Rachel Notley has announced her intention to step down as the leader of the Alberta New Democratic Party, as soon as a new leader is chosen. Good! Her time in provincial politics was fraught with poor policy decisions and turning her back on Alberta.Think back to the 2015 election, when the NDP deliberately didn’t campaign on bringing in a carbon tax. Yet after forming government, they immediately implemented the single largest tax hike in Alberta history —through their carbon tax.During the NDP’s time in government, when oil prices were at historic lows, Notley decided to raise corporate and income taxes, chase business and capital out of the province and failed to defend our energy sector against federal overreach. Her increased regulations and taxes made this province a significantly less competitive market in which to invest: the result was a mass exodus of energy companies out of Alberta.Rapid and unchecked spending, combined with job growth that relied almost exclusively on hiring more government bureaucrats, put Alberta in a very precarious position. (The province is still recovering.) Unlike other oil and gas dependent jurisdictions, Alberta has had trouble with poor public financial management and the NDP just added fuel to the fire. Texas, the US state with which we are most often compared, saw an average GDP growth of 2.9% per year from 2015 to 2019. Alberta saw an average GDP shrinkage of 0.12% per year in the same time period. It was the worst economic period of Alberta’s modern history, with the largest unemployment rate (excluding the COVID-19 pandemic) since the mid-1990’s. Even after hiking taxes, the Notley government soaked our finances in red ink, increasing the debt from $12 billion to $70 billion in just four years.Since being voted out and moving across the Legislature to the Opposition in 2019, Notley hasn’t stopped pushing her anti-Alberta agenda. She openly campaigned on moving the province’s electricity grid to net zero by 2035, which would cost somewhere between $200 to $435 billion dollars. She also supported sealing the production limit of our oil and gas sector, telling podcaster Herle Burly, “I do think that, you know, it’s possible to get a cap that is very ambitious, that we can get that’s not super far away from that federal (Trudeau Liberal) cap.” Canada only contributes 1.5% of the planet's greenhouse gas emissions. The 70 megatons of carbon dioxide Alberta’s oil sands produce every year is less than half of the new 43 coal plants and 18 blast furnaces brought online by China in 2020. This should lead any objective observer to one conclusion: Notley and the NDP are much more concerned with virtue signalling and empty platitudes while the rest of us get stuck with the bill. Rather than promoting individual rights and freedoms, the Big-Brother socialist NDP seek to dictate how every Albertan must live, all in the name of “progress.”Notley’s departure as captain of the socialist ship leaves a big hole in Alberta’s second largest political party. In this province, Notley was the NDP and the NDP has been completely hitched to the Notley wagon for close to a decade. Whoever takes her place will have two very large, very orange shoes to fill.Notley will always have a legacy in Alberta. For progressives, she will be remembered as their champion, someone who defeated the undefeatable and ended the 44-year rule of the Progressive Conservative Party. For conservatives, she reminds us of what complacency and lack of vision leads to and how everything can be lost in one election cycle.Conner Hall is an Engineer in Training who works in the energy sector in Calgary.
