Rachel rides the roller-coaster

have been much smaller.

Now, as Alberta recovers from the recession, Rachel Notley is premier and calls the shots about how to deal with the deficit. And in her third budget, she has offered a simple plan: buy another ticket on the revenue rollercoaster she once decried and hope for royalty revenue growth to take care of the problem.

The numbers tell the fiscal plan ends and what’s left is a vague “path to balance” showing that at that point the deficit starts to shrink much more quickly before disappearing completely in 2023–24.

So how exactly does the government think it will be able to make so much progress on the deficit later given it is making so little progress today? The answer, unfortunately, is that the government royalties.

Let’s look at it another way. The budget forecasts natural resource revenues in 2023–24 will represent 16 per cent of all provincial revenues. This compares to 18 per cent in 2014–15, the year before the effects of falling oil prices were fully felt. So the government’s plan to balance the budget explicitly requires riding the once-derided revenue roller-coaster back to nearly the same height as before the recent fall.

This means if resource revenues don’t increase quickly, big deficits will persist. The reason for this is that after three years in power the Notley government has shown no appetite to address the root cause of Alberta’s troubles: government spending.

Despite dire fiscal circumstances, total spending has grown under the Notley government by 14.5 per cent between 2015–16 and 2018–19. The government projects slower spending growth going forward, but this budget makes no serious effort to reform spending or rollback recent increases. Instead, the plan is to merely slow down the rate of growth and, again, hope for resource royalties to do the heavy lifting.

Notley has failed to put the province on any safer fiscal trajectory than the old Alberta “resource rollercoaster” she once rightly criticized. This latest budget confirms the Notley government’s deficit-reduction strategy is simple: Buy another ticket and hang on for the ride. capacity by 43 per cent.

The public’s boredom with global warming hype is also seen in media coverage. “According to a yearlong study, climate change was largely ignored by the corporate broadcast evening news and Sunday shows on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox Broadcasting Co.,” states Media Matters, the George Soros-funded watchdog organization. “The study also found that the four corporate broadcast networks combined aired only four segments that discussed climate change in the context of natural disasters in the U.S. in 2017, despite it being a record year for weather and climate disasters.”

The press once cared about climate change; politicians did, too, whenever it appeared to further their political careers. But the public may never have truly cared, if election results, rather than public opinion polls, are the measure. Canada was a pioneer in proving how little the public cared when, in 2008, Liberal leader Stéphane Dion vowed to introduce a carbon tax if elected prime minister, earning the Liberals’ worst defeat since Confederation. Australia’s Labour Party in 2013 also suffered a crushing defeat when it explicitly made carbon taxes a major campaign issue. Since then, political parties — the Trudeau Liberals included — have prudently downplayed climate-policy costs during their campaigns. There won’t be any downplaying in Trudeau’s next election, though, in 2019, when his carbon taxes will be front and centre.

Will he be able to prevail, where all others have failed? Good luck with that!