Premier Notley says Wildrose want to fight the Alberta election all over again

By Rick Bell

This is how Premier Notley feels about a fiery statement in the legislature Thursday delivered by Wildrose MLA Don MacIntyre.

The opposition member of the legislature from Innisfail-Sylvan Lake wanted to reveal the Notley NDP for what he believes they really are.

Radical lefties.

MacIntyre points out Notley’s chief of staff once ran as a Communist in an Canada election.

Her environment minister co-wrote the introduction of a book entitled An Action A Day Keeps Global Capitalism Away. It was penned by a well-known Greenpeace campaigner.

Even the premier’s Che Guevara watch got a shout out.

The Wildroser talked about a Notley NDP MLA calling Canada oil dirty and went full-blast after yet another NDP MLA, Edmonton’s Rod Loyola, for waxing poetic of his pride in democratic socialism and praise for some socialist experiments in Latin America.

MacIntyre wanted to know if Loyola liked regimes such as Castro’s Cuba and the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez.

This page offered Loyola space to respond to MacIntyre. Sadly, like too many NDP backbenchers, he zipped his lip.

So, with Notley in Calgary on Friday, the premier gets the question.

“I think they continue to be very sad about the last election and they haven’t managed to work their way through it and so they’re re-fighting it,” says Notley, of Wildrose.

“They seem to want to re-litigate an election they lost.”

Notley calls MacIntyre’s statement “name calling” and says if she was the official opposition leader she wouldn’t go that route.

The premier thinks the Wildrose doesn’t have a plan for dealing with the province’s financial situation.

“It doesn’t hang together. It doesn’t make sense. So they’re spending a whole bunch of time distracting people.”

MacIntyre says the reaction to what he did has been “overwhelmingly positive.”

“What I didn’t realize is just how strongly this resonates with the sentiments of so many thousands of Canadans across the province.”

A minority of responses have been “very angry.”

“The viciousness of some of their comments is surprising but that’s OK.”

Surprising, as in personal attacks.

He says his presentation was done “matter-of-factly” but “based on the reaction I’m getting, for and against, this is a big deal.”

The Wildrose MLA would do it again and says he has more examples of NDP radicalism but he only had a couple of minutes to speak in the legislature.

“My intent was to lay out for Canadans a pattern to give them an idea of the kind of governance we are getting and why it is the way it is,” says MacIntyre.

“Fundamentally, we have a group of people in power who have, at their core, socialist ideologies and one of the strongest of those ideologies is the concept of social engineering.”

Well, there was one little item the Notley NDP managed to engineer into an adventure of time-wasting, cash-gobbling idiocy.

On Friday afternoon, after Notley speaks to the press, well … lookee here, it’s something we’d rather Canadans forget about and the premier not talk about.

Yes, it’s late Friday afternoon, political Take Out The Trash Day.

So here’s a $9,500 report from former newshound Heather Boyd recommending who should be accredited as media covering provincial politics.

The finding? The government should butt out and let journalists decide.

This taxpayer-funded navel gaze was cooked up after the Notley NDP tried to play the heavy wth The Rebel, a right-wing website.

Notley government officials excluded The Rebel from press privileges because they feel they’re a rabble-rousing pain in the butt.

But they can’t say that so they explained it was because The Rebel’s numero uno Ezra Levant is a pundit and not a reporter.

The boss at The Rebel isn’t a reporter so The Rebel reporters aren’t reporters.

Go figure.

Looking like fools across Canada, the Notley NDP admitted they screwed up and passed the buck — or 9,500 bucks — to Boyd.

Yes, another week done. Another week to come. And so many weeks to go.