Peter Shokeir | [email protected]
NDP Leader Rachel Notley visited Jasper last week to address the Building Trades of Alberta convention at the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge.
Building Trades of Alberta co-ordinates and promotes the interests of 18 Alberta local trade unions with a total of 60,000 members.
Notley shared their concerns with inflation, health care, promoting trades in Alberta and ensuring trades are better able to secure a market share within the workforce.
“We know that the high quality of the work that you through Building Trade’s engagement along with the worksite protections and benefits that unionized workers can enjoy is better in terms of the outcome from the project as well as the quality of life experienced in the communities,” she said.
Speaking more generally about inflation, Notley admitted that it was “a tough nut to crack” but outlined some steps that the province could take to help mitigate rising costs.
“You can start by not piling on more costs to families, and that’s what this government has done on a number of fronts,” she said, noting tuition, utility costs and income tax as examples.
“All of those things take money out of people’s pockets, so you can reverse those decisions and keep money in folk’s pockets and that will give them more support as we deal with inflation going forward.”
In order to deal with skyrocketing energy prices, the NDP are proposing a rate cap that would protect Albertans from power price spikes and have the government cover the remaining costs.
The UCP is currently holding a leadership race to determine who will replace Premier Jason Kenney, who announced his resignation after barely surviving a leadership review.
But Notley predicted the infighting and disfunction would not end, no matter who won the race.
“Whether you end with Danielle Smith or Travis Toews, there’s going to be a lot of division on the other side, and so we’re going to continue to see a lot of inward-looking focus by a government that’s not really that interested in focusing on the interests and concerns of Albertans,” she said.
“If you end up with a Travis Toews government, it’s going to be Jason Kenny 2.0, more of the same, and quite frankly, that’s been very hard on Albertans in a number of different ways.
“Either way, none of the UCP candidates have been focusing on inflation. None of them have been focusing on health care. Quite the opposite, actually. They’re focusing on a bunch of really dumb ideas that would take a crisis and explode it into a whole other level of crisis.”
Notley speculated that much of the internal division within the rival party was the result of promises that couldn’t be kept by Kenney or his government.
“What Albertans need is a government that is not looking at its own naval, figuring out its own problems, but instead going out there, talking to Albertans, listening to the issues that they have and working to fix them as opposed to imposing their own ideological vision onto people.”
