[JaredMilne]

Sunnyways Sunnyways:

OK, we all know Alberta is a province and gave up a fair whack of its oil revenue to spendthrift federal governments and equalization but what about the rest of the money? Is there nothing to be learnt from Norway’s good example?

Um, no. Alberta has never had to give up any of its oil royalties to Ottawa or anyone else. Our federal taxes get transferred, yes, but not our oil money. We set our own rates.

bootlegga bootlegga:

Wall may have reduced taxes from much higher taxes, but my point is if we had even slightly higher taxes. such as a small PST or not instituting the flat income tax that cost the treasury billions of dollars, we would have almost never have run a deficit (even under the NDP and their profligate spending). That meant we wouldn't have had to raid the HTF every year for every little scrap of revenue the government needed to pay for hospitals, schools, and roads.

The Alberta Advantage was based on raiding the HTF and NOT saving any of the non-renewable royalties.

Edmonton has had its fair share of boondoggles (just try building a bridge in this city), and taxes have increased rapidly over the past decade, but overall, many problems that both Edmonton and Calgary suffer from is that they have only one tax option (property taxes), and get to little in the way of transfers from the provincial government.

Had the province lived up to Lougheed's vision, each city would already have an extensive LRT network, which would reduce congestion. Each city would have its ring road built long ago. Each city would have adequate hospitals and plentiful schools. Students wouldn't be carrying $50,000 student loans to get a bachelors degree. All those things are funded largely (or entirely) by the province, and austerity by 20 years of PC governments made all of those things lag far too long, causing all sorts of problems in the cities./quote]

Thanos Thanos:

The most critical thing that anti-Alberta types also keep ignoring is that both Norway and Alaska also don't have to transfer a massive chunk of their own developed wealth further down the line to a larger government entity. And that's either through individual income taxes or levies imposed by the feds on the state. All the money they make is theirs to keep or spend as they see fit. No one else comes in and gets to tell them what to do. Norway is safely outside the worst of the EU's scams and that type of state-to-federal transfer just doesn't exist in the United States.

We can go on forever about the rights and wrongs of how the HTF was used by Alberta premiers over the last forty years. What's not disputable though is that if the money Albertans sent to Ottawa had stayed inside the province we'd be several hundred billion dollars richer right now, with one of the most comprehensive social program safety nets in the entire world, and practically every single person in this province would have been sheltered and safe from the harshness of commodity busts. Excessive taxation imposed by the Canadian federal government has made life harder for Albertans when the busts happen, and Ottawa (and most of the rest of the country too) certainly doesn't give a damn at all when it occurs.

Are you talking about government revenues, or individual revenues? Because if those federal tax dollars we sent to Ottawa remained in our individual pockets, that wouldn't necessarily transfer into higher provincial revenues. Remember that as bootlegga has pointed out, we've always spent oil money as it comes in to keep our taxes low and have some the highest per capita spending in Canada, and this was in the early 2000s when Ralph Klein was still firmly in charge. Governments are still responsible for critical things like health care, education and infrastructure-would we have accepted higher personal taxes to keep those things financed even if we weren't sending money to Ottawa? And what about everything Ottawa finances that we depend on, from infrastructure to the military? Where does the money come from for that if we don't pay to Ottawa?

And taxes have steadily gone down year over year in Canada. Even when Rachel Notley increased high-earned taxes, we were still the lowest-taxed jurisdiction in Canada.

Ralph Klein was a good Premier in getting the provincial books balanced, but he's not a great Premier because he royally fucked up in pissing away the later oil booms. He readily admitted that he didn't know what to do about the revenues coming in during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and he largely wasted it. The flat tax was also a really bad idea-when one province adopts a good policy in Canadian federalism, other provinces will often copy them. The fact that nobody else was interested in copying our flat tax was telling.

Have we been royally fucked over by bad federal decisions like the NEP, activists trying to keep us from developing our resources, and the current unfairness of the federal equalization program (which Stephen Harper did jack shit to change?) Yes, and I'll touch on that in my next post.

