Government must keep pledge to not raise taxes, and balance the budget . . . on time

Part of the job of being an MLA or MP is speaking to high school students on a semi-regular basis. I’m often asked to explain not just what I believe in, but why. It’s a question a lot of politicians don’t often stop to ask themselves.

So, when a student asks, “What does it mean to be conservative and why are you one?” it shakes you out of your comfort zone as a politician.

Fundamentally, the conservative wishes to conserve. It might seem obvious, but often the meaning of that doesn’t get enough consideration. Being a conservative is about retaining the things that work in our society, while cautiously embracing the new. We look to the past for advice on how to guide our future, and are leery of utopian ideological promises.

When Albertans or the media ask me about the latest never-ending push for a PST or breaking our pledge to balance the budget, I go back to those core values. And one of those things I wish to conserve is the time-tested principle of a more prosperous society through allowing people to keep as much of their own money as possible.

It stems from the understanding that money is not just a number. There is a human component behind that hardearned tax dollar taken by the state. Our parents and grandparents taught us to respect the value of a dollar because it is backed by hard work, time, and perhaps even risk. The dollar is not an abstract object. It is the embodiment of the proportion of our life that we have given up to earn it. When the government takes a dollar from a man or woman, they are taking a proportion of their life.

When the average Canadian pays roughly 40 per cent of their incomes to the three orders of government, the state is leaving only 60 per cent of a person’s life in their own, individual hands.

When U.S. President Calvin Coolidge delivered his 1925 inaugural address he said, “I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant.”

For much the same reason, Alberta’s budget must be balanced within our four-year mandate, while resisting the temptation of a PST.

Right now, some are saying the budget will have to wait much longer to reach balance. After more than a decade of deficits under both PC and NDP governments, we cannot accept this. When I ran as a UCP candidate for MLA in the last election, I supported our promise to get it done before 2021.

Unlike former PC and NDP governments, we must not break this key commitment to Albertans. If the circumstances of keeping our promises have become more difficult, than we must be all the more aggressive in keeping them.

Too often, politicians (and even some voters) forget that the deficits of today are the taxes of tomorrow. Deficits are not free. There is a cost to them, now and in the future. If we do not keep our pledge to balance the budget on time, then our deficits of today become the taxes of tomorrow.

On cue, the usual crowd are demanding that Alberta’s government impose a PST on its taxpayers. While this is at least a more honest option than continued never-ending deficits, it is still wrong.

A sales tax would be an abdication of the government’s responsibility to control spending and an admission that a broken fiscal situation caused by out-of-control spending cannot be fixed internally. A government that is too big, too cumbersome, too expensive, and too wasteful, must demonstrate reform before reaching into Albertans’ wallets yet another time.

Albertans have already faced huge tax increases. The NDP massively hiked incomes taxes upon coming to office in 2015, and while those increases should be rolled back, there is little sign of that happening anytime soon. The NDP carbon tax of 2016 was a massive new confiscation of Albertan’s wealth. Our UCP government has repealed large portions of that carbon tax, but it has still been left in place on the oil and gas industry.

Coupled together with other “sin taxes”, Albertans have more than done their part in supplying the government with evermore cash. It’s time that we – the government – did ours.

Drew Barnes is the UCP MLA for Cypress- Medicine Hat.