As a lifetime resident of Alberta, I wish to address a problem that our experts will not touch, although they will huff and puff and now they will have a panel of 12 more huffers and puffers appointed by Premier Ed Stelmach.
In our province, we are paying 95 cents per litre for our own resource. That probably puts us in the most nonsensical position in the world.
To look at Alberta in 1960, you saw us paying 32 cents a gallon for gas. I think wheat was about $4.60 a bushel that year. Four and one half litres in an imperial gallon would make a gallon about $4.27 today.
One can divide $4.27 by 32 cents, 13 times. Gas is 13 times more expensive than in 1960, but wheat has gone down to about $4 a bushel. But 13 times $4.60 is $59.80 per bushel at today’s prices.
But hold it! You can make 50 loaves of bread per bushel of wheat and a loaf of bread sells for $2 so that makes $100 for the product of one bushel.
Oh my goodness gracious, you can’t give the sod busters a fair price now, can you? It’s not like gasoline that goes up all over the province the same day everywhere!
So I tell you what folks: let’s cheat the farmers. They don’t mind anyway!
Let’s give them only a little bit of money for their grain.
Now you can’t cheat Esso or Shell, but you can sure cheat the raw material producers of Alberta. But you see folks, when a farmer gets his money, he spends it into the economy and it circulates seven times from the machinery dealer to the grocery store and the fertilizer dealer to every one of us and it makes our province wealthy.
In our province, we give away our resources through NAFTA and consequently there is little money in our province for industry unless, of course, it’s the oil industry.
We have been held in the dark ages because our province is run by two Eastern provinces.
Our farmers are suffering at this time. It’s not our government’s duty to buoy up General Motors; it’s our government’s duty to print debt-free money to provide a fair price for farmers.
If they do not, soon we will be taken over as our country proceeds into an arranged bankruptcy.
Don’t be taken in by Stelmach’s 12 experts. Nothing will change!
Dennis Combs
Olds