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If an election was held today, who would you vote for?

  • UCP

    Votes: 9 12.5%

  • NDP

    Votes: 53 73.6%

  • Liberal

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Alberta Party

    Votes: 5 6.9%

  • Undecided

    Votes: 5 6.9%
  • Total voters
    72
O-tac said:
The issue isn't merely that you could be harassed by political parties. It opens you up to financial scamming, political persecution and poses a threat to abused women, police and judges and politicians. The separatists can also forge your signature for their petition if they want since the main thing Elections Alberta verifies is that your voter ID, address and e-mail matches. And they aren't allowed to verify if your name was used for a petition, or even remove it if it was since the UCP changed the rules. And even better than that, foreign adversaries probably have copies they've made to interfere with elections, to say nothing of Palantir and other fascist surveillance companies uploading that info to their databases. It's really bad.

As for Smith's response, there's been none beyond her claiming she can't comment since Elections Alberta is investigating. Bill 54 was passed by the UCP right before Centurion Group got the list and it prevented Elections Alberta from investigating this at the end of March by requiring an unnecessarily high standard to look into tips. A reporter notified them and they did nothing until the data was posted online.
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I'm aware of the severity, I was being sarcastic. Except for the world ending and Kenney comments, those were serious. My point with the sarcasm is people do not care and nothing will change for them when they cast their ballot for the low taxes blue team. Decency and democracy be damned.
 
A $6B surplus could very well be a significant underestimate if WTI prices stay at $100/bl, which is where they seem to have settled. If oil prices stay higher longer, we could see a surplus of $10B+.

I'd like to see some of that money funnel back into education and health.
 
Looks like the debt servicing for this year will be around $3.4 Billion, so half of the surplus going to debt services would cover the debt from increasing. As Adam mentioned, if the prices stay high, maybe the surplus will be higher.
 
adamyyc said:
A $6B surplus could very well be a significant underestimate if WTI prices stay at $100/bl, which is where they seem to have settled. If oil prices stay higher longer, we could see a surplus of $10B+.

I'd like to see some of that money funnel back into education and health.
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UCP: "Hahahahahaahahahahahaha" <pisses it all away to their grifters and terrible business decisions>
 
Alberta’s education spending is the lowest in Canada on a per student basis. Not sure I agree with the assessment that education is “vastly over funded”.

Health spending is a little trickier since health spending on a per capita basis isn’t a great measure, since Alberta’s population is one of the youngest, so generally its spending should be less on a per capita basis. That said, Alberta’s per capita health care spending was only higher than New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec, and its healthcare spending to GDP ratio was significantly lower (~3%) than Canada’s spending overall. So I have to again disagree with the assessment that healthcare is “vastly over funded” in Alberta.
 
adamyyc said:
Alberta’s education spending is the lowest in Canada on a per student basis. Not sure I agree with the assessment that education is “vastly over funded”.

Health spending is a little trickier since health spending on a per capita basis isn’t a great measure, since Alberta’s population is one of the youngest, so generally its spending should be less on a per capita basis. That said, Alberta’s per capita health care spending was only higher than New Brunswick, Ontario and Quebec, and its healthcare spending to GDP ratio was significantly lower (~3%) than Canada’s spending overall. So I have to again disagree with the assessment that healthcare is “vastly over funded” in Alberta.
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While I don't agree either of these priorities are "vastly over funded", the schools one is tough to estimate on funding alone. There's a lot of structural differences between provinces, and I doubt most would say the education quality in MB is much better than AB. Alberta performs very well in standardized testing, and I know some will say that's not an accurate measure, but then what should we measure? I don't think it makes sense to say more funding = better education quality and ignore any type of efficiency gains.

On healthcare, the only thing I wanted to mention is that percentage of GDP is a very bad measure for AB. Just like how stats showing we have the highest GDP per capita in the country is also misleading, same with charts showing the same for North Dakota and other natural resource extracting areas. I'd be interested to see these spend figures in a couple years time, as this government has committed to a level of spending that they would criticize if the NDP did the same. Health spending across Canada needs some fundamental reworking. We spend amongst the highest per capita in the world without the access/performance of such. The Canada Health Act was mostly written decades ago, and most health experts would say it's a "fair" but very imperfect system, and there's far better models if we were to rebuild from scratch.
 
trtcttc said:
education quality
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It is important to ask what is a quality education? Once that is defined you can then ask is Alberta providing quality education.

