Alberta’s debt

Dear Editor:

After Alberta eliminated every nickel of its provincial debt more than a dozen years ago, our province maintained an economic advantage over every other province. Individuals and businesses in Alberta didn’t have to pay taxes that were then sent to Wall Street investors and Bay Street bankers to pay debtinterest.

A few years ago, when the current Notley administration was elected on a promise to balance the provincial budget by 2019, the previous government of Jim Prentice had left a deficit, albeit, one that would have been easily manageable if the new government had not immediately boosted spending.

Since the NDP took office three years ago, our provincial debt has rapidly and dramatically increased. In Premier Notley’s first full fiscal year as premier, she borrowed the equivalent of $10,000 for every family of four in Alberta. And since then she has kept right on borrowing. Her 2015 election promise was a balanced budget by 2019. Instead, she delivered a one-year deficit for 2019 exceeding $10 billion. That’s a million dollars, ten thousand times over. Its what she borrowed.

Today, there are credible forecasts that project Alberta provincial government debt to be standing at $96 billion by 2023. For taxpayers, it’s like watching a runaway train.

According to the Dominion Bond Rating Service, which is one of the biggest credit bureaus around, and an agency that monitors government spending in order to establish or adjust their credit ratings, Alberta’s NDP government doesn’t have any kind of a deliberate or meaningful plan to tackle its debt and deficits. Instead, Premier Notley and Finance Minister Ceci want to rely upon future expectations that are entirely rosy. Essentially, they say that they need not act more deliberately on the debt because oil prices will shoot up someday and pipelines will get built.

That’s right. The NDP’s fiscal plan for Alberta is wishful thinking. And it’s a plan that has almost all of the controlling factors outside of the government’s control. Not exactly what anyone would call precision management, or even responsible management.

Any man or woman who runs all their credit cards to the limit, and then assumes that rather than adjusting their sending they’ll get out of their financial mess by winning the lottery, or walking into an inheritance from a rich unknown relative, is not really the kind of person to whom taxpayers should feel good about entrusting their hard-earned money.

And what makes this situation even worse, is that our provincial government also has an almost unlimited capacity to borrow, meaning it can easily saddle taxpayers with still tens of billions of dollars more in debt and financial obligations. These are financial obligations that we will all still be paying for, with interest, long after Premier Notley and her excessive spending entourage have left the building.

Stuart Taylor, Hinton