FROM ALBERTA, A CASE STUDY IN NDP SILLINESS.
FROM ALBERTA, A CASE STUDY IN PATENT NDP NONSENSE
Ever since Alberta elected a New Democratic provincial government in 2015, I’ve been applying a fuzzy concept of “NDP nonsense” to my analysis of their behaviour. I was relatively comfortable with an NDP victory at the time. The Conservatives who had been running the show for my entire life were in desperate need of chastisement. The opportunity to apply it arrived at a moment when New Democrats were the only practical alternative on offer.
Unfortunate, for someone averse to leftism. But at that moment, my thought was: “Let’s see just how much NDP nonsense we end up having to swallow.”
I have a particular definition of “NDP nonsense,” possibly less wide that the one you will hear almost anywhere in the province. It doesn’t include things like carbon taxation, at least in t he economist- approved Alberta NDP form. Some things I disagree with, like making the tax system a tad more progressive, do not count as “nonsense”: they’re sensible, coherent ideological choices that are not to my own taste. Even the new government’s enormous deficit financing was not “NDP nonsense” in the face of a ( locally) severe recession — although the apparent total lack of concern with future solvency is another matter.
Mostly by “NDP nonsense” I mean old-fashioned economic dirigisme and identity- politics gamesmanship. But maybe it’s best to explain with a case study. Let us turn to the government’s Bill 2 of the current legislature session, the “Growth and Diversification Act.”
The bill certainly contains some non- nonsense. There is a promise, for example, to create 3,000 new “tech spaces” in Alberta post- secondary institutions over the next five years. The part of the press release that talks about this expansion identifies a specific problem: the Alberta high- tech sector is facing a likely medium-term shortage in the quantity of “computer and information systems professionals.” The idea is for us to train more such professionals, making sure some are ready to plunge into emerging fields of white- hot activity such as artificial intelligence and (ugh) “big data.”
Yes, points deducted for the horrible buzzword, but ... if you are running an education system, you have no choice but to anticipate labour-market trends. A government of any stripe might implement this part of the bill, and would try to look up-to-date and tech-savvy in doing it, even if that government were actually full of farmers who don’t fully trust any postwar tractor. ( We’ve had governments like that, believe me.)
But then there’s this new Interactive Digital Media ( IDM) Tax Credit. This, I am afraid, looks like canonical NDP nonsense. “IDM” basically means video games, along with other forms of computer storytelling, education and entertainment. In Alberta, the government tells us, “IDM has grown from just a few studios in the 1990s to 55 studios with 540 full- time workers today, contributing up to $ 80 million towards Alberta’s annual GDP. We want to see this trend continue.”
Uh, who says? IDM has been a growing sector in Alberta partly because governments have already been chucking modest tax breaks at it. We’ve been so successful at fertilizing this busi- ness with subsidies ... that it needs more of them?
The new subsidy is not at all modest. It will refund fully 25 per cent of the salaries of IDM employees, thus making them a lot cheaper to hire. The punchline here is “... cheaper for video game studios to hire, as they compete for labour with other Alberta industries.” Weren’t we just reading about a devastating future tech labour shortage in Alberta? If that threat is real, why are we giving techies a gigantic incentive to go work on a firstperson shooter instead of at a hospital or a telco?
Make no mistake: these are mostly video game jobs. Bill 2 defines “interactive digital media” as a combination of “application files and data files.” This means the tax credit will not be available to anyone who produces content for someone else’s platform, or for a public one. It is not a tax credit for making YouTube videos or putting a local newspaper on the Web. ( It could be a tax credit for interactive pornography, as I read the statute, but only if the porno comes in the form of a stand- alone application.)
As a nice little NDP- nonsense bonus, the tax credit will be raised to 30 per cent for employees from “underrepresented groups” not yet defined. Since the whole idea of the tax credit is that it will be passed through to the employee — and definitely not siphoned by buccaneering scumbag executives, as film tax credits sometimes are! — this almost seems to raise the spectre of different implicit tax rates for different racial groups, or gender categories.
Maybe you’re comfortable with that. Even if you are, is it obvious that a tax credit for persons already eligible for work in tech is the most efficient way, dollar- for- dollar, to assist groups historically excluded from the tech sector? If it is, where is the evidence? Not that the lack of an economic rationale will stop the NDP when it has a real thirst for nonsense, mind you. In fact, I have the discouraging f eeling that this huge, splashy tax credit has something to do with some politician’s halfunderstood angry late-night conversation about “Gamergate.”
WHY ARE WE GIVING TECHIES AN INCENTIVE TO GO WORK ON A FIRST-PERSON SHOOTER?