Here’s how we get back on track

Some common sense goes a long way, writes Brian Jean

Alberta is in its worst recession since the National Energy Program.

That’s what the latest fiscal update from the NDP government confirmed this week. As in the early 1980s, Alberta has a Trudeau-led federal government chipping away at its long-term economic interests.

The difference in 2016 is that Alberta now has an NDP-led provincial government that’s making the collapse in global oil prices worse by piling on with massive tax increases and crushing new regulations.

The facts speak for themselves. Over 100,000 Albertans have lost work in just one year — and that doesn’t include the tens of thousands of Albertans who either don’t qualify for employment insurance or have seen their hours dramatically reduced. In Calgary, 4,000 businesses’ doors have permanently closed.

No one is blaming the NDP or Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for low oil prices, but everything they’ve done since taking power is just making things worse.

The NDP raised the carbon tax on heavy emitters and is now engaged in a very public, messy and expensive legal battle with local power producers. They’ve raised personal and business taxes, beer taxes, train taxes and user fees.

When they ran out of taxes to raise, they topped it off with a new $3-billion carbon tax that will hurt charities, further damage small business confidence and cost the average family at least $1,000 per year.

With job losses and declining confidence in Alberta as a safe place to invest, tax revenues are now plummeting — particularly business taxes. Alberta is now borrowing $12 billion just this year — that’s one quarter of our total annual budget, or nearly double the total amount the government spends on our entire education system.

Those are all big numbers, but here’s the bottom line for Alberta’s families: Over $1 billion of the Alberta budget now goes to paying off interest payments instead of going to health care, education or paying down the debt. That means massive tax increases will be just around the corner from this government, compounded with even further credit downgrades.

We didn’t sacrifice so much in the 1990s to now watch the future prosperity of our province slowly slip away because of a decade of mismanagement from successive governments.

Wildrose consistently warned both the previous and current NDP government that we, as a province, cannot expect to tax and spend our way back to prosperity.

To get Alberta back on track, it will require innovation, grit and remembering that our job as leaders is to always be on the side of everyday Albertans.

After travelling across the province, here’s some free advice I’ve been told to pass along to the NDP.

First, scrap the carbon tax. Not only is it terrible timing for families and businesses, but Alberta is rapidly becoming one of the least competitive petroleum-producing jurisdictions in North America. This carbon tax won’t help.

Second, stop waging your war on businesses and the families that rely on them. Instead of suing power companies like Calgary-owned Enmax after bulldozing through huge tax increases, consider working with them as a partner.

While we’re at it, a 50 per cent increase to the minimum wage will force employers to close their doors and put thousands more out of work. Let’s either slow this move down or stop altogether until our economy can afford it.

Finally, feel free to borrow Wildrose recommendations to get our budget back on the path to balanced budgets.

What Albertans want to see is a prudent approach and an attempt to find just a few pennies of savings for every dollar spent.

Implementing a hiring freeze for all nonessential hires, thinning the ranks of government through attrition, doing a review of all program spending and negotiating a wage freeze across the public sector would be a good place to start.

Adopting just a few of these steps would send Albertans the message that the NDP is ready to set their ideology aside and start using some common sense.

When they ran out of taxes to raise, they topped it off with a new $3-billion carbon tax.