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April 4, 2012 - No. 47 Alberta Election 2012 Public Right Yes! Monopoly Right No!  
Election
2012 Election 2012 Party Leaders, Promises and PollsThe Progressive Conservatives, now led by Premier Alison Redford, have held majority power in Alberta for 41 years. In other words, Alberta has long been a one-party dictatorship. This is because one set of economic interests, that of the energy monopolies, has dominated the province for decades and the PCs have served those monopoly interests well. Politics is economics in concentrated form. It is no accident that members of the ruling PC Party move freely back and forth between the legislature and the corporate boardrooms. Peter Lougheed was vice-president of pipeline builder Mannix before he became premier in 1971. Since stepping down in 1985, he sits on numerous corporate boards of directors, including the Royal Bank of Canada, also known as the "Oil Bank." His successor, Don Getty, served on the boards of numerous energy and other monopolies, including the Royal Bank, before and after serving as Premier. Jim Dinning, Finance Minister for Getty's successor Ralph Klein, moved from Dome Petroleum to the Legislature to executive VP of TransAlta Utilities and other directorships. Thus do the private economic interests of Alberta wield political power over the people.
Saturation coverage of the leaders of the cartel parties by the Alberta and other media, a steady stream of fanciful election promises from each party, and continuous polling that fraudulently claims to mirror public opinion, all negate the striving of the people to consciously participate in the Alberta election. The focus on the leaders turns the election into an auction of individuals where each leader tries to sell herself as the most "trustworthy" and the person to lead the province to "prosperity." The flood of campaign promises such as 140 new family care clinics, $300 dividends to each Albertan, and free post-secondary education by 2025, reduces people to choosing which brand of policy objectives they may "buy" or reject, based on which promises seem the most plausible according to preset criteria. It is the ultimate cover-up that people neither set the agenda nor control the decision-making process. The never-ending unscientific polls, which purport to show that this or that party is ahead or behind, solidify the people as mere spectators of the election. The real aim of such polls is not to gauge public opinion but to actually destroy it. These elections are not about a process which turns the popular will into the legal will whereby the new Legislature could legitimately be said to present public opinion. They are about an elite which frames "choices" and the process is supposed to sort these "choices" out to get a winner. Repeating over and over some bogus poll finding, such as that the PCs and Wildrose are running "neck and neck" aims to implant the false idea of choice in the minds of the people. The ultimate aim is to divide them behind these pre-selected choices so as to make sure they do not organize themselves to set an agenda that would resolve the crisis in their favour, not in favour of the rich privileged economic elites. Democratic Renewal Is the Order of the Day in Alberta
The people of Alberta need to participate in this election by taking an active approach to their own empowerment. The current system aims at excluding people from deciding on the priorities, policies, and direction of the economy and the agenda for the coming Legislature. It is an expression of monopoly right and economic power and privilege in political affairs and it must not pass! The issue of "Who Decides?" is one that a modern democracy must sort out in favour of the people. This means that the working class of Alberta and its allies must create mechanisms which permit them to exercise control over the decisions which affect their lives. They must take control over their political and economic affairs and the right to make decisions that affect their workplaces, economic sectors, social institutions, neighbourhoods and society itself. It is the people of Alberta, wherever they work and live, and not the monopolies and the parties who serve their interests, who must become the province's political and economic decision-makers. Public Right Yes! Monopoly Right No! Who Decides How Energy Resources Should Be Exploited and the Wealth Distributed?How the energy resources which belong to Albertans, First Nations and Canadians should be exploited and distributed is a key election issue. The Workers' Opposition is demanding that governments fulfill their social responsibility to ensure that there is broad benefit to Canadians when our natural resources are exploited, not just a fast buck for the mainly foreign owners of capital and their retinue in Alberta and Canada. Not only must the oil workers who produce the wealth and the building trades workers who construct these massive projects be provided with living and working conditions that respect their rights and dignity, but the natural environment and the hereditary rights of the First Nations must be given priority. The basis is that society must be human-centred, not capital-centred and this can be done if decision-making is carried out for purposes of providing human rights with a guarantee, not the most powerful private monopoly interests which negate all other rights which stand in their way.
