Bitumen and Ed?

[coppertop]

I know of one family member whose income was below the poverty line. she was collecting CPP, plus a widow's pension. She got a pretty good job, but didn't receive a red cent from her employment until October of 2002. She had to relocete, rent a place to live, buy furniture etc. When she filed her 2002 income tax the government made her pay back every cent she had received that year in CPP, regardless of the fact that she didn't receive a penny until almost the end of the year.

[coppertop]

My understanding of Ed's proposed Alberta Pension is that it would be optional, and dollars invested would be invested by the government similar to the Heritage Trust Fund dollars, gaining the best possible return on investment.

[cowman]

Hmmmm...has the Heritage trust fund been a well managed good return fund? Maybe investing your own money, for your own retirement might be better? Maybe you could do better than the government, managing your own money?
Not sure about that one.

[ivbinconned]

Twenty years ago the Minister of Finance in Ontario commenting in the legislature on a question about the fact that Ontario had borrowed by far most of the funds in the CCP and had not even been paying the interest due gave this reply...
"why should we pay it back...who could make us"?

I became a western seperatist conservative libertarian right then and there. I wanted government to get out of my life. And Ontario to stop running the show.

The FACT that they would be swallowing up the contributions of Horse, Coppertop, Cowmans and Wilagrow and of course mine too was more than I could accept.

But no no, the encroachment never stops, with a stroke of a pen every duck and gopher shooter in western Canada became a big threat to the Ottawa politburo.

Watching the Liberal convention scares the heck out of me.

We need the strongest premiers we can get to defend the west from the every growing federal government that we are bound to get in the future.

Vote Ted

By the way Copper...I told (suggested)my kids make Ed their second choice.

Good luck to you...and lets remember to not put any man so high on a pedistal that he crushes us when he fails...as most assuredly they all do.

[cakadu]

It might interest some of you to know that even Ralph visited the Alberta pension thing twice during his tenure and both times the cost to implement and run it far outweighed any benefits that there would be. So much for creating our own.

Most times there are no really new ideas, just re-worked ideas brought up at a later time.