#ralph klein

[buggybrains]

finally starting to read masterson's book that I got a bit ago. this is all just the beginning, so its nothing that I don't already know, but is nonetheless very resonant.

[oldshowbiz]

1993.

Alberta: Canada's Right-Wing Province.

[quasi-normalcy]

One thing that’s increasingly obvious is that, if we manage to get through the twenty-first century without a mass extinction, Canada will deserve precisely none of the credit.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Opinion: Cancer widow fears return of health-care spending cuts in Alberta

I remember the cruelty. The lost opportunities. The starved infrastructure. The nurses and doctors who left and never came back. The mockery of people with disabilities and addiction. The cuts that hurt. The hospital falling down.

I remember the low rumble, the vibrations that shook my home.

When the Calgary General Hospital imploded on a Sunday morning in late 1998, all of Calgary felt it. My life was collapsing with it. All that seemed solid a few months earlier was now a pile of rubble.

I lost my husband that summer. George Paton was 57, a heavy duty mechanic who’d spent years in the British Royal Navy and Merchant Marines. He was big and friendly and no shrinking violet. He played bass in a country band, raced cars and rode a Harley.

Doctors hadn’t looked for esophogeal cancer. By the time they found it, it was too late. We were told he had three months to live. George was dead in five weeks. He didn’t even make it to his CT scan.

He hadn’t seemed sick for very long, but our health-care system was showing signs of chronic pain. Ralph Klein’s premiership kicked off with a $500-million cut that trickled down to hospitals across the province.

The general hospital demolition was a TV spectacle. It showed the cuts from a safe distance. To see the effects, you had to go into a hospital. Wait times were long, rooms were packed. When George was admitted to the Rocky View Hospital, he was placed on a gurney in the hallway, his failing body there for everyone to see.

Continue Reading.

[allthecanadianpolitics]

The brutal cuts proposed by Mr. Jean would mean the same thing as the brutal cuts imposed by Mr. Klein in the 1990s: Worse health outcomes, longer wait times, crammed Emergency Rooms, closed rural and urban facilities, demoralized health care professionals, another lost generation of nurses who take their skills to greener pastures, and a general collapse into the general dysfunction from which we are only now recovering.

Outgoing Wildrose Leader Brian Jean, who is campaigning to lead the province’s far-right Frankenparty, has vowed to lead Albertans back into the health care wilderness where they wandered with Ralph Klein a generation ago.

Alberta is still recovering from that misadventure.

Roughly one half of all Alberta hospital beds were closed during the worst years of Conservative premier Klein’s health care “reform,” between the end of 1992 and 1995. Very few of these beds ever reopened, even though the province’s population has doubled since that health care disaster.

The impact is well understood: years of chronic Emergency Room waits, crumbling infrastructure, stratospheric replacement costs, and now a looming staffing crisis as the Baby Boom generation of health care professionals prepares to retire without the experienced replacements who were driven out of the province by Mr. Klein’s destructive and ultimately ineffective policies.

Nevertheless, in introducing his platform to lead the so-called United Conservative Party, Mr. Jean pledged to make $2.6 billion in instant cuts to Alberta’s public sector by freezing salaries, leaving the jobs done by retiring caregivers and other public employees unfilled, and firing managers, many of whom are in fact front-line heath care workers.

Continue Reading.

[famousborntoday]

Ralph Klein : Born November 1, 1942

Ralph Philip Klein was a Canadian politician and journalist who served as the 12th premier of Alberta and leader of the Progressive Conservative Association of...

Link: Ralph Klein

[nostalgia-eh52]

Good Riddance Notley

[allthecanadianpolitics]

This chart is a good rebuttal to people who complain that the NDP is overtaxing people in Alberta. People sure didn’t seem to mind when Ralph Klein did it (and did it more than the NDP did).

Someone give this to Kevin O’Leary.