But the other problem is that we as Albertans haven't done ourselves any favours with our own mishandling of our oil revenue. Oil royalties and personal taxes are two separate things-and given our resistance to paying taxes, I don't know if the money staying in Alberta would have made a difference.

[herbie]

Just spent the last week in May in Olds, AB.
Town is growing, slow but steady.
Every single fast food chain represented in town, new diners popping up and people in them all the time.
Help wanted signs everywhere.
Grandson bragging he'll start any job at $15 an hour, more than Mom makes after 8 fucking years at WalMart.
Roads full of newer, fancier cars and trucks.

Want to see how bad Alberta is "suffering" - Drive down Hwy 16 to Prince Rupert. Then you can talk. That's what happens in one industry towns.

[JaredMilne]

I'm really torn on the TransMountain debate, and the larger O&G development in general. Keep in mind that many of the Natives opposing oil pipelines rely on traditional hunting and plant gathering for their livelihoods, and they're worried about spills for the same reasons that white farmers, tourist business owners, and others might be worried about theirs. There's also a larger leadership issue in their communities, in that the band council chiefs are often considered illegitimate, or at best administrators of federal programs. That's an issue that still needs to be resolved-and it ties into the larger legal framework of Canada.

OTOH, I also see all the Native people involved in the O&G business itself, and how they see it as a way out of poverty-tying into what some activists themselves have said about private industry helping economic development as long as consent is given and their concerns are taken into account. Not to mention that O&G is such a critical source of jobs and tax revenue-including the tax revenue that so many progressives say we need to spend on everything from pharmacare to Native language support. I actually agree with all those causes, but I'm left puzzled as to where they expect the money to come from if we kill the resource industry. I fucking hate the fact that Albertans are portrayed as Captain Planet villains, seemingly wanting to kill the environment for shits and giggles, when oilpatch workers remit money across Canada and we contribute so much in equalization.

I also find it a bit rich that B.C. is suddenly standing up for the environment on TransMountain when they approved the Site C hydro dam, which was itself faced with Native opposition and concerns about whether it was even needed. Not to mention Victoria dumping raw sewage into the nearby waters (which Montreal also did in the St. Lawrence, for the record). And then there are B.C. companies committing their own environmental sins-and as Thanos pointed out, even the Republicans are siding with the Democrats against them.

So I wish I knew what to do and where the common ground is-and I can probably look forward to spending a lot more time trying to figure it out, whether I want to or not.

[JaredMilne]

herbie herbie:

Just spent the last week in May in Olds, AB.
Town is growing, slow but steady.
Every single fast food chain represented in town, new diners popping up and people in them all the time.
Help wanted signs everywhere.
Grandson bragging he'll start any job at $15 an hour, more than Mom makes after 8 fucking years at WalMart.
Roads full of newer, fancier cars and trucks.

Want to see how bad Alberta is "suffering" - Drive down Hwy 16 to Prince Rupert. Then you can talk. That's what happens in one industry towns.

I once met Judy Dahl, the former Mayor of Olds, roughly ten years ago when I was working for the Town of Morinville. She was whip-smart and put a lot of effort into attracting new businesses, particularly in making Olds into a university-type town if I remember right. Not every community is that lucky.

Which brings me to...

Thanos Thanos:

I don't know about Edmonton but the city council of Calgary is wildly irresponsible with tax dollars. I don't know about you but I'm not taking instructions on fiscal responsibility from the gang that wanted to spend billions on the damn Olympics in a town where too many people are barely getting by. I won't dispute that the province should kick in more but handing more money over to a city government that is simply untrustworthy would be a terrible thing to do.

O&G became increasingly profitable in Alberta in the late 1990's by cutting back on the taxes that had steadily increased over the years. The boom, as you said, really didn't ignite until after the Iraq war. That being said the business tax cuts can't be denied as a large factor in increasing private sector activity. Every day in Calgary we get a new story about small businesses closing due to the excessively high tax rate the city has imposed on them - the most recent one is a popular bar that made money hand-over-fist thanks to the hockey playoffs and the Raptors win but is still losing revenue thanks to the city deciding that their property that was valued at $3 million in 2016 is now worth $7 million.

