Elect a Rae, get a Harris?

Lesson from a life spent occasionally glancing at Alberta politics: when Ron Kneebone speaks up, pay attention. Last week the University of Calgary economist, who is a longtime authority on Alberta’s public finances, raised a modest alarm about rising income support caseloads. Or, to use the old-fashioned lingo, welfare recipients. Their number is growing fast in Alberta.

This is not a surprise. The labour market here is still in critical condition, even though benchmark oil prices have inched upward and the discounts on Alberta oil varieties are at historic lows. The latest official unemployment rate is 8.4 per cent, down from a peak of 9.0 per cent in November. To a middle-aged Albertan, these numbers are so incomprehensible they might as well be “846 per cent” or “upsilon”.

Rachel Notley was sworn in as Alberta’s premier in May of 2015, with West Texas Intermediate at around US$58 per barrel, roughly where it is now. The sickening dip to $30 was yet to come, in early 2016. Unemployment in Alberta stood at a distasteful 5.8 per cent, but the overall welfare caseload, excluding adults in Alberta’s AISH program for the handicapped, was at a level that had long been typical: 35,603 households.

Everybody has been very careful to say since Notley’s election that she is not responsible for the world oil price. And it is so; but this creates an epistemological problem. If the NDP government is not to be judged on the usual objective economic indicators, then how is it to be judged? How are Albertans to evaluate the choice they made to take a chance on prairie socialism?

But Kneebone is not sure they are entitled to quite this much slack. Unemployment shot to 8 per cent in February of 2016, and Alberta’s welfare caseload reached a new post-Ralph Klein high of around 43,000. The latest caseload figures, from January, have more than 54,000 households in Alberta receiving social assistance. The growth in welfare is out of line with historic trends, even correcting for the high unemployment.

Will it go on climbing? As our New Democrats appeal to the excuse of a recession, one remembers that Bob Rae’s Ontario NDP government (1990-95) offered the same explanation for its various woes. Indeed, Bob Rae has long since ceased to be a New Democrat, but New Democrats are still making the excuse. What did Rae in, as I understand it from afar, was not so much economic or fiscal crisis as it was the simultaneous nonsense that came along with electing the NDP: impractical campaign promises, social justice crusades, and, above all, more generous welfare, with access guarded less cruelly.

Rae’s government doubled welfare caseloads in Ontario. Everybody assumed the Ontario Liberals would be the beneficiaries. Ontarians picked Mike Harris, who regarded welfare in much the same way Captain Ahab viewed a certain whale.

Alberta had already struck most single adults off of its welfare rolls by that time, not without some friction and fudging. Many of these people were quietly reclassified and found their way onto AISH, Alberta’s program of “Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped.” This sort of thing is inevitable in welfare states. If someone will not work, you cannot let them starve: the system finds a way. But there is a danger — I say this with glum certainty that this centuries-old accepted truth will incite tantrums — in permitting the dole to grow too large. One need only look at the United States’s current addiction to federal and other disability programs. The U.S. reformed welfare as Alberta (and eventually Ontario) did, but disability schemes involving armies of doctors, lawyers and administrative judges became an equally huge species of para-welfare.

The result is a national orgy of prescription opioids and suicide, as policy inertia encourages millions to make a bad back or a trick knee the centre of an unproductive, isolated life. The bottle of OxyContin absolves and soothes; Donald Trump wins a presidential election.

I want no part of anything like this for Alberta. During my lifetime the province has been an economic colony, obsessed with competitiveness and quite short on the state’s version of “compassion.” We all knew we would get NDP economic policy when we voted NDP. They have un-flattened taxes, revived groovy ’70s industrial planning, taxed carbon, regulated farms, run planetsized deficits, and sheltered the bureaucracy while businesses choked and privatesector workers struggled.

Only the very inattentive could have been unprepared for most of this, as a price to be paid for hosing out the Conservative stable, or even as a desirable correction. Welfare numbers signify a more fundamental, threatening change. It is one that the New Democrats may find more dangerous to its electoral future than all the rest put together, if Ontario history is any guide.

The growth in welfare rolls that can take place in a year may take 10 to reverse. And, of course, such growth suggests that other NDP nostrums, like hiking the minimum wage, aren’t working out. Why would anyone at all require state income support in labour’s paradise? Do NDPers need to look far to find a stalking, wrathful, hyperconservative Mike Harris figure in Alberta?