The Acting Speaker: Hon. member, names.

Mr. Anderson: The Premier – sorry – has served with all of his heart. He believes in many things that, of course, I believe in and many others that I do not. But one thing is clear, that he does what he does because he thinks that what he does is the best course for Alberta. So although I will continue to point out why his and his government’s policies are wrong and why I feel they will hurt our province, I will never question this Premier’s integrity and his commitment to the province that we both love. It’s with a sombre heart that I address the Speech from the Throne.

You know, we live in a beautiful place, forgetting for a second that it’s minus 21 degrees outside. We live among great people. We live among strong families. We live in a plentiful land with an unmatched expanse of riches and resources that the world desperately needs. But, my fellow members, I think it’s important, especially today and with the events of the last few weeks in mind, that we remember that there really is chaos right now all around the world. There are riots and protests and massacres and extremists that are threatening to destabilize what is already a very fragile and tenuous world economic recovery. There are multiple western European democracies teetering on the edge of financial ruin. The Middle East has reached a crossroads of monumental importance, with one road leading to stable and healthy democracy and the other to religious theocracy.

Our North American neighbours are in equally dire straits. Mexico is teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state as horrific cartel killing sprees of police and civilians continue to grow almost exponentially every day while a cash-starved nation fights back with its so limited resources. Then there are our dear friends and family in the United States, currently squarely on the path to financial collapse caused by unfathomable debt, that generations of children not even born will have to pay the price for. The future of our most important trading partner and ally has not been so uncertain since the darkest days of the Great Depression and of World War II. My colleagues, we live on a ship that I see is sailing right now through the eye of a hurricane. How we steer ourselves from this moment on will determine the course of our future for decades and perhaps longer. We need to straighten that course and prepare for the entirely uncertain times ahead of us. We need to be better financial stewards so that we might not only have enough to survive a couple of years of world economic turmoil but so that we can survive and thrive, whatever the world throws at us.

We need to be a beacon of hope and prosperity, a place of refuge from the storms ahead, where people from our nation and even from around the world can come and know that they can find work, prosperity, and opportunity. We can be that place. I’m sure of it. We must be that place. We have to be better managers of our finances. We cannot continue to spend at the rate that we are currently spending. Our sustainability fund is due to expire by 2012-13 or thereabouts, give or take a year. Our heritage fund, when adjusted for inflation, is worth as much today as it was in 1981. Think about that. Although most institutional debt was paid off by 2005, long-term liabilities have since skyrocketed and continue to grow at an alarming clip. My colleagues and friends in the PC Party, I hope you understand, and I think we all in this House need to understand that we right now are squandering our province’s greatest income-earning years.

Although oil hovers around $100 today, new technologies combined with uncertain economics make the future value of oil virtually unknowable over the long term. We’re not prepared for a bad scenario. We are betting our own and our children’s future prosperity on a best-case scenario. We can’t do that. I know we want more infrastructure, and that’s important. We do need more infrastructure, but surely we can prioritize the most urgent of needs and stretch that budget over an extra couple of years in order to balance the books. Even the Liberal Party this last week recommended that same idea, one that we’ve been advocating for a long time. It is not extreme. It is not uncaring. It is absolutely reasonable and essential to do so. Can we not control our spending increases to the rate of inflation plus population growth? Is that really so difficult? Is it too much to ask? Is it too extreme? We spend more than anyone in the country on social programs per person.

Our problems in health, seniors, and community services are not due to a lack of funding. They are due to poor management and subpar planning. The health system, for example, is broken. It does not work. It is causing people to unnecessarily suffer and in many cases die. Unnecessarily. That’s a fact, and there’s no amount of money that is going to solve the problem. We can’t afford that amount of money anyway. Let’s come up with solutions for our health care system. Let’s look to Europe and to the systems that do work, not the U.S. system. By all means, 99 per cent of the Albertans that I know are not interested in any kind of private insurance system where citizens are oftentimes left in financial ruin if they get sick or, even worse, they don’t even get treated at all. No one wants that.

Aren’t we ready to look at the models that do work around the world, to introduce competitive delivery, where an Albertan can take their public insurance card to the facility of their choosing, where private providers build infrastructure using their money rather than tax money to compete for Alberta patients with the public system facilities? Shouldn’t we stop building new, expensive acute-care beds when we could free up thousands of existing acute-care beds across this province with a much less expensive investment in long-term care for seniors? Wouldn’t decentralized health care without paid boards and large PR departments be more responsive to local needs? Would it not result in increased financial partnerships with municipalities and businesses to expand available health services? Would it not unleash the innovative spirit of Albertans to come up with unique health solutions to their very, very unique community needs? Wouldn’t it result in a more stable and less expensive system, a more sustainable system as we see these same reforms have created in the European models?