Municipally, individual politicians count for a lot. Here in St. Albert, 15 years ago we were routinely facing huge tax increases of 5% or more, including a whopping 13% increase in 2005. A number of Council candidates came out and a larger public backlash set in against these increases. Even today, with a Mayor who wouldn't be out of place in the Liberal or NDP caucuses, she's made a lot of effort to keep tax increases to a minimum in part because of the activism of those other individual politicians and their community supporters.

Unfortunately, in Calgary there's the squirrely management described by Thanos, including a mayor who acts like he's having a hissy fit when people complain about the City's public art choices, and who seemed hellbent to schmooze with Olympic athletes, damn the cost. Or look at Ben Isitt in Victoria, who tries to get Ottawa to pay the $15,000 for policing Remembrance Day ceremonies but insists on Victoria City Council getting $10,000 catered lunches.

That sort of crap ends up making anyone else who could be associated with them look bad, just as the alt-right makes sane conservatives look bad.

[Sunnyways]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Sunnyways Sunnyways:

OK, we all know Alberta is a province and gave up a fair whack of its oil revenue to spendthrift federal governments and equalization but what about the rest of the money? Is there nothing to be learnt from Norway’s good example?

Um, no. Alberta has never had to give up any of its oil royalties to Ottawa or anyone else. Our federal taxes get transferred, yes, but not our oil money. We set our own rates.

That is true in a narrow sense for oil royalties. Oil revenue is ambiguous - I should have said oil wealth. The federal govt has received proportionately more money from Alberta through its taxpayers per capita mainly because of its oil industry. In effect, directly or indirectly, the excess was coming from oil. What I am trying to concede there is that, unlike Norway, Alberta did indeed lose some of its income from oil to another government before it started doing anything locally.

Anyway, I’d like to see more questioning about Alberta government policy over the decades. Why was so little saved? Were taxes too low? Was spending too high? For example, working in Foothills hospital in the Eighties, I couldn’t believe the scale and lavishness of it and the attached medical school.

[Thanos]

Sorry Jared, I'm still trying to process being told to go be the MAGA I apparently always wanted to be, despite three years of active posting about what an evil rat bastard Donald Trump is, because I'm not loving Canada in the appropriate way as our federal government destroys the place I live in. Love it or leave it, Canadian-style? Yeah, it's just as lame and pathetic of a sentiment as the American version of it is.

[JaredMilne]

Sunnyways Sunnyways:

hat is true in a narrow sense for oil royalties. Oil revenue is ambiguous - I should have said oil wealth. The federal govt has received proportionately more money from Alberta through its taxpayers per capita mainly because of its oil industry. In effect, directly or indirectly, the excess was coming from oil. What I am trying to concede there is that, unlike Norway, Alberta did indeed lose some of its income from oil to another government before it started doing anything locally.

Anyway, I’d like to see more questioning about Alberta government policy over the decades. Why was so little saved? Were taxes too low? Was spending too high? For example, working in Foothills hospital in the Eighties, I couldn’t believe the scale and lavishness of it and the attached medical school.

Well, the issue with federal taxes came from our having so many more high-paying jobs resulting from oil booms proportionally than other parts of the country. If lumber had generated the same kind of high-paying jobs, then it's likely B.C. or even Quebec might have been impacted the same way (although I recognize that the Liberals might have revised the equalization formula to keep Quebec from getting hit...and I wouldn't mind seeing the equalization formula revised to make it fairer to us too.)

As for the questioning Alberta government policy, that's something some of the more thoughtful leftists in Wild Rose Country have been asking for years. Unfortunately, when they do they can be accused of being closet Communists or of not loving Alberta the 'right' way in an ugly mirror image of what Thanos discusses below.

Thanos Thanos:

Sorry Jared, I'm still trying to process being told to go be the MAGA I apparently always wanted to be, despite three years of active posting about what an evil rat bastard Donald Trump is, because I'm not loving Canada in the appropriate way as our federal government destroys the place I live in. Love it or leave it, Canadian-style? Yeah, it's just as lame and pathetic of a sentiment as the American version of it is.

