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Alberta’s payday loan merchants are upset, the dears.

Profits are down. In these miserable times, they can only score 200 per cent annual interest on a short-term loan, not 600 for weekly payments, as they did in the good old days before the NDP.

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The federal legal limit for criminal usury is 60 per cent per annum, but provinces can make exceptions. Alberta’s payday lenders benefited from whoppers, thanks to years of casual oversight by the Progressive Conservatives.

The lenders now say Alberta is an “extreme” case of restriction on these loans. To the NDP, that’s high praise. It means that desperate people are no longer being buried under mountains of debt.

The government’s contempt is obvious. They called their legislation An Act to End Predatory Lending. It passed third reading one year ago.

The NDP’s consumer protection agenda is now much wider and deeper, a kind of social holy war designed not just to protect vulnerable people from abuse, but to build support among those middle and lower-income groups.