Notley’s latest attack on previous government policy ignores facts

Imagine you are a young female physician in 1999 who just finished a specialized residency.

You are working full time and can begin to pay down your student debt.

Imagine also that the province begins to cut income taxes.

That is helpful to your takehome pay, and further allows you to save for the future, including for your children.

Fast forward 16 years and listen to the premier of Alberta tell you such tax policy, based as it was on initial prudent government spending, was a mistake.

“The lie that looking after only the most fortunate helps everyone else has been proved wrong,” said Rachel Notley in Calgary on Wednesday, in her state of the province address.

Notley offered up a straw man — who actually advocates for “looking after the most fortunate?”

The premier was attempting to revise history. Specifically, she has long believed, opposite the facts, that balanced budgets and moderate taxation for all Albertans under a past government, Ralph Klein’s, was wrongheaded and a failure.

Fact one: On budgets, Notley skipped over the possibility of doing more with less, something most families do every day.

Fact two: If one measures helping the least fortunate by ensuring tax dollars end up being spent on programs, Klein’s budget reforms did just that.

For example, in 1993, interest on the provincial debt was $1.4 billion annually, or 75 per cent of the tax dollars spent on social services. By 2006, when Klein left office, debt interest was equivalent to nine per cent of the money used for social services. Bringing the budget under control mattered.

Fact three: After balancing the books, the Klein government cut personal and business taxes starting in 1999, and this continued until the early 2000s, reversing tax hikes from the late 1980s and early 1990s.

All of this mattered to investment and job creation, at least if one cares about such things instead of Notley’s 1970s-style class warfare rhetoric.

Between 1999 and 2014 (the latter year when the Saudis crashed the price of oil), Alberta’s job creation record was the best in Canada. Over those 15 years, Alberta’s jobs grew by 677,000, or 45 per cent higher than the 1999 numbers.

Compare that to Ontario, by 2014 with just over one million new jobs, and Quebec, with 633,000 more people working compared with 1999 — an increase of just 19 per cent in both provinces.

Of note: In those years, Albertans without a high school education benefited from the lowest unemployment rate in the country, with an average annual jobless rate of just 9.7 per cent for that group.

In Quebec, where Notley’s preferred spend-more, tax-more, interventionist policies have been in play for decades, those without a high school education suffered from an annual unemployment rate of 14.5 per cent between 1999 and 2014.

Faced with such facts, some claim Alberta just got “lucky” with a boom in resource prices. With plentiful oil and gas reserves, one would hope Alberta benefited from the rise in energy prices, just as Hawaii should benefit from warm weather that fosters its tourism industry.

But natural advantages don’t mean a thing if a government mismanages finances or craters a local advantage with ill-advised policy. After all, Venezuela has oil and lovely weather and its economy was destroyed by an ideologue, that country’s late president/autocrat, Hugo Chavez.

Despite Notley’s belief, earlier Alberta policy benefited everyone: From high income earners such as physicians to Alberta’s teachers, nurses and government employees, who paid the tiniest amount of taxes on the highest public-sector salaries in the country.

Klein’s investment-friendly policies also helped create a plethora of jobs, including and especially for those who never finished high school.

For the premier to claim otherwise ignores the facts of how a cold, northern jurisdiction became the success story it did: With smart, opportunity-based policy.