Jeff Burgar
Too often, elected people are not really experienced, savvy or educated enough to know the ins and outs of business, politics, particular professions, cultures or enterprises. It is easily said, the best people on any particular subject are working hard doing things in that field. They aren’t out working in politics.
Further, when it comes to trees, cattle, oil wells, wild animals, who is best suited to speak for them? We say rural people, not city folk.
Amalgamation in the long run is actually going to mean fewer and fewer leaders of all types ready to stand with our forests, our rivers and lakes, our farms and small towns and communities.
Amalgamation will reduce the numbers who even maybe today aren’t doing the best job possible looking after our rural lifestyle. But they are what we have. It’s said you can always take a good looking person and teach him how to sing. But it’s kind of hard to take a homely fellow (maybe Jelly Roll is an exception, or maybe he is just the exception who proves the rule) who can sing, and teach him how to be handsome.
But the fact remains, rural people who can speak from the life and the heart for rural Alberta are like farmland. Once it, or they are gone, it and they are probably gone forever. Once you cut their numbers out of leadership, or the positions open, they aren’t coming back.
With the way immigration, the growth of cities, birth rates, general concentration of farms and land ownership is going, rural Alberta has a generally declining share of voting power in this province. We can’t afford losses.
Consider the way rural Alberta let successive provincial governments centralize and consolidate health boards across this province. Looking back, governments actually steam-rollered right over the entire province until we had one big “super-board.”
Then, the more recent Starke Report, filed a few years ago, discovered the biggest single complaint about health in Alberta comes from rural Alberta: No input into and no accountability from, a “ruling body” based somewhere in Edmonton.
In other words, amalgamation might look good on paper. In practice, not so good, if not downright stupid.
As said earlier, joining together rural governments might seem like a good idea at first. But the long-term effect, just like the health boards, means concentration will take away one of the main, if not the main, voice rural Alberta has in government – our own governments. Our provincial government should never be an “us” against “them.” Even if it seems that way too often. This is “our” government. We shape it the way we want it. And if we let it slip away, like so many times in our small communities, we end up with the government we deserve, not the government we want.
So rather than thinking of reasons to amalgamate, we need reasons not to amalgamate. Remember, we did not fight against amalgamating the health boards.
Consider this: The model for our Canadian federal government included a strong senate. The American republic has that model today. The idea is, the power of population centres needs to be balanced by the interests of small states.
In Alberta, the way growth is, Edmonton and Calgary will own “our” government eventually, just by sheer voting power. An independent senate in Alberta (which once we had) would be a counter-balance to that.
We will never get even close to that dismantling what we already have.