NDP isn’t the same old, same old

Re: Be Careful What You Wish For, Alberta, editorial, April 28. Your paper suggests anyone considering voting for the NDP in Alberta must be, well, dumb. I beg to differ.

In the 1990s and the aughts, Alberta’s successive Tory governments cut public services, then invested poorly in restoring same after the books balanced. They cut taxes and allowed the oil industry to grow unimpeded, which in turn created a massive influx of people whose service and infrastructure needs went largely unmet. Then the boom ended, and — with no plan for when the music stopped — the province finds itself back in 1993 again.

Faced with a snap election, Albertans have three choices: ❚he Tories, who got us into this mess, and whose platform is akin to a wink from a used-car salesman (“Trust us, we got this.”); ❚The Wildrose, funded by Calgary oil money and whose plan (save for shipping the sick to Disneyland) is the same as the Klein years — and we know how that plan ended; or ❚The New Democrats, who plan to balance the books, share the pain between people and businesses and try to maintain government service levels in the process.

The similar approaches of the rightwing parties may be more in keeping with the National Post’s economic orthodoxy, but those policies have been tried here and they failed. The NDP’s popularity is therefore unsurprising. And while your paper may think its policies are doomed to fail, many here would rather let them try than elect a Tory or Wildrose party intent on playing the same broken record, over and over again.

Kevin Kimmis, Edmonton.