Canadians must be embarrassed by the arithmetic we are hearing out of the premier’s office in Edmonton. Nobody would expect the premier to be a world class mathematician but for her to make such a fuss and make such a fool of herself is to be unfair to the sensible people of Alberta. If we get to expect people from the province to be unable to add two and two, it will cause a surge of hiring only people from out of the province to be cashiers or bookkeepers.
Face facts. How long would Tim’s stay in business if you go in for your morning double-double, give the cashier two five-dollar bills and you get a twenty in change?
We are talking here about that looney-tunes premier in Alberta who is threatening to have Albertans to dump the Canada Pension Plan and have their own Provincial Alberta Pension Plan. I wrote about it when she first told us, thinking that she was saying it for laughs.
Okay, so maybe she thought people who said bigger was better, were talking about something else. The truth is that when it comes to pension funds, the big ones are the ones that can handle the money better in the ups and downs of stock markets.
Big makes better in this type of endeavour. And what makes it even better is that if there are any serious downturns, the whole thing is backed by a federal government on behalf of more than 30 million Canadians. In this big is better world, Quebec went their own way but being about twice the population of Alberta, it has done alright.
The important concern in this matter is if Alberta taxpayers accept the stupidity of their premier’s claim that Alberta is entitled to 53 per cent of the funds in the Canada Pension Plan. It might have something to do with the age of Albertans as opposed to the rest of Canada’s population. It could also be as simple of someone inputting data and getting a fly speck confused with a decimal point and some computer going crazy. It is no excuse for this foolishness.
The simple facts are that Alberta, with less than 20 per cent of the participants in the plan, is hardly entitled to 53 per cent of the funds. Give that premier a good shake.
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