I asked Google AI to Define a quality primary school education environment. That way it is unbiased.

Physical Space
Comfort: Good lighting, ventilation, and ergonomic furniture.
Health: Clean water, private toilets, and hygiene facilities.
Safety: Sturdy buildings, fire exits, and secure perimeters.
Activity: Safe playgrounds and green spaces for movement.

Social & Emotional Climate
Safety: Zero tolerance for bullying or corporal punishment.
Inclusion: Accessibility for all abilities and cultural backgrounds.
Support: Small class sizes and positive teacher-student bonds.
Resources: Easy access to books, technology, and art supplies.

While a lot of the physical space items are met, I do know of a couple areas where we're falling short. For example there is a situation where to save money multiple schools share one custodian. When a student puked in the classroom, the class needed to be relocated for over an hour while waiting for the custodian come to the school and cleaned up the puke. There is also no AC or windows that can open in this school so when it gets hot outside there is no relief beyond drinking cold water. I think the city has also said there are a lot of playgrounds nearing their end of life. This isn't all buildings but we're a first world country so there should be zero tolerance for us not to meet the physical space needs of students.

Most of the social and emotional climate items are met but there are some areas that need to improve. Some might actually say we're too inclusive in some ways, having students with complex ability needs integrated with everyone can be good for socialization but bad for other students that can witness outbursts and may not receive the attention they need because the complex ability student requires more attention. The teacher to student ratio has not been corrected to where it needs to be. Class sizes have been well documented, while those are receiving more attention, years of underfunding has left a deficit. So while funding has improved, the affects of underfunding won't work their way out of the system for years.

So, sure if you look at the numbers today things look good but you cannot look at those numbers in a vacuum.
 
CalgaryTiger said:
It is important to ask what is a quality education? Once that is defined you can then ask is Alberta providing quality education.

I asked Google AI to Define a quality primary school education environment. That way it is unbiased.

Physical Space
Comfort: Good lighting, ventilation, and ergonomic furniture.
Health: Clean water, private toilets, and hygiene facilities.
Safety: Sturdy buildings, fire exits, and secure perimeters.
Activity: Safe playgrounds and green spaces for movement.

Social & Emotional Climate
Safety: Zero tolerance for bullying or corporal punishment.
Inclusion: Accessibility for all abilities and cultural backgrounds.
Support: Small class sizes and positive teacher-student bonds.
Resources: Easy access to books, technology, and art supplies.

While a lot of the physical space items are met, I do know of a couple areas where we're falling short. For example there is a situation where to save money multiple schools share one custodian. When a student puked in the classroom, the class needed to be relocated for over an hour while waiting for the custodian come to the school and cleaned up the puke. There is also no AC or windows that can open in this school so when it gets hot outside there is no relief beyond drinking cold water. I think the city has also said there are a lot of playgrounds nearing their end of life. This isn't all buildings but we're a first world country so there should be zero tolerance for us not to meet the physical space needs of students.

Most of the social and emotional climate items are met but there are some areas that need to improve. Some might actually say we're too inclusive in some ways, having students with complex ability needs integrated with everyone can be good for socialization but bad for other students that can witness outbursts and may not receive the attention they need because the complex ability student requires more attention. The teacher to student ratio has not been corrected to where it needs to be. Class sizes have been well documented, while those are receiving more attention, years of underfunding has left a deficit. So while funding has improved, the affects of underfunding won't work their way out of the system for years.

So, sure if you look at the numbers today things look good but you cannot look at those numbers in a vacuum.
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Yes I agree these things contribute to education quality, but I was mainly responding to the comparison across provinces. If we want to have a measurable scorecard for comfort/health/safety/etc. then great, we can generate a scorecard based on that and see if more spend = more quality. I just don't think spend = quality, rather if one province can spend less and get equivalent quality, that's better than the province spending more to get the same thing. There's also some operating model differences between provinces, some have middle schools, some don't. Some have more distributed schools, while Calgary has fewer, larger high schools. I'm not saying PISA test scores are the only quality measure, but defining that quality in a measurable way should be the first step of this rather than more spend = better that gets brought up repeatedly.
 
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