Demands in this Election Defend the Rights of Workers in the Oilsands
Every day workers in the oilsands and on pipeline construction face dangerous working conditions, injuries and death. In less than one month, three workers died on the job in the Ft. McMurray area. At the end of February, a pipeline worker working for Banister Pipelines operating a sideboom used to lay pipe into the trench was killed when his machine flipped over in the ditch. In March a worker died at the Christina Lake oilsands site which is about 60 km north of Ft. McMurray. He died of massive bleeding when a steam line ruptured, striking him in the leg. The worker was an employee of MEG Energy, working on a Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SADG) project. Also in March, a guide employed by Golder Associates left camp to travel back to Fort Chipewyan by snowmobile and was found dead a distance away from his snowmobile. Such tragedies must not be permitted! On the two job sites, stop work orders were issued by Occupational Health and Safety (OHS). But the workers are effectively shut-out and deprived of their crucial role both in being provided all information and consulted for the important knowledge and skill they possess. Even the names of the workers are withheld by OHS, who treat them as faceless statistics. In the case of the pipeline worker, all of the sites operated by Banister Pipelines were temporarily shut down. Yet pipeline workers across the province, who operate this and similar machines have been kept completely in the dark as to what had happened to cause the accident, information crucial to preventing a re-occurrence. Investigations can drag on for years. For example, five years after two temporary foreign workers were killed at the Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. (CNRL) Horizon oilsands site in August 2007, Alberta's Court of Appeal ruled on whether Sinopec could be charged along with CNRL and contractor SSEC Canada Ltd. The trial, in which the companies face 53 charges is not scheduled to begin until October, 2012. The health and safety of workers is an election issue! Workers have a right to modern, cultured living conditions. Instead of planning and building new towns, camp life has become the norm for more and more workers. Existing camps in the Ft. McMurray region have the capacity to house 53,500 workers in dozens of camps. Of those, 35,200 are at operating oilsands projects and 18,300 are at "open camps" run by independent contractors. There are now applications for an additional 48 work camps to house 17,000 workers, which would bring the total capacity of the camps to 70,000 workers. All work camps are supposed to be approved by Alberta Sustainable Resource Development. The camps are built on public lands. But the Ft. McMurray municipal government carried out its own investigations and found 26 camps without permits with a total population of 12,000. The Ft. McMurray city administration estimates there are now about 40,000 workers living in work camps. The fact that 12,000 workers live in camps which have no permits shows the utter disregard for the workers' safety and well-being. For example, if a camp is operating without a permit, how would fire departments and ambulance services even be aware of the location of the camp in the event of fire or other emergency? There would be no inspection of facilities to make sure they are safe and meet acceptable standards. Will new projects be built with no permanent housing for workers and their families? Imperial Oil's Kearl Lake project plans to operate completely with workers who fly-in and fly-out directly from their homes both within Alberta and from other provinces across Canada. The lack of housing for workers and their families is simply unacceptable. These governments who consider the workers who produce the wealth as a cost and who refuse to uphold public right and the rights of the workers must be held to account. Use this election to demand safe working and living conditions for oilsands workers.
Fight for Public Control of Electrical UtilitiesThe people of Alberta are continuing to speak out and demand solutions to the soaring cost of electricity which is causing hardship for many people. At a recent meeting of county councillors from rural Alberta, the meeting erupted with applause when a farmer spoke out about how skyrocketing electricity rates are strangling Alberta farm families, who face monthly bills of $1,000 or more.
