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Tired of the spin

Posted on May 20, 2015 by Taber Times

The amount of rhetoric and fear mongering coming out of the PC party following the provincial election has been almost deafening.

I, as a candidate who ran against the NDP, am getting tired of the lies. I am hearing nothing but fear mongering and mostly the sour grapes from a party which from the electorate who I talked to had totally lost touch with their constituents. Then I get to pick up the Taber Times and read LaVar Payne, our federal MP (CPC), spout off more garbage. Let’s look at the list.

1) Higher corporate taxes will send corporations out of the province and jobs will be lost.

First of all, the provincial NDP was campaigning on bringing the corporate tax to 12 per cent which is the same as the next highest province. Also, that is an increase of two per cent, which in reality, if a corporation has a million dollars of profit—that’s profit, not income, after all the bills are paid. The salaries are paid, the BONUSES are paid, what is left is the profit. If they made a million dollars, their current provincial tax would be $100,000. The increase would be $20,000. You know whose job is going to be affected? The CEO’s, his bonus wont be quite as high as he hoped. No one is going to lose their job because of a two per cent tax increase in the PROFITS.

2) Progressive tax for individuals.

Did anyone look at the scale they proposed? Most incomes below $100,000 per year would be the same, if not less for lower income earners. It’s not until you get to the higher income levels that it changes. If you look at economics research, which is not tied to ideological parties, all studies show a flat tax puts an unfair burden on low income earners.

3) Royalty Review, that’s the key word: review.

This should be done regularly anyway, not just when there’s an election. This is something that would be done every 3-4 years to ensure Albertans are getting fair value for OUR resources. They don’t belong to the exploration companies. If the review says lower them, fine. If it says raise them, OK. The last time we did a royalty review the implementation came just as we hit another pop of the oil bubble; Alberta doing a royalty review did not cause the world price of oil to crash. It also did not cause a major discovery in south eastern Saskatchewan and North Dakota of cheap oil, causing a huge exploration boom. Linking those items together was a favourite thing of our past provincial government, who coincidentally got over 80 per cent of their donations from corporations (public data).

4) Other provincial NDP governments

You can’t compare provincial parties from one province to another. Ideologically they may be similar, but it is like comparing siblings. They can be as much different as they are the same. If they weren’t, we could say the provincial PC MLAs should be charged with fraud like the 12 in Saskatchewan. But no one would dream of that. The people of the province chose a new government. Fear mongering will be more likely to keep investment from our province than a two per cent increase in corporate taxes ever will. Let’s look for ways to work together with our new government instead of trying to cause divisions, and grow our province to keep it a strong and vibrant place to live.

DEL BODNAREK

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