Albertans happily frittered away their Ralph Bucks
Look, I told Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell, I’m not writing the front-page headline with “prosperity bonus” in it — that’ll put people to sleep.
Rick, busily composing a column about Ralph Klein’s latest wacky wheeze — to hand back money to Alberta taxpayers — took time out from perfecting the fine art of the seven-word sentence to inquire what, in heaven’s name, should he call this plan then.
“Call it Ralph Bucks — that’ll work just fine.” And there, folks, a tiny slice of history was born.
Not my tabloid-headline inspired direction — being Sun editor-in-chief in those heady days of 2005 — but the subsequent moment when ordinary folk got a government cheque, not because they claimed victimhood of some sort, but instead because Alberta had more than a little spare change to return to citizens.
Even now those infamous Ralph Bucks (yes, the name lasted longer than that next day’s headline) causes the hairs to stand on certain pencil necks.
Oh, how we could have used that cash for some glorious health-care initiative or a new downtown University of Calgary campus.
But, instead, the ragged hoi polloi sucked up an entire $1.4 billion at $400 a pop and spent it on who knows what.
Actually, local economist Todd Hirsch, he of future- GDP pontificating fame, knows the answer to that very conundrum.
“We frittered away our money. People got a couple of dinners and put some gas in their Hummer, and that was about it,” he later told a local conference.
Well, personally, I like the occasional fritter, though my cheque was spent rather boringly on new tires for my Honda Accord: sadly not a Hummer.
Anyhow those Ralph Bucks, which caused the self-appointed guardians of Calgary’s social and economic order so much angst, were a moment never to be repeated. No doubt Todd will be relieved, unlike Calgary’s Hummer dealers, if any still exist.
This political history is being rerun today due to the staged rumours that if Jason Kenney is elected premier we’ll see public spending slashed on a scale unseen since Klein’s first government in 1993.
Yes, there were big cuts back then, initially to get the budget balanced and then to pay down the $23-billion debt.
Yet it wasn’t Klein who initiated this agenda. That was Liberal leader Laurence Decore, who repeatedly hammered Don Getty’s earlier government about reckless over-spending and raced about the province brandishing a ticking debt clock. If he hadn’t stuck his foot in his mouth over abortion, Decore could have indeed been premier.
Ever a populist, Klein jumped upon this austerity bandwagon — the two leaders described by NDP honcho Ray Martin as Tweedledum and Tweedledee in their competing campaign pledges to slash spending.
It was a good line, but it didn’t help poor Ray or his party: Klein was elected with 51 seats, while Decore’s lot banked 32. The NDP got zero.
That’s the point today’s Klein revisionists rarely mention. Every single member of that 1993 legislature — Tory and Grit — was elected on a program of cuts, and when Klein’s government actually implemented them, he’d be returned to power with more seats: 63 in 1997 and a remarkable 74 in 2001. People voted for the program and then rewarded the man who delivered.
So in 2005, with natural gas royalties pouring in and an annual surplus of $6 billion, it was decided to hand a quarter of that extra loot back to taxpayers through the prosperity bonus program.
And, yes, I enjoyed my Ralph Bucks, not just because it fit into a tabloid headline but also because, for once, regular people got a bit back. If they gassed up their Hummer (give us a break) or went out for a night on the tiles, then good for them.
This will never happen again. Albertans haven’t stomach for it today. But those who still can’t abide that $1.4 billion once escaped the maw of those frittering experts in the public sector should not ignore there was a time when a vast majority of us did.