Energy Minister Ted Morton has responded to the broad outrage with his claim that everything is fine and that Albertans pay, on average, about the same for electricity as people in most other provinces. Morton continues to assert that the problem is not the soaring cost of electricity for workers and their families, farmers and small businesses, but only that prices fluctuate from month to month. On the basis of this irrational assertion, yet another committee, the Retail Market Review Committee, has been established. Its mandate is not to review the stark facts of deregulated electricity in Alberta and make recommendations based on the public good, but whether the default residential rate -- the option chosen by 70 per cent of Albertans -- is needed or should be abolished. The default rate is the rate consumers pay if they do not sign a long-term fixed rate contract. Presumably if the default rate is abolished, everyone will be forced to sign a long-term contract. The reasons given for soaring power rates are totally irrational. Winter, we are told is responsible, as though winter, and the mildest in decades at that, is some unforeseen event that absolutely no one could have predicted. Or it is supply and demand, or better yet "unplanned power plant outages" -- the latter being repeated even though an investigation is taking place whether the power plant outages were indeed planned so as to spike the price of electricity. In fact, TransAlta has already agreed to pay roughly $370,000 in fines and foregone income for a shutdown it carried out in November. Such review committees have nothing to do with consulting the people or finding out what people's concerns are, much less serving the public good. They are part of the arbitrary power exercised by the executive branch, which uses hand-picked committees and panels to sort out problems with existing arrangements on behalf of the monopolies. They are also used to claim that some "independent" source has studied the matter to give a veneer of legitimacy to what the executive branch has already decided. The composition of this latest committee leaves no doubt that private interests have been politicized while the public good has been abandoned. Committee members represent private interests involved in cablevision and radio broadcasting, a former member of the technical team involved in deregulating electricity in Alberta and a former policy advisor involved in privatizing public utilities in Texas.
The latest "independent" review is actually part of the restructuring of the state to impose the dictate of the most powerful monopolies. Another "independent" committee has rubber-stamped the need for four new transmission lines. Bill 50 was used to approve new transmission lines to be built by AltaLink and ATCO with absolutely no public scrutiny or accountability. AltaLink and ATCO do not have to pay one cent for these lines, which become an added charge on electricity bills. In this pay-the-rich scheme, ATCO and AltaLink get a free lunch where they can build lines without any public oversight despite the fact that industrial, commercial, public, farm and residential users will shoulder all the costs. The Alberta New Democrats recently pointed out that both Direct Energy and Capital Power applied in January for electricity export permits to the U.S. from Canada. The applications indicate each company wants to be able to export up to about 34,649 GWh per year for 10 years. There is much evidence that the new lines are being built to provide transmission to export power to the U.S. This would give U.S. corporate interests concessions in the use of electricity and prices and provide a market for the oil giants operating in the oilsands to export electricity from co-generation. "Who decides?" is a crucial question. Driving up the price to serve the owners of capital and provide preferential energy concessions for U.S. corporate interests' war machine at the expense of workers, farmers, small businesses and Alberta's manufacturing sector is not acceptable. The Workers' Opposition must stand firmly for the right of Canadians to decide. Electricity is an essential public service and it should be publicly owned and controlled.
Stand Up for Public EducationOn March 26 the Alberta Legislature was dissolved with the 28th General Alberta Election to be held on April 23, 2012. One of the bills that died on the order papers in the Legislature was Bill 2, the Education Act which was to replace the existing School Act. According to Alberta Education, the last major review of the School Act was in 1988, although it has been amended since then. What happened to this bill must be judged on whether it contributes to guaranteeing the right to education which belongs to all people by virtue of being human. The experience with this bill shows the need for teachers and education workers to take a stand during this election in defence of public education. They must not permit the public system to be opened up as a market for private interests to make a profit.
