Dear Mr. Griffiths

Mr. Griffiths, You had asked me what issues I would like to see addressed that are not being discussed during the leadership race for the Conservative Party.

Chances are quite likely that either you, or one of the other five candidates, will be the Premier of Alberta following the next provincial election; I have little doubt about that.

What I do have is the same doubt that I had with a majority of the Mayoral candidates during Calgary’s civic election last October.

There were a lot of platitudes put forth by each candidate on how they would work with the province and the feds to accomplish what Calgarians needed.

I am hearing a lot of the same from the various leadership camps. I have referred to them as  “PR spun quotes”, the verbiage being attributed to the various policy statements.

I would provide examples of some of what I am talking about with respect to your campaign, as this is primarily a response to our discussions , but to be honest, I am having a hard time finding policies and specifics that you are proposing. 

I did come across your five points of interest: Education (kindergarten to post secondary), land stewardship and environment, reforming government, healthcare solutions and reinvigorate the PC party, though I have had a difficult time finding further information.

Each candidate seems to have a great writing staff on board to draft these high level talking points, but there is very little in the way of specifics.

Of course there are the hot topics that have popped up (Queue jumping and Calgary’s versus Edmonton’s crime statistics) that seem to get a lot of ink in the media, but still little in the way of specifics.

You had asked what the issues were that I was referring to. The gas price issue was a bit of a red herring and is something that baffles me, though my issues focus more so on some of the following.

Healthcare

Canada has what I consider one of the best health care systems in the world.

Wait times are a huge issue, for non life threatening services. I have gone into the ER to experience the long wait that comes with a trip to the Foothills, though I appreciate that someone with a compound fracture will be seem much faster than someone with a scraped knee.

Has the province considered opening or contracting out, walk-in type clinics at the hospitals to funnel the scraped knees from the urgent care centers so that those clients on stretchers in the hallway don’t have fight through the hoard of headaches waiting in the ER.

I have noticed that the Foothills Hospital Pharmacy is now a Shopper's Drug Mart. Great move if they are paying a fee to the hospital/government. What other partnering can be done throughout the province.

So much of health care is managed and doled out to the province/city through the federal government. There was a time when universal health care meant 'universal health care'; eye glasses and dental care would not cause a family of 2 adults and two children to go into debt.

Those days have changed. I couldn’t expect a return to the days when a trip to the dentist and optometrist wouldn’t leave a $2,000 dent in my pocket book (multiply that by 4 family members).

Single parent families or even families with a low income go years without checkups because the cost of eyesight and painless eating is too much.

I don’t know the answer to this, but I am posing the question to you. What real ideas or plans do you have to for health care?

Transportation

Specifically what will you do as Premier to work with the City of Calgary get an LRT in the Southeast? 

How is it possible that the entire Southeast portion of Calgary is shut down because both the city and the province couldn’t, or didn’t, communicate and opted to move ahead with major construction in the same area at the same time?

Your five key areas of interest

What specifically will you do for education? There is already plenty of access to post secondary education in the province; the issue facing students is the cost of education. There is no way now that I could afford the Post Secondary education that received when I was in college.

I will be honest, I m not aware of the Land Stewardship issue having live in the city. But for those who are affected by the bill, what do you propose?

Reforming the government, healthcare solutions and reinvigorating the PC party; I truly want to hear more from you and the other candidates, not the guy that writes the Blog articles and press releases

Like I said in one of my last tweets to you Mr. Griffiths, I don't expect you to know it all or have all the answers (I would be likely quite skeptical if you did), but I think that I, and the millions of Albertas that you are vying to govern, would expect that plan.

That goes for all of the candidates.

Thnak you