ALBERTA PARTY MAKES SOME NOISE WITH PITCH ON PST
The spectre of an Alberta provincial sales tax is back on the table.
Not from the NDP or the Liberals — but from the Alberta Party.
“As the downturn moves into its third year, Alberta is at a crossroads,” party leader Greg Clark told a news conference Monday. “We can no longer afford to avoid difficult conversations or to rule anything out, even if it’s politically unpopular. All options should be on the table.” One of those options is a provincial sales tax.
“I’m absolutely open to considering that,” he said, cautioning that he’s not calling on the Alberta government to introduce a sales tax. “I don’t trust the NDP with a PST, I’ll say that, because the NDP have shown that they’re unwilling and unable to constrain government spending.”
Clark made his comment in the legislature’s Media Room, the same venue where over the years a litany of politicians — including finance ministers — have declared a provincial sales tax was “on the table” during downturns in the economy, only to throw it off after a public backlash.
In 2009, for example, then finance minister Lloyd Snelgrove mused out loud that a five per cent tax would raise about $8 billion a year. He was promptly upbraided by then-premier Ed Stelmach.
But Snelgrove, and just about every Alberta finance minister, realized that a PST, when stripped of its political baggage, is something that makes sense economically and fiscally.
In 2011, then-finance minister Ron Liepert said the idea of a PST had come up repeatedly during budget consultations with taxpayers: “In Alberta, we can’t continue to rely on resources revenues and I think we should have that conversation sooner instead of later.”
That led to a front-page story under the headline: “Sales tax back on Alberta’s agenda.”
That in turn led to Liepert retracting the comment with a blunt statement: “No provincial sales tax for Alberta.”
Many economists — and experts hired by PC governments of old — came to the conclusion it’s time Alberta introduced a PST as part of a revamped tax system.
Clark, likewise, suggests a PST might make sense if coupled with a cut in other forms of taxation, such as corporate taxes.
Clark is raising the notion of a dreaded PST – long branded the “provincial suicide tax” in Alberta – for its shock value, if nothing else.
The Alberta Party might have the coolest name in Alberta politics, but it only has one MLA — Clark himself — and a public profile so low as to be invisible.
As if to underline this point, besides myself, only one journalist turned up for Clark’s news conference Monday — my Postmedia colleague, Emma Graney.
Clark is risking his party being branded the “PST Party,” but he apparently subscribes to Oscar Wilde’s dictum that the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.
And Clark desperately wants people to talk about his oft-overlooked party.
He wants moderate Albertans, those angered by a high-spending NDP government on one side and turned off by a slash-andburn Wildrose (or its right-wing successor led by Jason Kenney) on the other, to find a home in the Alberta Party.
It’d be easy to dismiss Clark’s musing on a PST as a dead end. But I’ve been thinking for some time this topic might yet become a major issue in the next election campaign. It’d be up to Premier Rachel Notley to make it an issue, though, not Clark.
Notley has said she will not introduce a PST during her current mandate. But will it come up during the next provincial election campaign in 2019?
“We would have to in some fashion have a pretty upfront conversation with Albertans about the fiscal framework,” Notley said in an interview last year. “I don’t think, given the history of this province, that it would be respectful to voters to not talk to them about the issue if it was something that we were seriously looking at. I think that only makes sense.”
She sounds just like Clark. Or maybe Clark sounds just like Notley. Either way, Alberta’s electoral table would have no room for any other issue if a provincial sales tax were on the menu.