The monopoly-owned media in Alberta has framed the failure to pass the bill as resulting from rivalry and political brinkmanship between the Wildrose and the PC parties. This fits in nicely with their mantra that the election is a contest between two right-wing parties, and that the voice of the working class and people, including teachers, other education workers, parents and students, is irrelevant or non-existent. The media was only interested in those aspects in the objections to the bill that were taken up by the Wildrose Party, while broad concerns from both teachers and school boards were never discussed. Through the work of teachers and others concerned with the defence of public education, the new Education Act did contain some positive features. For example students would have been funded to complete high school until 21 years of age. The Alberta Teachers Association (ATA) has been very clear regarding its objections to provisions of the bill, especially those which will permit expansion of charter schools. The ATA has expressed serious concerns with private and charter schools that create social segregation through exclusive admission practices and ultimately weaken public education. As it was introduced into the Legislature, Bill 2 proposed to remove a number of requirements for charter schools, firstly to have the operation of the school as the operator's sole purpose. In existing legislation a charter school must be set up by a non-profit organization, independent of any business or other activities. Removing this restriction would give monopolies free rein to set up charter schools of their own as a means to guarantee market share in the profitable "education sector." A private company such as Pearson Education could own and administer charter schools that would purchase learning resources from the parent company. Secondly, The School Act as it exists allows first right of refusal for school boards that are willing to provide an alternative program proposed in a charter application. In other words, a charter school cannot be established if the public school board in the area is willing to establish the same type of program. This provision has arrested the spread of charter schools in Alberta, as public school boards have chosen to operate alternative programs rather than have them established as charter schools. Thirdly, the bill dispensed with the existing review process which requires charter schools to undergo a review every five years to have their charters renewed. In drafting the Education Act and other bills, the government has increasingly favoured various forms of "consultations." They are not intended as a forum for people to participate in decision-making, but to claim that a "mandate" has been sought and received. In some cases these "consultations" are invitation-only events, and may even be entirely behind closed doors. For example, the secret review of the Alberta labour code entailed sitting down with non-union contractors to discuss their wish list to break the unions and strengthen the hand of their instrument, the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC). Consultations may be organized by establishing an "independent" committee or panel which will deliver the result required, such as with the panel looking into soaring electricity rates. At other times "consultations" will be hurriedly organized, few people will even be aware that they are happening. Such was the latest round of consultations for the Education Act. After years of consultations, the current education minister Lukaszuk carried out another round of pseudo-consultations which were announced on December 15 and closed on January 15. The timing of these pseudo-consultations shows they were not intended to elicit broad public participation, or even to seek the views of those mostly directly involved in education, such as teachers and school councils. Thus at the eleventh hour, the Conservatives found themselves with a new Education Act, that was supposed to represent the result of all this consultation, but was opposed by both teachers and some school boards. And the scrambling began. With an hour and a half left before the legislature adjourned, the Conservatives introduced a five-part amendment. Responding to the objections raised by the ATA, one section of the amendment stated that the operator of a charter school must restrict its purposes to the operation of that charter school. Previously, the Tories had already taken the unusual step of accepting a proposed amendment from the NDP which restored wording from the previous Act allowing a school board to have the right of first refusal before a charter school is established. The amendments also addressed changes to the legislation regarding how school divisions are established which had raised the opposition of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees Association. Another section removed the requirement for Francophone school trustee candidates to have children in the Francophone school system. The Fédération des Conseils Scolaires Francophones de l'Alberta had opposed this change pointing out that this arbitrarily restricted the right to be elected to serve on Francophone school boards and was in any case unconstitutional. While some of the concerns raised by those who have a stake in the education system were addressed in these amendments, Government House Leader Dave Hancock pointed out that a new PC government would not necessarily introduce the same bill. Thus all bets are off as far as what will be in the bill when the government makes the next attempt to pass it. Teachers must remain active during this election to defend public education and keep fighting through to the next legislative session to hold the government to account. The Redford government's bill does not recognize education as a right. The only "right" it recognizes is that of "choice" -- the code word for opening a public service to private interests. The preamble makes public education just one choice amongst many. Teachers have a responsibility to speak out and advocate in defence of quality public education. Strengthening the hand of monopoly right, through charter schools or other means such as public-private partnerships (P3s), is a backward step that has no place in a modern society.
