Grrrralph!

Apparently Ralph Klein is just starting to assimilate the spanking his party gave him a few months ago. Like a spoilt child he's lashing out in all directions.

First, we are treated to more whining about resource revenues and equalization. For crying out loud, Ralph, nobody's talking about those revenues being annexed by Ottawa, just factoring them in as part of the provincial government's revenues when calculating equalization.

Then, moving closer to home, education appears set to become the next bugaboo for Ralph's Team. He's all upset with teachers and schoolboards for having the audacity to complain that education funding is not working adequately. Let's think about this - the cost of living in Calgary has been skyrocketing, meaning that the current salary scale for Calgary teachers is inadequate; we have schools that desperately require major amounts of repairs (anybody else remember a certain school roof in Marlborough?); I can only speak for Calgary but the school boards in this city need both new schools built as well as other funding.

Sez Ralph:

Operational funding for education, Klein said, has ratcheted up 84 per cent since 1996, noting there are eight new school projects in the CBE's school district.

Yes, but prior to 1996, your government (and its predecessor) did major cuts to education funding - so don't even try to measure from 1996. That's the same line you use for health care funding, and it's a crock to start with.

Then, we hit what used to be called "Advanced Education" (Universities, Colleges etc.) - where we find out that the government is "falling short" of its goal to have the "most affordable" system in the country. Yeah - well, Don Getty's crew starting abusing the funding of Universities in this province when I was completing my degree. A recent economic boom has done wonders for the University of Calgary (at least last time I was on the campus it seemed to be doing quite well - lots of new buildings and other changes), but tuition/fees and books aren't cheap and the increases to those fees have often exceeded the rate of inflation considerably in recent years. Oddly, this is the first report I've seen out of Ralph's Team that I actually agree with - Alberta, of all places, should be striving to make its advanced education system not only more affordable, but taking it "up a notch or two" in its quality. Perhaps even more astonishing is that it comes out from Denis Herard - a former backbench MLA that has mostly served as a seat warmer in the past.

What's truly sad about all of this is not Ralph's snapping his teeth and barking, but rather it's the fact that with the multi-billion dollar surpluses the government is racking up, it would be utterly trivial to create several large endowment trust funds (a la what backs some of the Ivy League schools in the US) for our Universities that would provide a foundation of stable, growing funding over the decades to come. I don't believe it would cover all of the University funding required, but properly managed, it could go a long ways. Of course, miserly old Ralph can't see beyond the stacks of green that he's been accumulating.