The NDP government has grown up.
The milk-fed novices of the unexpected election victory a year ago are now old hands at the fine political arts of public cynicism and private self-deception.
The lessons learned by hacks in past governments have been learned by the new hacks surrounding the NDP ministers and caucus.
Lesson one: the first law of cynicism is to call a nasty thing a nicer thing.
A tax is no longer a tax if you call it a levy. It acts like a tax and smells like a tax, but the law of cynicism disallows calling it a tax.
What a levy and a tax have in common is that they are, well, levied. They are assessed on transactions, they produce government revenue and if you want to give a levy back, you do it with a rebate in the same way you do with a tax.
On this page is a companion piece to this column by Red Deer South NDP MLA Barb Miller. Her views and mine are night and day.
We don't disagree about climate change.
The globe's climate is changing and that should come as no surprise to students of ancient geology, both the earth's and the other comparable planets in the solar system – especially Mars.
We do disagree – profoundly – on how Alberta deals with its microscopic contribution to the emission of greenhouse gases.
The so-called Climate Leadership Plan is, at best mitigation in a needless hurry, if it mitigates as much as is claimed by the hacks who smith the government's words.
It won't work because it is bad economics and without sound, market-driven economics, the deck of cards will collapse – after the damage to people and ultimately the environment is done.
I'd like to make the newsman's boast that you read it here first. Unfortunately that's not the case.
The NDP have one thing right – the Conservatives didn't take care of the interface between energy and climate.
Now the file is in the hands of economic ideologues who are energy illiterate.
Miller admits at the beginning of her piece on this page that she didn't know that Alberta burns more coal than the rest of Canada.
Shame on her for being shocked at a fact that has been a debating point in Alberta politics and our relations with the rest of Canada since the 1930s.
From 2009 to 2013, Red Deer may have surpassed national standards for clean air, but much of its electric power came down the line from coal-fired power plants that were emitting into someone else's air.
Miller laudably wants to move Alberta forward into a cleaner, greener and healthier world. So say we all.
It's just that the NDP's Climate Leadership Plan won't get us there.
To claim otherwise is just cynical or self-deceiving.
Frank Dabbs is the editor of the Didsbury Review.
