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Rachel Notley doomed Fort McMurray by slashing the firefighting budget

In a PR nightmare for the ages, Premier Rachel Notley did indeed slash $5.3-million from the Alberta firefighting budget only weeks before the most devastating forest fire in the province’s history. But the cut was an accounting cock-up, rather than a real-world kneecapping of Alberta’s firefighters. Firefighting money is emergency funding; it’s virtually unlimited in times of disaster. What the budget did was lowball what the final bill was going to be when the firefighting season ended. Water tanker contracts were shortened, but that won’t come into play until August. And fire preparation budgets did take a small hit, but when it comes to a fire that can jump the Athabasca River, there’s only so much a few more fire breaks could have done — particularly when the budget was only tabled last month.

The Red Cross is getting rich off Fort McMurray

Even when every official in Alberta is urging people to put relief efforts towards long-term Red Cross-managed funds, many staunchly refuse based on the belief that the Red Cross are soulless, bureaucratic tragedy profiteers who will ship the Fort McMurray donations to Syria. “They’ll take all that money else where in the world,” reads a typical comment. This week, the Alberta branch of the Red Cross told CBC that 95% of the now-$60 million donation pool will go directly to Fort McMurray relief efforts. That’s still $3 million going towards processing the donations, but the Red Cross is uniquely on guard against perceptions that it is squirrelling away disaster money. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, the charity faced one of the largest PR disasters in its history after it tried to bank some of the overwhelming number of donations for a fund that would benefit the “victims of tomorrow.” This doesn’t mean that Alberta shouldn’t be keeping the Red Cross’ feet to the fire, however. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, for instance, a devastating ProPublica investigation found that the American Red Cross wasted food, mismanaged volunteers and used needed emergency vehicles for press conferences.