albertans mark Victoria Day with barbecues and gardening on Monday, it’s hard to imagine a better namesake than the fourth daughter of Queen Victoria.

So what if she never came here.

“It’s a good fit,” says Josh Traptow, Alberta spokesman for the Monarchist League of Canada.

“Alberta is viewed by the rest of Canada as kind of that kid who . . . is always on the outside and doing things on their own.”

Indeed, Princess Louise was not your typical Victorian royal.

“She defied convention,” says Calgary author Robert Stamp, whose book Royal Rebels recounts the remarkable lives of Princess Louise and the Marquis of Lorne.

She was a determined, self-assured woman who was once branded “dreadfully” contradictory by her powerful mom. Potential suitors could find her independent manner disconcerting. She smoked.

The princess was also an early supporter of women’s rights when that critical battle was for education and the right to vote.

Long before Princess Diana was celebrated for visiting the sick, Louise broke with convention to make unscheduled stops at hospitals.

“She didn’t want to be a royal,” explains Jehanne Wake, British author of Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s Unconventional Daughter.

“She wanted to be free. She wanted to be an independent person.”

But the unconventional princess had a bit of glam factor, too.

She was widely considered the most beautiful of all of Queen Victoria’s daughters. Huge crowds came to catch a glimpse on her wedding day in 1871, with police being called in to help keep control.

While time has erased the princess from the minds of many Albertans, she is one of the province’s most prominent links to the monarchy.

Not only does the province bear her name, so does the renowned tourist destination, Lake Louise.

But, in Louise’s day, there was so much more to the strong-willed princess than her regal name.

If Louise and Lorne were contemporaries of William and Kate, their movements would attract a devout following of paparazzi. Rumours about their sex lives would preoccupy TMZ.

But even in the 19th century, the life of a young princess was still a very public one.

She entered the world at Buckingham Palace in 1848, the sixth of nine children born to Prince Albert and Queen Victoria, one of Britain’s most celebrated monarchs.

Princess Louise was a shy child but immensely curious, earning the nickname “Little Miss Why,” as noted by former provincial legislature librarian, Blake McDougall, in his account of her life.

Alberta’s former top public safety official says he warned the government months before the Slave Lake fire that it was ill-equipped to protect the public in the event of a major disaster.

And in the wake of a new report that finds there were poor communications and a delayed evacuation of the town, Dave Hodgins said Saturday he hopes the province will finally give the Alberta Emergency Management Agency he used to head the power to co-ordinate the response to major disasters.

“It makes my blood boil to think the lives of firefighters and residents were unnecessarily put at risk,� Hodgins said in an interview.

“Ministers and deputy ministers were told this could happen and they chose to ignore that advice.�

An independent review released this week found the potential fire behaviour implications of the weather advisories issued by Alberta Sustainable Resource Development were not provided to local authorities or the 7,000 residents in the days before flames consumed one-third of the northern Alberta town.

Bill Sweeney, a retired RCMP supervisor who headed the review, suggested the department needs to work with the AEMA to put in place a consistent incident command system to ensure information is better shared during the early stages of a disaster.

“Managers from SRD and the town need to be in the same room talking to each other so informed decisions can be made,� Sweeney said in an interview.

“We were damn lucky there weren’t multiple fatalities.�

The report found many citizens evacuated only after the wildfires had encroached into the community and homes were on fire on the Sunday evening. At that point, police officers had insufficient information regarding safe routes out or muster points.

If he had been given timely and complete information about the fire’s proximity to town and the potential for high winds, Sweeney said he would have told residents on Saturday to be ready to leave on a moment’s notice. When the wind-whipped fires spread into groves of black spruce near the town the next afternoon, he said he would have ordered people then to evacuate.

“I am an armchair quarterback, but that’s what I would have done,� Sweeney said.

“The crucial point is with the increased potential now for more wildland, urban interface fires, we need to ensure there’s a command structure where that information is shared quickly.�

Hodgins said AEMA could have performed that co-ordination role during the Slave Lake disaster if the province had implemented the recommendation of a 2005 report — ordered in the aftermath of a poorly managed train derailment and oil spill west of Edmonton — that said the agency should report directly to the premier’s office.

“Sweeney’s done a good job, but I’m afraid it will be another waste of government resources to produce a report that will just gather dust.� he said

“Give the agency (AEMA) the authority to do its job at two in the morning, so it doesn’t have to call and ask permission from 15 bureaucrats,�

After three years as AEMA’s managing director, Hodgins said he resigned in frustration in September 2010 because he felt hamstrung at co-ordinating the province’s response to the H1N1 outbreak and widespread flooding in southern Alberta.