What on earth is going on 👀👇

Tourism Calgary President & CEO Alisha Reynolds is speaking out about the incredible momentum Alberta's tourism industry is experiencing – and the risks posed by separatism.👇 On Oct. 19, she's voting to keep Alberta strong and prosperous within a united Canada. 🇨🇦 "The friendliest city in the world cannot be divided over separatism." Pledge your vote I votetostay.ca/ #yyc #yycbiz

This is counterintuitively fantastic because both the tone and the substance treat voters like grown ups. It’s the opposite of gimmicky populism. A sober-minded regular guy levels with his fellow citizens about big issues, without manufactured anger or dumb slogans. Some political consultants will cringe at this. “Why are we talking about the debt to GDP ratio, down to the decimal point? No one understands or cares about the province’s credit rating! Gotta address cost of living by promising free stuff, not lectures on deficit spending! That doesn’t even come up in the focus groups!” But I think people are more than ready for serious straight talk. Especially in a campaign where the NDP is about too-clever-by-half political manipulation (“let’s call an election while our opponents don’t have a Leader!”) and braindead populism (“punish the home builders!”) Some of us are old enough to remember an era in Canadian politics when grown up leaders were honest with voters. Ralph Klein, Preston Manning, Roy Romanow, Mike Harris, Jean Chrétien, Stephen Harper et al. They told us there was no such thing as free stuff, and we can’t borrow & tax your way to prosperity. They administered tough medicine. They got government spending under control, cut taxes, deregulated. All of that set us up for a couple of decades of solid growth, and raising living standards. Remember when our middle class was the richest on Earth, and our dollar on par with the US? I suspect British Colombians want to move past the rage bating from both the populist right and left; and are done with being treated as an ideological laboratory for the NDP. Just as this good and serious man arrives on the scene as a much-needed truth teller.