Editorial

Cool hand on the tiller

It was a nice event, last week’s groundbreaking ceremony for the new Slave Lake government centre. Everybody and his dog showed up to chat, listen to speeches and see the ceremonial spadework.
It had some class, as these things go, which reflects well on quite a few people, starting with Mayor Karina Pillay-Kinnee and council. Also high on the list of those to whom credit is due – not just for a well-organized ceremony, but indeed for the project itself – is town manager (or CAO if you prefer) Betty Osmond.
Osmond is in her third year at the helm of the town administration and seems to be the right person for the job after several years of mixed fortunes in that office. She is (or very much appears to be) a bridge-builder, a consensus-maker. A cool head; a calm, good-humoured and competent personality who seems to engender confidence in those she works with, and for.
She may also be a humble person, in which case she won’t like this sort of praise in the newspaper. But from our perspective, she was and is the right person at the right time for managing the affairs of the municipal corporation.

An industry in the tank
Everyone knows the forest industry is in the tank. It’s no longer a matter of ‘when’, or ‘if’ job losses happen. They have happened and are happening.
According to the Alberta Forest Products Association, 3,000 Albertans have lost their forest industry jobs in the past year. In the past two years, the value of forest products produced in Alberta has dropped by a billion dollars. And apparently, no end in sight.
The AFPA pulls no punches in its depiction of the desperateness of the situation. Its website has a large alarm bell, and urges Albertans to write letters calling for government action.
Fair play to them, but what the industry wants, clearly, is a taxpayer-funded cushion. This gets into sticky territory that government spent at least the 80s and part of the 90s mired in. Part of the ‘Klein Revolution’ mop-up job of the mid-1990s was to get government out of the business of subsidizing (propping up) big business. Do we really want government to get back into it?
Maybe we do. Maybe government never really got out of it.
In any case, it presents a challenge, for sure, for the Stelmach government. For example, industry wants the government to take back some of the forest management responsibilities it downloaded onto industry in the past 20 years.
Perhaps some things can be done to help mills stay open. The AFPA wants the public to holler at elected leaders to do just that. Read about it at albertaforestproducts.ca and elsewhere and make up your own mind.