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Originally Posted by Suave
Sorry, my mistake on the funding issue. They have to cut their budget by 20% over the next 4 years because the government isn't contributing enough. It still comes down to Klein not giving enough of that surplus to education.
Defending Klein by using oil profits as a reason is completely weird to me. The Lougheed government was the one that allowed Alberta to make good use of its oil reserves, not Klein. Klein just happened to come into power during a period of economic boom when all of the basic economic infrastructure was in place. They're both conservative governments, but VERY different conservative governments.
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I do agree on the fact that they need to give more, although I've always wondered why the UofC alwasy seems to be falling apart, to a certain extent I think there not doing a good job managing the university, it used to be quite highly rated in the annual survey's, and well, now look at it.
But Klien was not elected during an econmoic boom, or at least not at a time like right now, we were in an econonmic slowdown at that point in time. Our unemployment rate was at 9.3% at the time. (another interesting stat, since 1993 we've gained about 500k people in alberta, and the total employed is up just under 500k people)
The economic infrastruture was not in place, besides the fact we already had in industry. The previous government ran up a debt of 22.7 billion, and had a deficit the year before of 1.4 billion. It had just completed such boondogles as the swan hills plant.
I'm not defending him using oil profits, I'm defending him by saying he's used the profits well, and helped maintain/create and environment where we can profit from the oil prices.