Wildrose candidate and Beiseker Mayor Bruce Rowe stopped by the Town of Olds council meeting on March 12 to present himself and talk about his platform.While Rowe admitted to being a life-long Progressive Conservative, disillusionment with the way the party governed Alberta made him change affiliations.“I think it probably started when deregulation came in,” he said.“The electricity situation will only get worse with Bill 50, the transmission lines.”Rowe said many things are wrong with the health-care system and the education system.“Everything just seems to be broken,” he said.“There's not a whole heck of a lot that I can see that people are doing to fix things.”Rowe wondered how the provincial government could get away with paying fees to MLAs for sitting on committees that haven't met in years, while city and town councils would be punished if they did the same thing.“Not only we would not be re-elected, we would probably be taken off council. Municipal Affairs would probably step in. We could probably be charged,” he said.“My question to you and the public is, why do we not hold our provincial politicians to the same level of accountability as we are?”Mayor Judy Dahl was quick to point out that municipal government does not work the same as provincial government.“We certainly would not even get ourselves in that situation, period, because we do not get an automatic fee for meetings as the provincial government does,” she said.“We don't get paid for meetings unless we go to meetings and then we have to claim them, whereas the provincial government is honorarium-based.”Rowe said Wildrose would be working towards having the education portion of the property tax removed from the tax bill.“We want to leave room for municipalities to have that choice, whether they move into that area or not,” he said.“We want to establish a whole new relationship with municipalities.”Rowe called for an eventual end to the Municipal Sustainability Initiative grant.“The grant lottery system that we are funded under now, for the most part, has to stop,” he said.“We are not saying to shut down the MSI grant yet. It is going to take some time to come to a reasonable formula between urban and rural municipalities to come to a legislated sharing of total revenue.”When questioned by Dahl about his thoughts on the Alberta Royalty Review, Rowe said that Wildrose doesn't want the province's rates to be different from Saskatchewan or B.C.“If the PCs want to move to an energy policy that makes us all equal and we are all on an equal footing, then I am all for that,” he said.“The way the PCs did the review last time, it just came out of the blue. It caught everybody off guard. It really upset the industry. It cost us jobs and business.”Dahl replied that the last royalty review was a result of Stelmach listening to people.“Stelmach did enforce expectations on the oil and gas industry but a new party was born because of it.”Rowe concluded his visit by inviting Town of Olds council to the official opening of his Olds office on March 17.
