Bye Ralph - Don't Come Back - Please!

So, Ralph has given his final speech in the legislature (or so we can hope!). The speech itself was more or less the dreck one has come to expect from such speeches, and I won't dwell upon it - it's what he said in a media scrum afterwards that I wish to examine in more detail.

He admitted to having no plan, no clear direction at all for the province in the current boom. That's no real surprise. Once Ralph's Team had the deficit dragon slain (somewhere around about 1999 or so), they lost all sight of what to do. They "refocused" on the next obvious thing to go after, the government's accumulated debt, but as a collective whole, the Klein Tories have been a policy disaster zone. They clearly don't understand anything other than a dollar sign, and at that only if it is incoming revenue - god help them figure out how to spend the government's (our) money wisely. Calgary has lost four hospitals since Ralph took over; some of our oldest, and most beautiful, school buildings have been allowed to decay into near unusability. The health care system has been gutted, with many supporting, non-surgical treatments defunded to the point where the poor and elderly simply cannot afford to have treatment because the "post treatment" recovery requires ongoing treatment that they cannot afford. Our government slashed welfare in half - reducing what a single "employable" recipient receives in a year to just barely $5000 / year, and then claiming that he "preferred to give a hand up instead of a hand out" - of course blindly making the assumption that perpetuating the cycle of poverty somehow gives these people a way out.

To be perfectly frank, I'm quite sure that Ralph never had any kind of "plan" for anything. Ralph succeeded in spite of himself, not because of his wisdom or insight. Throughout his political career, he never demonstrated so much as one iota of insight into what it means to govern - he simply bumbled around, one ham-fisted maneuver to another, and leaving the pieces for the people to pick up as best as they could. Following Dim Jinning's "Just Do It" ethos, he slashed public funding in all sorts of areas, with no regard to how those cuts would impact the services involved, or the clients of those services. He privatized everything he thought he could get away with, and choked the funding for everything else (e.g. schools and health care).

Forming public policy is not merely a matter of reading which way the winds blow that particular day, but rather it is a subtle game of balance and counterbalance. Ralph understood (sort of) that spending too much money was a bad thing, and he clung to it like a shipwrecked sailor to a piece of driftwood in a storm. That he admits he had no plan to deal with the oilsands boom should come as no surprise to any of us - he never had any plans for anything.

Sadly, as Evilscientist notes, the alternatives to replace Klein are no improvement.