338Canada.com predictions vs. actual Alberta election 2019

[Lazybones]

Alberta elects its first assistant trailer park supervisor as Premier
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/04/alberta-elects-its-first-assistant-trailer-park-supervisor-as-premier/

[Darren Dirt]

I see now the link is Beaverton... but when I first saw the heading I was prepared to find that it was CBC.
PS: okay Mr. Kenney now it's time to fulfill the promises! https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/04/kenney-vows-to-personally-strangle-every-bc-resident/

[Thorin]

I see now the link is Beaverton... but when I first saw the heading I was prepared to find that it was CBC.
PS: okay Mr. Kenney now it's time to fulfill the promises! https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/04/kenney-vows-to-personally-strangle-every-bc-resident/

Are you suggesting Kenney should strangle Lazy?

[Darren Dirt]

I see now the link is Beaverton... but when I first saw the heading I was prepared to find that it was CBC.
PS: okay Mr. Kenney now it's time to fulfill the promises! https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/04/kenney-vows-to-personally-strangle-every-bc-resident/

Are you suggesting Kenney should strangle Lazy?

That was another link to the satirical Beaverton, aka OF COURSE NOT!

...although future gas prices will likely do the job anyway

[Lazybones]

...although future gas prices will likely do the job anyway

LOTS of used electric and hybrids on the market here.. PILES of Telsa's on the road.. I can dream.

I commute 100% via transit and the Mazda 5 is not bad on gas.

[Tom]

All I know is that this year's election cycle has been a train wreck and I'd vote for nobody if I could. Notley is the least worst in my opinion and so I'll be going orange again.

Ditto. Green was an actual option here in EVG. But I didn't feel their platform quite aligned with what we need this time around. Wanted to vote green last time, but things have changed since then. So yeah. I voted Orange. And EDM is 100% orange it would seem, but they lost all cgy votes afaics and any northern votes. the last vote map I saw was completely blue except edmonton.

I overheard a guy talking on election day that he will vote (or voted) for the UCP cause they "promised" reducing cigarette and alcohol tax. *SIGH*. That'd make me mad if I really cared that much. Frustrated a bit that they can't see past their own nose, but I can imagine they just don't care and probably think all parties are just as bad so just vote for the one that'll save you the most in the short term I guess? w/e.

I'm betting Kenny and co (assuming they don't get booted due to corruption charges. I HIGHLY doubt that they would. maybe some fines or smth or a dismissal or they stall it long enough for the rcmp/proscecutors to give up?) run the province similarly to the previous PCs except worse. Their current platform what little of it they finally released (a few?) weeks before the election is just more of the same conservative BS about trickledown, giving hand-jobs to their rich pals and punishing the poor.

[Thorin]

They did release a very detailed policy about what they would do if elected, it's found here: https://www.albertastrongandfree.ca/policy/.  It's a long read.  Some of the things they say make sense, many of the things they say in their policy are business-positive worker-negative.

For instance https://www.albertastrongandfree.ca/telling-job-creators-that-alberta-is-open-for-business/, expand the section "The NDP's Failed Policies", look for the heading "Failed NDP Policies - High Cost", then look for the bullet point starting with "Holiday pay". Here's the wording:

Holiday pay ? Restaurants have been forced to pay all staff holiday pay, even when a restaurant isn?t open on the holiday. Having to pay all staff statutory holiday pay to not work on days when the business is closed adds a significant labour cost, which small businesses find unfair.

Think about that for a minute.  Kenney wants to help restaurants not pay workers if the restaurant is closed for a statutory holiday.  Now think about how you'd feel if you were suddenly told that you're taking tomorrow off because it's Good Friday and by the way you're not getting paid for it.  Wouldn't you be furious that your employer is breaking provincial law, federal law, and going against well-established case law?

Now expand the section "UCP Policies That Will Create Jobs and Prosperity", then look for the bullet point starting with "Appoint a Minimum Wage Expert Panel".  Here's the wording:

Appoint a Minimum Wage Expert Panel to
[..]
? assess whether hospitality industry workers who serve alcohol would likely generate higher net incomes (i.e. by working more hours) with a wage differential similar to those that exist in Ontario Quebec and British Columbia

Here, Kenney is suggesting that if he lets restaurants pay servers less per hour (specifically he's talking about making a lower minimum wage for servers), they'll make more total money because they'll get more hours.  Which is disingenuous, because one would assume the restaurants are already only employing workers for as little hours as they need them, so dropping the per-hour wage would just reduce what the restaurants need to pay out.  Why would a restaurant keep employees around longer and spend more on labour than they need to?  That whole industry is already rife with business owners who screw over employees, they're not suddenly gonna get magnanimous overnight.

So put those two things together and you can see that Kenney has a hard-on for screwing over your local waiters and waitresses by letting restaurants pay them less and removing their stat holiday pay, even while he complains about NDP policies that actually helped them.