Who the hell said that to you? If I ever came across that way, I'm really sorry. That's the last thing I'd ever want to do.

But what you're talking about in not loving Canada the 'right' way is the same kind of bullshit that's been slung our way by Eastern liberals for decades because we've tried to point out that maybe certain federal policies leave us holding the bag, or because we didn't prostrate ourselves enough for either of the Trudeaus.

Oh yeah, and Preston Manning apparently woke up every morning plotting about how he was going to get God to condemn gays and French speakers to hellfire and brimstone just because he pointed out that we wouldn't be able to pay for the social safety net if we went bankrupt.

Like I've said before, it's small wonder Albertans get pissed off over this sort of thing.

[Thanos]

Not you. Others. Sorry, should have been clearer.

[bootlegga]

herbie herbie:

Oh Jesus, the pipeline's approved and you're still whining.

Yeah, the pipeline was approved by Trudeau in 2016 and we still don't have shovels in the ground.

Any wonder why Albertans are skeptical three years later?

[bootlegga]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

And taxes have steadily gone down year over year in Canada. Even when Rachel Notley increased high-earned taxes, we were still the lowest-taxed jurisdiction in Canada.

Something I've pointed out over and over (both here and social media) and most fellow Albertans believe that: 1) They already pay too much tax, and 2) That I'm some sort of socialist who wants to re-distribute their income to poor people.

For all Jim Prentice was mocked by people when he said Albertans were partly to blame for its financial mess, he hit the nail on the head with his comments - we have had it too good for far too long.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Ralph Klein was a good Premier in getting the provincial books balanced, but he's not a great Premier because he royally fucked up in pissing away the later oil booms. He readily admitted that he didn't know what to do about the revenues coming in during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and he largely wasted it. The flat tax was also a really bad idea-when one province adopts a good policy in Canadian federalism, other provinces will often copy them. The fact that nobody else was interested in copying our flat tax was telling.

I object to anyone saying Klein was a good Premier in any shape or form because his draconian cuts caused WAY more damage than any benefit we ever received from paying off our debt a few years early.

I know lots of people are glad that he paid off our 'mortgage', but the problem was that he neglected the flooded basement, leaky roof, failing appliances, and collapsed garage to do that.

I don't have any issue with him privatizing road maintainence, the ALCB, registries and all the rest (except for the vicious way his Ministers implemented it perhaps), but most of the rest of his policies harmed Alberta long term and mean that austerity now is going to be much worse than the '90s...and for anyone who lived through the '90s here, it was fucking brutal. The HTF could have provided a cushion to deal with this, had successive governments just left it alone, but instead its a shadow of what Lougheed planned for and it won't be a factor in the coming austerity.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Have we been royally fucked over by bad federal decisions like the NEP, activists trying to keep us from developing our resources, and the current unfairness of the federal equalization program (which Stephen Harper did jack shit to change?) Yes, and I'll touch on that in my next post.

The NEP pulled between $50 and 100 BILLION out of Alberta in the early 1980s, which crippled this province at a time when oil prices collapsed, which is why old memories die hard in Alberta and it'll be a cold day in hell before the NEP is ever forgiven/forgotten by most of those who lived through it.

I know my parents - who had nothing to do with the oil patch - nearly lost our house three times because of the combination of job losses in the recession and insane interest rates.

I think in theory the NEP could have been a good deal for everyone had it been implemented in a more fair manner, instead of just using it to buy votes in central Canada.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

But the other problem is that we as Albertans haven't done ourselves any favours with our own mishandling of our oil revenue. Oil royalties and personal taxes are two separate things-and given our resistance to paying taxes, I don't know if the money staying in Alberta would have made a difference.

I think it would have, because if the money stayed here, we could have at least left the HTF alone to grow. It wouldn't be the size Lougheed envisioned (close to $500 billion by now), but it would probably be around $100 billion instead of $17B.