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Spending too much a big mistake, Klein says

Former Alberta premier and debt slayer Ralph Klein dug into his old playbook Wednesday to offer post-recession recovery advice to local business owners.
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Former Alberta Premier Ralph Klein speaks to a group of business people at the Memorial Centre in Lacombe on Wednesday.

LACOMBE — Former Alberta premier and debt slayer Ralph Klein dug into his old playbook Wednesday to offer post-recession recovery advice to local business owners.

“What I learned is you don’t have debt and you don’t have deficits. I learned you can’t spend more than you earned.”

Klein called entrepreneurship the “hallmark of Alberta” and urged his audience not to let their businesses stagnate.

“You need to always look for new and exciting ways to do things,” he said at the Employer and Business Owner Symposium hosted by the Lacombe and District Employment Service Centre.

With every recession and boom Alberta has learned a little more about how to cope and then prosper, he said, adding the recent downturn does not compared to the 1980s.

“Then there was nothing but rebar sticking out of the ground when there should have been buildings,” said Klein, who was mayor of Calgary at the time.

Many attributed the province’s recovery to surging oil and gas prices alone. That’s untrue, he said. The recovery owed more to tax policies that encouraged growth and helped generate the surpluses tapped to pay down the debt.

Businesses need to take a similar approach and develop a well-researched plan to emerge healthy from the recession.

In a question and answer session that followed, Klein tackled hot topics new and old, such as privatized health care. He favours two-tiered for-profit health care and said it was the fear created by those opposed to that approach, including members of his own caucus, that killed it.

“I failed in health care,” he said. In some jurisdictions, over half of the budget goes to health care and he believes it will get worse unless something is done.

He also called on banks to open up their vaults to help business owners. “(Banks) are too stingy relative to venture capital loans.”

When asked if he thought global warming would become a big issue again and attract more investment once the recession has passed, the former minister of environment in the early 1990s expressed skepticism with global warming.

“Then we were dealing with stuff you could smell and see. Now I feel like we’re fighting ghosts.

“Global warming, the science hasn’t been determined. You know but politically it’s an issue. Politicians pay a lot of attention to global warming.”

Asked how small business owners could address the province’s extremely high wage expectations, Klein said he didn’t know, but noted that the recession had lowered labour costs.

When a questioner countered that they hadn’t come down enough, Klein countered, “Maybe we need a good recession or a depression.”

pcowley@www.reddeeradvocate.com