By EverythingGP

ELECTION 2019

McCUAIG-BOYD, Margaret (New Democratic Party)

Apr 9, 2019 | 2:03 PM

1. Why should eligible voters cast a ballot for you?

When Alberta went through the worst recession in decades, we didn’t make things worse. We chose, instead, to invest in the services families rely on like health care, education and infrastructure. We fully funded schools and hospitals, we built 2,100 new long term spaces, and we spent more than $100 Million to maintain roads and bridges in this region alone over the last four years. We have a plan to get to a balanced budget in 2023 without sacrificing services and we can do it because, unlike Jason Kenney, we don’t intend to blow a $4.5 Billion hole in the budget with the biggest corporate tax break in Alberta history.

We’ve spoken out clearly on the need for the Trans Mountain pipeline to get built. But while Jason Kenney’s only plan for our energy sector is to complain and stage phoney publicity stunts, we have a Made in Alberta plan to get more value for oil. We are encouraging more petrochemical diversification, partial upgrading and refining. That plan has already unlocked new private sector investment such as the Nauticol project to build a methanol plant near Grande Prairie.

We’re tackling problems that the previous government neglected for far too long. We began to build an affordable child care system with $25/day pilot programs in Fairview and Valleyview and with Rachel Notley’s plan to expand that program across the province, more communities like Falher will benefit. We will eliminate co-payments on prescription drugs for seniors making more than $75,000 a year. We increased funding for local FCSS organizations, and indexed AISH and Seniors’ Benefits to inflation. We began to reduce rural crime by hiring more police and prosecutors and in the next term, we will provide funding to rural crime watch organizations.

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2. If elected, what is the first thing you would want to accomplish?

I would want to see construction begin immediately on the Trans Mountain Pipeline and Rachel Notley and I will resume our efforts to get this pipeline built. We will ultimately succeed.

But my first task will be to resume the work we’ve begun to diversify our energy sector. We made some announcements related to partial upgrading and more petrochemical diversification in the pre-election period. We were completing our due diligence on a number of other diversification projects and I expect that, with the election over, we will be in a position to announce more such projects in the near future.

These projects are good for the entire Alberta economy, benefitting contractors all over the province, and not just in the region in which they are built. For example, there are more than a hundred workers employed in Grande Prairie doing work related to the construction of the InterPipeline polypropylene facility in the Industrial Heartland north of Edmonton.