Refine It Where We Mine It! Energy Resources Must Serve the Common Good
The Redford regime is both spreading disinformation about the economic viability of bitumen refining in Alberta and actively taking measures to block it from going forward. Like the Harper dictatorship, Redford has openly given unqualified support to both TransCanada's plan to ship raw bitumen to the U.S. through the Keystone XL pipeline and Enbridge's plan to ship raw bitumen through the Gateway Pipeline to Kitimat or another BC port for export. In February, 2012, the Redford regime refused to support the Aboriginal First Nation Centre's comprehensive plan for a viable $6.6 billion oilsands refinery to be built in Lamont County (see TML Daily, March 21, 2012 - No. 39). The one upgrader plan going ahead in Alberta, the $5 billion North West Redwater Partnership upgrader, has been disdainfully dismissed by Redford as a bad decision of the previous Tory government which she reluctantly must live up to. Meanwhile the Harper dictatorship is using the new federal budget to streamline and force through approval for the Gateway Pipeline and other sellout projects that simply ship away our raw materials. But when the layers of government and monopoly disinformation about upgrading bitumen in Alberta are peeled away, what is the reality? Take the example of the single "government approved" upgrader project in Alberta, the North West Redwater Partnership project that Redford dismisses. The proposed upgrader is a 50-50 collaboration of North West Upgrading and Canadian Natural Resources Limited (CNRL), two privately owned Calgary companies. In the upgrader project's Phase 1, expected to be completed by 2014, the refinery will use 36,000 barrels per day (bpd) of provincial bitumen feedstock under the province's Bitumen Royalty-in-Kind (BRIK) program, and 14,000 bpd of CNRL feedstock, to process a total of 50,000 bpd. The refined products will be 36,000 bpd of ultra-low-sulfur diesel gasoline, 18,000 bpd of naphtha and 14,000 bpd of diluent (diluting agent), which will be sold to meet domestic and export market demand. The Alberta government and CNRL have already committed to provide bitumen to the refinery for 30 years. Construction of the 50,000 bpd North West Redwater Partnership upgrader, which is expected to start in summer 2012, is only the first phase of a potential four-year, three-phase project to eventually refine 150,000 bpd. On-site construction of the refinery, equipment fabrication at shops, and module yard assembly will create an estimated 8,000 jobs in Alberta. The completed Phase 1 will require about 300 workers to operate the refinery and the fully built facility will require an estimated 700 workers for operation. 1.27 million tonnes of carbon dioxide produced by the refinery each year will be captured and shipped through the 240-kilometre Alberta Carbon Trunk Line to the Clive Field in east-central Alberta where it will be injected into conventional wells to extract an estimated additional 25 million barrels of oil that remain in the ground, using enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques. The implementation of the project will make a definite contribution to the all-sided development of the Alberta economy. Further, while the Redford regime, TransCanada, Enbridge, and others dismiss refining bitumen in Alberta as making no economic sense, the facts say differently. On March 23, Ian MacGregor, the chairman and one of the founders of North West Upgrading, who has thirty years experience in developing and managing energy-related businesses, primarily in Alberta, pointed out that the price of the diesel produced by the new refinery will be more than double what the province receives for the bitumen that it ships to U.S. refiners. Bitumen is now selling for about $65 a barrel, with diesel selling for over $1 a litre or about $160 a barrel. "They are taking our raw bitumen in Houston and turning it into diesel for export. There is no reason why we can't export diesel directly from Alberta," MacGregor said. "By refining in Texas they are multiplying the value of the bitumen by two or two and a half times. That extra margin can turn into taxes and revenues up here." MacGregor concluded: "The margins have been high, and if this plant had been in production last year, the Alberta government would have earned about $500 million more than it would have by just selling raw bitumen." It is clear that the Redford regime is spreading disinformation in the interests of certain monopolies, and that upgrading bitumen in Alberta both makes good "economic sense" and serves the common good. However, upgrading will only take place in the province if the monopolies are restricted. The sole goal of TransCanada, Enbridge and their ilk is to make big scores by exporting as much raw bitumen as possible as fast as possible, an option that is not in the interests of the people of Alberta. Perhaps it is no coincidence that TransCanada and Enbridge have been two of the largest corporate contributors to the Alberta Conservative Party in recent years. The petroleum resources of Alberta must be removed from the dictate of the monopolies and brought under public control so that an energy policy that serves the people can be developed. A step forward would be to place a moratorium on the export of raw bitumen and to implement a comprehensive provincial industrialization program that includes building the required upgraders and developing the related, value-added petrochemical industries.
