Revolutionary Moderation

Ezra confirms my fears



Ezra Levant thinks the appointment of Steve West is a good thing, for all of the same reasons I think it's a bad thing: because Steve West likes to privatize anything that isn't nailed down, and some things that are.



More telling is what else Ezra has to say, using West's appointment as a launch point.

...like a dieter who celebrates his success by pigging out, Alberta's Tories have "rewarded" themselves for cutting spending in the mid-1990s by jacking up spending by 70% over the past seven years -- even though population growth over the same period is only up 14%.

I'm sorry - did the province start running deficits again? Because I thought the idea when the first cuts came along in the early '90s was to stop those, not to cut spending because it's good sport. As for the misleading numbers here, well, the province deferred a lot of necessary infrastructure spending during that deficit-cutting spree, but those schools and hospitals ain't gonna build themselves.



Or perhaps they will, if the Alberta Alliance Party has its way - or at least, they'll be built by private industry. I'm sure that's the hope encompassed in the voucher programs being recommended by that party. Sound a little out there? Well, that's the party Ezra fears (hopes?) Tories are headed to as Klein "loses his way".



Also given the Ezra stamp of approval is the Alberta Residents League. I'll leave it to readers to determine to what degree their vision for Alberta sounds like "Sovereignty-Association", and further leave it to readers to determine how desirable that sounds. To me, the first organization sound like they are way out to the right (and Randy Thorsteinson's name reinforces that impression - remember him from the SoCreds, last election?), and the latter organization appear from the website to be nutballs. I've read some of that stuff before, but generally it's scrawled in crayon - my favourite part is the bullet chart on this page.



So there you have it. The Alberta Tories have slid too far to the left, what with their trying to get along with Ottawa, and wasting money on stuff like, er, programs. Thus Spake Ezra.



(as an aside, it was the ARL that sounded like the sovereignists to me, but Google thinks the same of Alberta Alliance.)