On several occasions both in this blog and on the web, I have implied that the Wildrose have it in for AISH. It turns out, I was entirely wrong about this. This is, of course, embarrassing, but the correct thing to do in a situation like this is clear the air, so that is what I intend to do.

I’m entirely prepared to say that my interpretation of their stance on AISH/PDD was likely colored by my overall impression of the Wildrose. I read this line from their Ideas And Solutions page about Health Care:

We will guarantee that treatment for AISH/PDD recipients is based on need

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The PC party of Alberta is an amazing thing. They have held the reins of power in Alberta for forty years, and even one such as I who holds no like for the party can respect that kind of record. But equally amazing is their ability to ignore every aspect of the world around them and still get people to support them.

This isn’t a new thing. I remember several years ago when Ralph Klein was running his second election as Premier of Alberta. His entire campaign was based on the fact that he had kept his word. We had balanced our budget. Of course, he made dozens of promises in that campaign about not cutting funding to programs big and small, and he broke all of those promises. The only promise he kept was that he would balance the budget, and that was accomplished by unexpectedly high oil and gas prices, which meant the provincial coffers were unexpectedly full of money. But the people ate it up. Ralph kept his word.

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The Lovely Lady and I watched a video the other day which I found quite interesting. It was about vote moving, and suggests that there may have been vote moving in the most recent federal election, which may account for the unexpected Conservative majority government. Now, this post is not about that, but it raised some very interesting conversation between us, and I wanted to go into the topic of Proportional Representation.

The video poses the question, “How did the Conservatives win 54.2% of the seats with only 39.6% of the vote?” and that really is an interesting question. I have long believed that a change to proportional representation was the only sensible solution to the problem that comes with our current system. To illustrate it, I’ll create a fictitious example.

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