PST in Alberta? No, Worse: The Status Quo

                There isn’t going to be a sales tax in Alberta.

                If you’re the sort of person who has always taken pride in our lack of one, if you’re the sort of person who brags about that to the rest of the country, rest assured. It’s a dubious point of pride, sure, but you can retain it. No sales tax.

                But if you’re the sort of person willing to think beyond your satisfaction and ask why there is not going to be one amid falling oil prices and job cuts, your rest may come with just a tad less assurance.

                Oil prices are down, and so are oil revenues. Alberta’s economy is fixed to these like a ship to an anchor, that’s right, fixed to the fortunes of a single, volatile commodity and so a projected surplus gets turned into a projected deficit. In. The. Billions. The most powerful economy in the country goes from champagne and party hats to Depression rhetoric in two months.

                Already the Suncors and the Shells are laying off jobs in the thousands. Belt-tightening for all, in every industry and every sector affected by oil, and because Alberta apparently has such a simpleton’s economy, every industry and every sector is affected by oil.

                The news since before Christmas has been a constant flow of doom, gloom, job losses, service cuts, wage rollbacks. Sales tax. All so much talk. Is it truly as bad as they’re telling us?

                No. But in making it seem that bad, by dangling the threat of the loss of that point of pride, being the only province in the country to run its budget without gaining cash from its citizens as they spend money, the Prentice Government can commit any number of fiscal atrocities. They’ve drummed up your sympathies and your ire, and if they back off from the threatened tax, Albertans will accept anything else because it “has to happen.”

                Because that’s what we’re being told has to happen.

                Because apparently this province’s electorate has lost the good sense to question what we’re told. Did we ever have it?

                There will be no sales tax, there will just be its fear. Instead there will be deep cuts to public sector wages and to services. The targets? The Conservative government’s two favorite punching bags since the Klein era: health care and education.

                Those schools promised last fall? Can’t, oil prices.

                More beds in hospitals? Price o’crude . . .

                Hiring rural doctors? Pesky petroleum.

                Teachers working on increases of 0% for three years while the private sector has seen an on average increase of 25%? It’s just, y’know, oil.

                If it’s as simple and as true as that—of course, it’s neither—why is it we aren’t stopping to question how we have let our economy be bungled so badly by being so deliberately tied to a non-renewable resource? Oh, and that we’re so dependent on that revenue today that we cut something as simple as health care premiums, empty the Heritage Fund, and wouldn’t even dream of something as sensible and proven as a sales tax.

                It’s all very convenient, and by fear-mongering about something as wise as a tax, our provincial (and federal) government show themselves incapable of seeing beyond the status quo.

                Oil is volatile economically, it’s eventually finite, and let’s not forget its acquisition is environmentally destructive (although in Alberta economic crises are treated as real and environmental ones as Hollywood and Athabascan fabrications). Tying our entire economy to crude is like planning a household budget on Dad’s Friday night casino winnings. Actually, it’s worse than that, because no one acts so gob smacked when they lose at a casino. 

                So what? This happens every few years, why can’t our government and the Shells and the Suncors run in the red for a bit until the price goes back up to $80 a barrel? Because the only word more reviled in Alberta than tax is deficit. Companies—and the government—use a downturn like this as an excuse to over-cut jobs and rape services because people for some reason buy into the necessity rather than question the poor planning that got us here.

                This is the definition of fiscal conservatism, then? An absolute implosion of middle and lower class quality of life for the sake of giddily seeing a little black in the ledger? To call it short-sighted is understatement.

                We’re looking at an election this spring. The Wild Rose Party has imploded in a spectacular combination of foolishness and power-greed and Premier Prentice dresses in Teflon every morning. The Left is in disarray and in no way prepared to challenge the forty-year pachyderm and its new handler. I’m idealistic, but not to the extent that I think this government will be ousted from office, but for the love of Pete can we stop rolling over and allowing it to believe we’re a province of rubes? I mean, our political news makes us the laughing stock of a country that is taking perverse delight in watching us fall from our pedestal.

                Opportune time to send a message to our elected representatives, to say that you owe us just a little more creativity when looking at the books. Time is long since passed that this great province has only one resource, and a policy that can only respond to that resource’s fortunes by shrugging and cutting.

                If we can’t elect people clever enough to save surplus for rainy days, to spread our assets across a few fields, to take a little off the top when we spend, to take more from those who have most, well, we deserve what we get.

                If we’re going to fall for this yet again, and let them base their mandate around our stupidity and their own un-inventiveness and duplicity, it’s our own fault.

                Because this has long since ceased to be a sensible way to conduct business. 


On this: http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2015/01/16/alberta-oil-prentice_n_6488252.html?utm_hp_ref=alberta-politics

http://calgaryherald.com/news/politics/alberta-sales-tax-the-most-detested-budget-solution-poll-says

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/tories-prepare-for-further-spending-restraint-due-to-cheap-oil/article22511451/