By the way, I didn't read the entire policy, the pdf document is 114 pages and eventually my eyes glazed over because there's constant little digs at the NDP rather than just providing facts.  But it doesn't address why the oil sector isn't doing so well - it does point out that oil&gas are doing poorly, then it tries to lay blame at the NDP's "failed policies", but nowhere did I find anything talking about why Alberta's dilbit (diluted bitumen) was being sold at such an extreme discount nor how Kenney would ensure that extreme discount was removed.  And this is important, because even if the price of oil skyrockets, if Alberta continues to sell oil at an extreme discount then it will have difficulty competing for investment and workers.

This does a good job of showing the price differential, and how Alberta's oil was more than $40 cheaper per barrel at times in 2018 than the West Texas Intermediate (WTI) price we always see quoted in the papers: https://economicdashboard.alberta.ca/OilPrice
And this does a good job describing the different oils and why there's a price differential no matter what: https://www.oilsandsmagazine.com/technical/product-streams

But the thing to really pay attention to here is why the price-per-barrel differential (or "discount") got so big in 2018.  It turns out that there was more dilbit being created (increasing supply) with not enough pipeline capacity to ship it so American refineries were not buying more because they had no way of getting more to them (stagnant demand), so the market followed the typical supply-demand rule and the price dropped (ie the discount increased)).  Notley forced companies to curtail their output, the supply dwindled, and the price raised (ie the discount decreased).  Then she put together a plan to ship more oil outside of the pipeline using rail so that American refineries could get more (increasing demand), which would then allow output to increase (increasing supply) without affecting the discount.

And Kenney's platform mentions none of this as far as I read, other than that he wants to scrap the oil-by-rail contracts, thus likely causing the discount to skyrocket again, which in turn means less oil revenue for the government.

Of course, if OPEC and Russia stick to their combined plan to curtail output to raise oil prices to the range of $70 to $80 per barrel WTI, and if the Alberta government can support the oil industry in such a way that the discount stays around $20 per barrel, then Kenney's government will see 50% more revenue from oil than Notley's government had.  And yeah, that's gonna make it seem like he's a mastermind at making economies recover, when it actually has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with people like Vladimir Putin and Mohammad bin Salman agreeing to drive the price of oil up.

[Darren Dirt]

All I know is that this year's election cycle has been a train wreck and I'd vote for nobody if I could. Notley is the least worst in my opinion and so I'll be going orange again.

Ditto. Green was an actual option here in EVG. But I didn't feel their platform quite aligned with what we need this time around. Wanted to vote green last time, but things have changed since then. So yeah. I voted Orange. And EDM is 100% orange it would seem, but they lost all cgy votes afaics and any northern votes. the last vote map I saw was completely blue except edmonton.

I overheard a guy talking on election day that he will vote (or voted) for the UCP cause they "promised" reducing cigarette and alcohol tax. *SIGH*. That'd make me mad if I really cared that much. Frustrated a bit that they can't see past their own nose, but I can imagine they just don't care and probably think all parties are just as bad so just vote for the one that'll save you the most in the short term I guess? w/e.

I'm betting Kenny and co (assuming they don't get booted due to corruption charges. I HIGHLY doubt that they would. maybe some fines or smth or a dismissal or they stall it long enough for the rcmp/proscecutors to give up?) run the province similarly to the previous PCs except worse. Their current platform what little of it they finally released (a few?) weeks before the election is just more of the same conservative BS about trickledown, giving hand-jobs to their rich pals and punishing the poor.

Visuals help see that the non-Edmonton parts of Alberta aren't just conservative blue.
They are mostly DARK blue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Alberta_general_election

PS: 16000 Albertans voted the mainstream Liberal Party.
12000 voted the "gringe" Independence Party.

O_O
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_separatism#2010s_resurgence
"A February 2019 poll from Angus Reid found 50% of Albertans would support secession from Canada." ( https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/a-new-poll-suggests-alberta-is-the-province-that-most-wants-to-separate-from-canada-not-quebec )
Top Comment: Sandra Grantham
1 month ago
I've been telling easterners this for quite some time. No one takes it seriously, but they should. People in Alberta are angry. I lived through both Quebec referendums, in Quebec, and the separation sentiment in Alberta right now makes Quebec separation threats look like a walk in the park. The more this attitude towards Alberta continues, the higher the percentage of separatists there will be....until the Rubicon has been crossed.

[Thorin]

Visuals help see that the non-Edmonton parts of Alberta aren't just conservative blue.
They are mostly DARK blue.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Alberta_general_election

While I agree that colour gradations help show how much support the party has in a riding, using a geographical map like this highly skews the visual towards whatever party is popular in rural ridings.  The northernmost five ridings in this geographical map below (from wikipedia) make up almost half the picture of the province (partly because the projection has squared off the province, so it's an even worse geographical map).  We should instead be using equal-area maps to show party support, and can then still use gradations like before, and it would be a much better representation.