Central Canada’s silly advice

More taxes are not the answer

In 1916, the prairie provinces of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba were the first provinces to grant women the right to vote; British Columbia and Ontario granted suffrage the next year, in 1917. Nova Scotia and the Dominion (federal government) followed in 1918; New Brunswick in 1919 and Prince Edward Island in 1922. Newfoundland (not yet part of Canada) allowed women to approach the ballot box in 1925; Quebec was a laggard. It finally gave in and gave women voting rights in 1940.

Emily Murphy of Edmonton became not just the first woman magistrate in Canada in 1916, but in the entire British Empire. In 1917, Albertans Roberta MacAdams and Louise McKinney were the first Canadian women to be elected to a legislature in the country.

We list such facts and with Alberta upfront because whenever this province makes news in Canada, it is inevitable that some columnist or political figure from some other part of the country will deign to give Albertans advice.

The same thing happened again after the recent provincial budget. One Toronto scribbler in particular wrote of how Alberta can’t govern itself properly. The Ontariocentric columnist took that view merely because the provincial government won’t impose a sales tax on an unwilling populace.

So, Alberta is lectured by Central and Eastern Canadians and a few would-be Central Canadians at home, that Alberta’s real problem is resource wealth — and that the provincial government should spend less of that, and tax Albertans more.

It would be nice if Eastern critics could at least study Alberta’s spending and revenues before engaging in lectures.

While sales taxes are more efficient taxes than others, they are very visible and judging from polls, Albertans are proud of this difference. What’s more, the reason so many Albertans oppose one is because they rightly fear it would be a new revenue grab, not a replacement for some other tax. Those who have studied the province’s finances carefully, unlike missives from high-tax missionaries from Ontario, have found that Alberta’s more pressing problem is its spending addiction.

That’s the conclusion of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary, the Fraser Institute and advocacy organizations such as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and Canadian Federation of Independent Business. All have published multiple studies in the past few years that reveal how provincial government spending grew significantly over the past decade.

Their work showed how the public sector has swallowed up most of the new resource revenues, and how that public sector is overpaid relative to the private sector. We don’t expect such work to convince uninformed Alberta critics, but they should at least pay attention to facts and not inventions of their own imagination. (This same columnist cited the amount of the cheques Ralph Klein sent to every Albertan. He said it was $200, when the cheques were $400 each.) The provincial government belatedly recognized in its provincial budget that it has spent beyond inflation and population growth for years.

What is truly odd about the call for higher taxes on Albertans is that plenty of provinces have tried the more and higher tax route and they have also borrowed massively. That describes Canada’s two most populous provinces, Ontario and Quebec.

And the result? Those two provinces are in deep debt and have high taxes and they’re not the job creation dynamos that Alberta is. Our unemployment rate is 4.5 per cent. Quebec’s is 7.4 per cent and Ontario’s is 7.7 per cent. If higher taxes were the route to balanced budgets and more prosperity, Ontario, Quebec and Eastern Canada (with even worse unemployment rates) would be at full unemployment and in surplus. They are instead drowning in red ink and have only a surplus of unemployed people.

Central Canadian-centric advice-givers often criticize Alberta and the Klein years. Give it a rest. In the 1990s, Klein spotted Alberta’s spending problem and reformed it and set the example for the rest of the country. From the federal Liberal government on down, almost every government copied Alberta on spending reform.

Years later, it is why so many Canadians and international observers continually comment how “lucky” Canada is not to have the crushing combination many countries around the world have: lots of debt, high taxes, and little room to manoeuvre on either.

But luck had nothing to do with it. Alberta, back in the 1990s, led the country on budgets, just as it and other Western provinces did in 1916 on another important matter. Alberta’s critics, as usual, merely reflect an uninformed bias, devoid of facts or history.