Raise my taxes, Alberta
Dependence on natural resource royalties doesn’t make economic sense – it’s time for Albertans to contribute.
I’m a proud Albertan and Albertans are very proud of their low taxes. Just watch an Albertan in B.C. theatrically sigh and roll their eyes when confronted with a 7% Provincial Sales Tax. We have a slogan for our low-tax regime: “The Alberta Advantage” and we’ll be darned if we’re going to give it up. However, my headline has already exposed me as a disloyal Albertan in that respect: I think people like me should pay more taxes.
We’re (secretly) socialist
The “Alberta Advantage” is not only low taxes. It is relatively high government spending combined with low taxes. Ken Boessenkoel – former advisor to Stephen Harper and Christy Clark, amongst many others – loves to say that, reputation and voting record notwithstanding, Alberta is a “socialist paradise” in its levels of social spending.
In almost any other province, that combination of low taxes and high spending would mean accumulating deficits that lead to inevitable insolvency. Alberta has been able to sustain this thus far as a result of geological luck: we have massive deposits of oil and natural gas and we can charge royalties to companies for the right to extract and sell those deposits. When the price of oil and gas is high, Alberta can pay for our social spending and keep our low taxes and have some left over for a rainy day (our “Heritage Fund”).
Market fluctuations
But, like the unsettled skies of a prairie summer, the rain can come suddenly and ferociously. Every $1 reduction in the price of oil results in a loss of $750 million to provincial government revenues. It doesn’t take a big hit to the oil market to turn surpluses into deficits. Okay, you might say, when oil prices drop, governments have to tighten their belts! But you can’t change government program spending at the same rate as the oil market fluctuates; it would cause massive social and economic disruption. Program spending is health care when we need it, adequately-maintained roads and teachers for our kids (the Alberta Teachers Association is on strike as I write this).
Dependence on natural resource royalties doesn’t make economic sense over the long term. But it also makes it so much harder for us to accept the fact that a fossil-fuels-dependent way of life isn’t sustainable at any level: economically, ecologically and even socially. As a friend of mine puts it: “we are going to become a sustainable world, either by design or by disaster.” Dependence on natural resource royalties keeps us from getting on the “design” train and leaves us constantly trying to stave off disaster in increasingly costly ways.
Paying more in income and consumption taxes – so that we can depend less on royalties – is a way in which Albertans can contribute to the design of a more sustainable world, including to a more sustainable fiscal policy for our province.
Our part
Paying more in income and consumption taxes – so that we can depend less on royalties – is a way in which Albertans can contribute to the design of that more sustainable world, including to a more sustainable fiscal policy for our province. Being good stewards of our environment and of the public purse requires of us that we make our contributions to the common good willingly and open-handedly. Raise my taxes.
When my friend was leading in prayer at a CRCNA congregation, he thanked God for the privilege of paying taxes to help each other with roads, health care, (etc.). In that congregation there were some puzzled people, but no revolt. When someone mentioned this at a CRCNA meeting in Grand Rapids, he was met with hostility: “Where did you get that idea?” (communal health care). “From this fellow Jesus Christ,” was the answer. Well, . . . The next day the U.S.A. member accepted the apology of the one who ‘turned his crank’ and said: “OK. I know you didn’t mean it.”
Like my prayer-leader friend, I DO mean it.