Former Alberta premier Ralph Klein was in Surrey this week addressing the Surrey Board of Trade members at a luncheon. Klein grew up in the Whalley area of Surrey before he moved to Alberta where he soon acquired the nickname ‘King Ralph.’ And he did come across as someone who doesn’t give a damn about popularity votes and is only focused on getting the job done. His manner may be gruff and tough, but it worked, as under his leadership Alberta retired a $23 billion debt.
Klein said: “I got the government out of the business of being in business. The government was in everything; liquor stores and more. We did the un-Canadian thing - everything that we could privatize, we did. The liquor stores still made sales, and today there are over 4500 public liquor stores in Alberta. The doom and gloom people who predicted there would be drunks everywhere, were proven wrong. That didn’t happen either.”
He went on to recount how ablebodied people on welfare who didn’t want to work were given a one-way ticket to another jurisdiction. (Gary Hollick, publisher of the Now newspaper, later commented to Klein that all those people came here, creating problems that the city of Surrey is working hard to eliminate.) Those willing to work, Klein said, were trained and put to work. He rolled 5% off government salaries and reduced the number of school review boards from 17 to 9. He cut down government spending by streamlining expenses, which made the government run much more efficiently. His method obviously worked.
He threw out little nuggets to the attentive audience, giving his opinions on everything from oil sand fields to mad cow disease to how to be a successful politician. On politics, his advice to future politicians was to stay away from controversial stuff that was not in their control. He commented on his style of leadership: “Find out where the train is heading and then get in front of it.”
On oil sand fields, he let the American political naysayers towards Alberta oil have it, by giving them hard-hitting facts on the oil produced by Alberta. Listening to him one can imagine why he may not have been much liked down south, giving back as hard as he may have received from the Americans.
He went on to praise the environmental work being done by oil companies, citing every company has an environmental department where they work hard to find ways to reduce environmental damage. The people working there, he said, are some of the brightest people, holders of PhD’s and so on.
He joked that if all the journalists were gone, there would be less C02 released into the atmosphere. He qualified this by informing us all that he started out as a journalist himself, and that journalists like adversity, and the longer their story gets attention, the better. “Over 500 hundred planes take off a day, and you only hear about the one that crashed,” he pointed out.
Currently, Klein is a senior business advisor at Borden Ladner Gervais LLP (BLG), based in their Calgary office. Klein focuses his work in the areas of oil and gas, electric energy, securities and capital markets, health law and aboriginal law, among others.
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