Education Is a Right University of Alberta Must Serve the People,
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In the current 2012
election we see a desperate attempt by the monopoly media and others to
claim that the 2012 election is a "real" two-way race between the PCs
and the "upstart" Wildrose Alliance Party, with the outcome of the
election supposedly in doubt. This is to suggest that the people now
have a "choice,"
which is an attempt to counter the growing opposition of the people to
their marginalization from the political process. The hope is to convey
that some kind of equilibrium can be created in Alberta whereby there
is a party in power and a party in opposition, suggesting that if this
was the case, Alberta would become
a province with "real democracy." But this kind of equilibrium has
never existed in Alberta, where every government has been a majority,
and, in any case, under the present conditions, it would be impossible
that such equilibrium could magically morph into a political system
where the people actually decide. As
long as democratic renewal is blocked, as long as nothing is done to
sort out the fundamental problem of ending the self-serving domination
of government and Legislature in the interests of monopoly right, the
dictatorship of the monopolies will continue to trump public right.
The mass media saturation coverage of the leaders with
so-called "political analysts" putting their spin and counterspin on
every election-related event, the endless campaign promises, and the
constant polling, deprive the people of their democratic
right to think, discuss, and decide on the direction of the economic
and political affairs of the province. It is all a very conscious
attempt to convey that the issues have already been competently decided
in backrooms by the "professional" politicians and their "expert"
advisors, and that the people's ability to think
and organize in their own interests, based on their direct experience
in their daily lives, is of no value. Thus the agendas and alternatives
proposed by the people are left unsaid and even declared illegitimate.
The whole aim of this anti-democratic campaign is to dampen the
enthusiasm of those who are struggling
to work out their own views, policies, and agenda in order to decide on
who should carry the banner of the people into the Legislature, and to
preserve the election as a means of determining, once again, which
party will be the champion of the monopolies.
Who decides how energy
resources should be exploited and for whom they should be exploited is
a central election issue in Alberta. The wealth produced by the workers
in the oil and gas sector and construction workers building these
massive projects belongs to the people of Alberta and first and
foremost
the
First Nations. How this wealth is produced and distributed is not a
special interest. It concerns the polity as a whole. It is a
fundamental issue of who determines the public interest and how it is
funded. Besides this, the workers also deserve working conditions
commensurate with the work they perform. It is their
hard work, skills and knowledge that create the wealth. Oil and gas and
construction workers have the right to safe workplaces, wages, benefits
and working conditions commensurate with the work they perform. They
have a right to modern, cultured living conditions. They have a right
to demand that at the very
least when our resources are exploited, projects should be planned so
that workers have secure livelihoods and do not suffer through booms
and bust.
The hardships being imposed on workers,
farmers and small businesses as well as increased pressure on
manufacturing industries as the energy monopolies claim an ever larger
share of the wealth created by the workers is an election issue.
Residents of Calgary and Edmonton had the highest power bills in Canada
in 2011. The soaring costs of electricity have also been a concern for
manufacturing in Alberta, and a number of companies have announced that
they shut down production during periods when electricity rates are
highest. "Who decides?" is a crucial question.