The answer is: yes, it would. It absolutely would. It has worked repeatedly, over and over and over again in those nations such as Austria and Belgium and France and Sweden and Germany and Japan, not that that’s a European model but another example. They are outperforming us in our health care at almost every single level, yet we continue to bang our head against the wall and do the exact same things that we have been doing for the last 20 years, for the last 40 years, but specifically the bad things we’ve been doing in the last five years. We all have to be courageous on that point. All of us – the New Democrats, the Alberta Party, the Liberals, the PCs, the Wildrose, all independents – need to stop with the fear mongering and religious devotion to the status quo in health care, which does not work.

We have to stop thinking that government will solve all of our health problems without help from the private and nonprofit sectors, who have so many of the most innovative and bright people in the province working for them. We need to be open to new ideas while holding to cherished values, namely that no one, absolutely no one, should be denied health services because of an inability to pay. We can have a sustainable and world-class health system to bequeath to our children and to our grandchildren, but if we continue along our current path in health care, we will leave our children and ourselves suffering, waiting, and bankrupt.

My friends, it has to change, and I hope that we can do so together, which brings me to my final point, democracy and free markets. Democracy is powerful. As imperfect as it sometimes is, it is the only system on Earth that has consistently been able to protect freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, the rights of women, the rights of children, the rights of all men and women to be free, to excel, to pursue success and happiness in the way that they feel is best. Democracy’s companion is free markets, not unfettered markets but free markets. You cannot truly have one without the other. In a successful democratic and free-market system government’s role is to ensure a level and a just playing field. It is to enforce the rule of law and then to let businesses and individuals compete and work together to build better communities. The incentive of financial success results in competition, innovation, cooperation where it makes sense, technological advancement, and wealth generation.

Let us not be deceived by those on the extreme left, and I do not point to anyone here who fits this description. Let’s not be deceived by those who would say that free markets have failed. Free markets have not failed. Over the last century they have resulted in the greatest and quickest rise in the standard of living ever witnessed in the history of mankind. We must not let political correctness or revisionist historians claim otherwise.

Obviously, the rule of law must be enforced. Obviously, we do need to make sure that regulations that are needed are in place. Obviously, we cannot have fraudsters and thieves game the system to the detriment of honest and hard-working and decent people. But just as one does not throw out their vehicle because they have a flat tire, so too would we be complete ignorant imbeciles should we think to jettison our free-market system because we failed to properly regulate certain financial instruments properly or we oversaw some things that shouldn’t have been done with regard to our government debts.

We need to protect our democracy and free markets. We need to ensure that the rule of law prevails thereunder. We need to make certain that each interference of government with the public is entirely necessary and justifiable. It should always be a last resort to interfere with an individual’s rights, never the first resort, which, sadly, has happened too much recently in this House. We cannot allow bureaucratic fiefdom building to trample on the entrepreneurial spirit of Albertans. They’re exhausted from it. They’re tired of it. It’s hurting families. It’s too much, and we have to reduce it. We must protect the property of Albertans as carefully as we do the right to free speech or expression or freedom of religion.

We must plan to carefully reduce over time the burden of government on the people through excessive taxation and wealth redistribution schemes. We must make our democracy healthy again. That means far more transparency in government, which the hon. Leader of the Opposition talked a lot about very eloquently. Bill 50 should have never happened in a democracy such as ours: $16 billion in untendered contracts, to be paid exclusively by Alberta ratepayers, passed out without even an objective needs assessment conducted to ensure their necessity. It is scandalous, and it should be repealed.

There is one principle above all that will save and strengthen our democracy, and that is this. We must restore the proper role of an elected MLA. MLAs are accountable first and foremost to the people they represent, not to the party, not to lobbyists, not to special interests, not even to friends. MLAs are accountable to those who step into that ballot booth and with a pencil mark an X beside the name of a community member whom they are willing to trust with the interests of themselves and their families. It is this right, it is this sacred principle that thousands of our countrymen have died for and a million more have fought for, and we need to enshrine this back into our democracy. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

Video:

Rob's Response to Throne Speech
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