To give the institute some credit, it did criticize the most recent Conservative government in Alberta, but that was an easy target, given, for example, the high-spending entitlement attitude of disgraced former premier Alison Redford. However, it also suggested that fiscal restraint and deficit reduction should be the modus operandi of the current government.

In an article entitled "The Rise and Fall of Alberta's Welfare State," author Eric Strikwerda cites the drastic social service changes of successive Klein governments for the emergence of a large underclass of Albertans.

During the Ralph Klein years, the social services caseload was cut in half, such that 45,000 people were cut from welfare rolls, but no one knows what happened to them, because there was no government tracking mechanism.

How many sought help from charities or families, and how many ended up on the streets? According to the author's research " … homelessness in Calgary alone increased 740 per cent between 1994 and 2006."

Strikwerda notes: "In the end, Albertans were left with a mere ghost of a welfare state … Through earlier decades Alberta's governments had, following international policy trends, created an enviable social-service system marked by high-quality education and health-care systems and a robust and multilayered welfare system to care for the province's most vulnerable. By the 1990s Alberta could only boast to potential investors of having the nation's lowest tax regime, among the nation's lowest minimum wages and among the nation's weakest labour legislation … Ralph Klein was only a small part of a much broader slavish following of anti-state-intervention ideology and neo-conservative thinking."

One can only presume that the Fraser Institute is a member of that "slavish following."

Just because the Fraser Institute sends the Mercury, and indeed every news organization in Canada, an endless stream of their nonsensical ideological garbage doesn't mean that it must be published.

Alternatively, why not ask the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for regular articles to counteract the extreme right-wing bias of the Fraser Institute? I am sure the centre would be happy to oblige.

Maggie Laidlaw is a member of the Guelph Mercury’s community editorial board.