The standard line given by the mainly
foreign-owned energy monopolies and their sales department, the Redford
regime, is that refining bitumen in Alberta "does not make economic
sense" and that the government should take no part in it. What the
Redford regime means by "economic sense" is that the energy
monopolies should be given free rein to ship raw bitumen to wherever it
is most profitable for them (and get paid by the state to do so), and
to hell with the people of Alberta. It means that the monopolies get to
make all the decisions about our resources, rather than that all the
resources belong to the people of Alberta
and that the people have the right to decide what is to be done with
them. A recent poll confirms that over 80 per cent of Albertans want to
see more upgrading and refining happening in the province to keep jobs
and money from flowing down the pipeline. As the very apt slogan puts
it, Albertans have overwhelmingly
decided that we should "refine it where we mine it."
Samarasekera then revealed
her real agenda by claiming that the cost of post-secondary education
is rising "faster than is reasonable" and is "close to exceeding the
amount that parents, students, and governments are able and willing to
pay," somehow equating the government's refusal to fund education with
its
extortion of ever-increasing fees from students and their families. She
then irrationally claimed that the university is "well-funded," while
also admitting that staff had already been laid off. Finally, after
more bafflegab, she trotted out the tired old mantras that the
University of Alberta must "do more with less" and
"work differently," well-known code words for cuts, cuts and more
cuts. She also suggested that the recent arbitrary and secretive
process of cuts to the Faculty of Arts was "open" and "transparent,"
implying that this unacceptable model should be used in other
faculties. She concluded her address with the outrageous
suggestion that students, staff, and faculty "unleash their inner
radical" by sending in ideas and suggestions as to how the university
administration can make further cuts. Students rally against the U of A honouring former Nestle CEO Brabeck-Letmathe, March 1, 2012. |
Six days after her State of the University Address 2012, President Samarasekera was interviewed by The Gateway student newspaper. The interview followed a rapid series of events: a vigorous protest on March 2 against awarding an honorary degree to Nestle CEO and water privatization advocate Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the university's announcement of the establishment of an external advisory board for a long-term university "Water Initiative" (see TML Daily, March 7, 2012 - No. 30), and a March 22 presentation at the university by Council of Canadians National Chairperson Maude Barlowe, who criticized the composition of the water advisory board as slanted toward privatization. In The Gateway interview, Samarasekera argued that the advisory board was "balanced" but continually refused to name more than one of its members. A January 2012 version of the draft list of advisory board nominees confirms that the majority are advocates of water privatization, e.g., Brabeck-Letmathe, several representatives of energy monopolies active in Alberta, the head of a private Ontario venture capital firm, agents of the U.S.-controlled World Bank, and so on.
The key question in all this is "Who does the University of Alberta serve?" The President's disinformation that the province cannot adequately fund education due to "budgetary constraints" reveals that the administration is quite content to have the university serve the monopolies rather than the people of Alberta. The claim of "budgetary constraints" is an attempt to obscure the real cause of underfunding, which is that the government is deliberately expropriating the social wealth produced by the people and using it to pay the monopolies, especially the energy monopolies, instead of investing the wealth in education and other social programs to fulfill the needs of the people and a human-centred society. This pro-monopoly agenda of the university is confirmed by its water initiative. Instead of affirming that water is a human right and consulting the people of Alberta as to how this right can be provided with a guarantee, the university is promoting the privatization of water by Nestle and others.
Students, staff, faculty and the rest of the people of Alberta refuse to tolerate that their largest post-secondary institution abjectly submits itself to the agenda of the monopolies. Albertans are adamant that the University of Alberta and other provincial post-secondary institutions, which are funded by the people, must fulfill their mandate to provide for the needs of the people and a human-centred society -- that is to say, the public good, not the private interests of the monopolies. As a starting point, the Alberta government must affirm and guarantee the right to education at all levels by writing it into the provincial Education Act. Investments in education and other social programs must be greatly increased. Tuition fees must be frozen, gradually reduced and eventually eliminated, along with all other fees. These steps are the initial and minimum requirements in order that the youth and the society can start to benefit fully from the constantly increasing level of education that is required by the complexity of any modern society.
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