Attacks on the Carbon Tax just won't go away and it's our fellow seniors who are to blame. They whine about the Carbon Tax, but ignore the fees that Ralph Klein's deregulation has added to our bills, far more than the Carbon Tax will ever cost them. Those of us who had cottages paid nothing during the winter months while our cottages weren't used, yet under deregulation we began being forced to pay $60 to $70 per month. While we heard our hero Peter Lougheed urge the Klein and Stelmach governments to slow down the growth of the oil sands and get control of the pollution, and refine our oil in Canada to take full benefit of its wealth, oilmen in the Edmonton area were telling us if we don't our children will be facing massive lawsuits from the pollution drifting into Saskatchewan and Manitoba, yet Klein and Stelmach refused to listen to Lougheed. It's a well-known fact that per capita Canada is one of the worst polluters in the world, and that Alberta has the highest percentage per capita of children with asthma in North America, and MS the second highest. Being an asthma sufferer, doctors have told me over the past 60 years they blame it on our air pollution which makes perfect sense in my case. My late parents moved to Alberta in 1938 and had three children. We all ended up with asthma problems, yet our 32 cousins born and raised in B.C. have never had a problem. Yet these Reformers and their supporters apparently don't care about the well-being of our children and grandchildren and aren't willing to do anything about it. They whine about converting our power to the much cleaner gas fired plants yet ignore the fact that TransAlta jumped on board with the NDP government to do so and the coal workers are apparently happy to get out of those dirty jobs. So now, when the oil industry, with the help of our NDP government and Trudeau government , following what's been done elsewhere , pushes for a Carbon Tax to be implemented, that's been in place in Sweden since 1991 and in B.C. since 2008 and has proven that it works these seniors, without doing any research, believe the lies of the Reformers. The same Reformers who are promising to bring back Ralph Klein's destructive policies by forcing Albertans into a lot more privatization while they continue to allow the foreign investors to clean us out of our oil wealth. No increase in royalties or taxes for their rich friends , let Albertans continue to see their cost of living skyrocket ,and try to do without new hospitals, schools, social programs, or extra policing for rural Albertans trying to fight crime in their areas. Maybe these seniors should have been listening to Dennis McConaghy's comments. McConaghy is the retired senior executive for TransCanada Pipeline and was furious with Stephen Harper for not implementing the Carbon Tax. He was convinced that had Harper done so, Obama would have approved the Keystone Pipeline and his corporation would have saved millions of dollars. I suggest that these seniors had better start listening to the true conservatives who know that if we don't get our taxes and royalties back up to the Lougheed levels, we will never get out of this mess they put us in. We also know that the NDP has no choice but to take us further into debt to help clean up this mess and this debt can be repaid very quickly when the oil and tax wealth is restored to the Lougheed levels. Alan Spiller
