EDMONTON – When Roger Kingkade heard about this year’s provincial budget, he was upset for a number reasons. So, he decided to voice his concerns in a creative way: a 90 second rap song.
“I wanted it to be fun. I’m a huge fan of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert and I wish that I had one iota of brilliance that those guys have, but I’m a political nerd admittedly,” says Kingkade. “I wanted it to be fun and accessible for people.”
Kingkade, who hosts a morning show on a Calgary radio station, says he’s not thrilled with the changes he’s seen in Alberta over the past several years.
“I see the province that I knew growing up, and I see the financial shape that we’re in today. I don’t think about it politically, or necessarily from an ideological perspective, I just come at it from an understanding that it really doesn’t have to be this way.”
He stresses Alberta was a province that could always provide for and support all its citizens in the past which is why the changes he sees in this latest budget are even more frustrating.
“I looked at that budget and what’s transpired in the past year, and I thought to myself, ‘we’re simply being ripped off by bad government.’ We just have a situation of poor leadership, poor ideas, and, I thought, vote grabbing in the last election. I think that Albertans need to wake up to that,” Kingkade explains.
When it came to constructing his message, Kingkade focused on simplicity and engagement.
“A lot of people aren’t engaged politically, and the fact that they obfuscate on the budget like they do and release such a confusing document doesn’t help. So, I wanted to try to interpret the document in a way that was really accessible for people who really didn’t know how to grasp how … if they should be outraged or really what the budget was all about,” he explains.
“So, that’s why I chose to do it in a 90 second rap song.”
The audio loop that is played throughout the rap is a clip from an interview Kingkade did with Alison Redford during the election campaign.
“I had asked Alison Redford, pointedly, how we can afford it and is she losing the support of her party by spending the way that she’s doing, by pitching a budget that is so lavish in the way that she’s doing, that I thought was not conservative at all,” he recalls.
“Her response to me is the quote you hear in the song, which was to say that if you actually understand how budgets work and you’ve read through this budget, you know that all of the spending is factored in. And here we are a year later, and we’re borrowing $4.3 billion to make good on promises she made a year ago that she swore she could afford.”
Kingkade stresses that presenting a budget that Albertans can understand is vital. He understands the criticism that this year’s numbers weren’t presented in a clear manner.
“I would really caution the Finance Minister from telling people that accountants understand his budget. They’re supposed to, they’re accountants, that’s a given, they’ve studied that. If accountants don’t understand a budget then probably they’re not fit for their post.”
“But Albertans aren’t stupid. This is a real dangerous thing in any level of government, when intellectuals take over, is that they begin to believe that they’re ruling because they’re smarter than everybody, and that should not ever be the case,” he says.
“They should not be telling us, ‘it’s ok, accountants understand the budget we put forward.’ It has to be written and presented in a way so that we feel that we’re getting a good deal and, frankly, that we feel good about voting for them the last time around, and I don’t think that’s the case with this one.”
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