8:18 p.m. - 2003-01-19
Gambling
There is a major firestorm blowing up over education issues. In the past ten days, the provincial government has announced that funding set aside to build new schools province-wide and a new hospital in Calgary - to replace the one they blew up a few years back - is no longer available. They also announced that there is going to be a major expenditure of taxpayers' dollars to upgrade all the Video Lottery Terminals in the province. So why is anyone surprised? Even though the majority of Alberta citizens give very high priority to education and health care and most - 80% - fought vigorously against the introduction of VLTs at all, the government has manipulated the population for so long that they fight each other over minutia instead of standing strong against the legislators.
I think part of the problem is that the political party that has governed this province for the past 30 years has developed several strategies that can keep opposition at bay and/or unable to organize a united front. The first strategy is called divide and conquer. A fine example is the urban vs rural split. Despite the fact that 80% of the population lives in urban areas, as citizens, we have considerably more in common with rural families than otherwise - the desire to nurture and protect our families/communities and the need to earn a reasonable living. Yet at every turn, the province will tell one group that their needs cannot be met because of the greed or unreasonable demands of the other group. Now I've spent a lot of volunteer hours in meetings and workshops in the company of people from rural Alberta on issues like health care, education, and the environment - see the entry re: the Kyoto protocol on October 6. Truth is, very few citizens have ever asked for something at the expense of the other. Usually just the opposite occurs where a compromise is sought so everyone's needs are met within the resources available. Where the province excels in manipulating and controlling this game, is through using the lack of understanding that often occurs when one group hasn't experienced the lifestyle demands of the other. It would be a simple exercise to educate each on the others' basic needs, but instead the provincial government employs a consistent appeal to some deeply ingrained prejudices and fears as well as some of the baser human instincts like jealousy, greed, and insecurity that we all hold at one time or another. If deemed necessary, they then set up regulatory processes that play one group against the other in an advesarial setting so that each side is entirely frustrated - i.e. farmers vs oil companies. Sometimes violence has broken out when it appears that the survival of one or the other is or appears to be threatened because of a ruling of the regulatory board. An additional extension of this strategy, is to make certain that each time the groups start understanding how to negotiate despite the regulatory barriers, that the rules are changed in arcane and capricious ways.
The next game is the old "rob Peter to pay Paul". This is the one often used where schools and education are concerned. Tell a community that only one of two options are available - close all the schools in the inner sections of a city because of their lower enrolment to build new schools in the burgeoning suburbs or keep the old schools open then bus all the children in the new suburbs across town - usually adding several hours to the childrens' days because of the travel times. Our local public school board did a "Building or Busing" study in the late 1980's that demonstrated that over a 20 year period, the cost of one to the other was zero sum. Bussing has a lot of major drawbacks for the children and communities affected that are mitigated by a local school. Closing schools in the inner parts of a city makes even less sense. Empty classrooms can and should be used to deliver other public services, such as community nursing, policing, and the like, because real estate costs closer to the downtown are prohibitive. Using public buildings paid for by taxpayer dollars is eminently sensible. However, it is the provincial government's contention that a school is "empty" if leases are extended to those types of services and, therefore, they must be closed so that they can be sold to private enterprise for THEIR profit. This has already been done in the health care sector where two public hospitals in Calgary were sold off, after major tax-payer funded up-grades, one to a sitting MLA's business and one to a friend of the Party. There are now several Alberta wide lawsuits going through the courts because so many people have died, simply because they could not get into a hospital for treatment even for acute conditions like appendicitis because of government policies. Apparently, the Premier has settled out of court on some already.
I'm familiar with these tactics, because they are exactly the same strategies that were applied in the last boom in Calgary, when in 1982 to 1986, the provincial government stalled or cancelled the building of the all schools promised for our brand new communities across the province. It took a while, but in Calgary, we were able to overcome the "divide and conquer" and "rob Peter to pay Paul" tactics by looking at the actual costs for each option and uniting with the parents whose schools were threatened with closure to demand our own solutions based on a lot of the observations made above. We were also fortunate enough to have, at the time, a couple of school board and government politicians who stepped away from party policy and chose to represent the people who elected them instead. The province eventually responded by disbanding the local school board, after a vicious campaign of character assassination against the school board trustees, then later removed their ability to control their own funds collected as taxes locally for education. Every local tax dollar for education is now scooped into the provincial governments' kitty and only about 50% - 60% is returned to us for education purposes. Any MLA who dared to step out of line was sent to the back benches with loss of all their privileges. A lot of us in the community were harassed in different ways too. That pattern of behaviour continues to present day.
The final tactic used in the ruling political party's repertoire is the war of words. It is one of their biggest budget items, with taxpayer money again - "public relations" - and most of the media are too cowed to do other than dole out the pap they are told is allowed. Renegade reporters and editors are demoted or fired. One of the more courageous editorial staff at our major paper stated it best this weekend when she noted that the words education and health care were always associated with the term "welfare state" in government communiques while things like VLTs are always grouped with words like "free enterprise", "entrepreneurship" and "economic divesification". Yes, for the group of sitting politicians of the ruling political party, who formed and hold the only franchise for all video lottery terminals in the province. Quel surprise. They are all doing very well at the expense of the rest of Alberta's citizens. And that's not the only "free enterprise" that is owned and controlled solely by that cabal - remember the hospital trough. The latest suggestion? That private sector builders - aka the premier's extended family and friends, who even have a lapel pin in the shape of a fork that they wear quite openly - be allowed to throw up much cheaper versions of public buildings, like schools, for the benefit of all. Well, that has already been done - at the junior high, Terry Fox, that was eventually built in our community six years ago. Our community agreed to the "experiment" because the provincial government told us we could take that option or go without a school - in an area that has about 1200 junior high students. The ventilation system broke down about three years ago and has been a problem ever since. It needs to be replaced. But of course there are no tax funds available to repair schools already falling apart either.
What would be my first move? Toss the VLTs and the politicians who own them.
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