Lots of Hats but no Cattle: the UCP unveils its Transformative Plan!

Yesterday, the United Conservative Party, led today by Jason Kenney and Finance Minister Travis Toews, provided the province with an economic update and unveiled their plan for relaunching the Alberta economy. What I saw was reminiscent of Jim Prentice’s update, delivered following a crash in the price of oil and subsequent recession in late 2014. Once more we had “Alberta Shock and Awe,” delivered by a Conservative premier to his heretofore fans and supporters. They claimed 330,000 unemployed in a province of just over four million people. The Finance Minister, in a 180 degree turn from the party line, spoke of “good debt” vs. “bad debt.” To complete the announcement, the Premier declared $10B in infrastructure spending to kick start the province’s recovery, among other things.

                The most significant declaration though was that the provincial Corporate Income Tax rate was being lowered immediately from 11% to 8%. This, in conjunction with the infrastructure spending, was claimed to cause the creation or support of a combined 100,000+ jobs. It’s easy to say why it’s significant – it isn’t just an immediate, apparently giant move, but it’s actionable. Of all the things discussed yesterday, this one can and is happening.

                I had the distinct pleasure of not watching the press conference in toto. However, I did skim through the short “plan,” published on alberta.ca. The premier promises that the ideas don’t stem from ideology, a popular refrain of his, but are rooted in good common sense. I suppose that’s half true, in that looking at the details, this transformational plan is nothing new. Common sense at work, I guess. Expectedly, much of the plan isn’t anything at all, being vague, or simply plans to make plans. This deserves some elaboration, but I’d like to focus on the main themes.

The Unemployment Perspective

                330,000 unemployed is a massive number. It warrants an asterisk, though. It needs to be kept in mind that in the first year of the UCP, Alberta lost 50,000 jobs – all while cutting corporate income taxes. Furthermore, during the crisis, the UCP took the unprecedented and unrivalled step of “letting go” of tens of thousands of education assistants and supports – all just to “save” a figure slightly north of $100,000,000 (a cost that was simply uploaded to the Federal government’s CERB, more or less). Of course, to these numbers we can add the dozens of doctors shutting down their practices and moving away, resulting in further losses throughout rural Alberta.

                Next, who is getting work? Notwithstanding the hope that the corporate tax cut will attract a variety of white collar workers back to Calgary (“they’d be negligent not to” – Kenney), this plan at best supports jobs in the construction sector, which, while hard hit by the completion of the build out of the Oil Sands several years ago, was not overly affected by COVID-19. In fact, hiring signs have been up along the Stoney Trail expansions as one example. These are jobs that haven’t been filled, regardless of unemployment, for ages.  Moreover, this money, invested wholly in infrastructure construction and maintenance overwhelmingly helps men, when we know that women have been the sex hardest hit by the pandemic. This isn’t to say that infrastructure spending is unimportant – it’s very important – but this move clearly ignores the biggest group of victims from the pandemic. It certainly raises eyebrows what influence the 15 women UCP MLAs have had on their overwhelmingly male caucus.

The Capital Spending that Wasn’t

                The UCP declared they were spending $10B on infrastructure, a move, which in their words, was the biggest investment in Alberta history. This is false on a variety of levels – private investment in the Oil Sands was far greater, often for individual projects. Government infrastructure investments under Manning or Lougheed, adjusting for inflation, were no doubt greater. Lastly, and more embarrassingly, it falls billions of dollars short of what the Trudeau Ministry in Ottawa has provided just for the Transmountain Pipeline, no less their direct aid to Alberta municipalities.

                Infrastructure is an incredibly important asset to have in any society. Sanitation systems reduce the incidence of death and disease. Power systems make everything move faster, more reliably and safely. Transportation systems enable the more efficient movement of people and cargo. All of these make society richer while lowering the costs of living and business. There are few places in the world where this investment is as essential as Canada, a nation with great expanse and few people; great resources but great barriers to extraction, such as the climate and geology. Within Canada, there are few places as poorly situated as Alberta, which is effectively an island of rich people separated from civilization by 1000 km of mountains, lakes, forests, and bad weather. Look in any direction: the nearest major population centres to Calgary are over a 1000 km away – either west, south, or east. Edmonton is even more isolated. We need connections.

Unfortunately, the Alberta government of the 1990s took the fantastically neo-liberal position that the Private Sector could and would provide the province with the infrastructure it needed. This failure in historical thinking resulted in the notorious infrastructure deficit that afflicts the province to this day as the market failed to deliver them. But I digress; the Klein government, then his successors, may have paid off the provincial debt (how consequential was that), but at the cost of putting much of the province’s infrastructure decades in arrears – all the while the population grew from 2,500,000 in 1991 to an estimated 4,500,000 today, and its needs grew, too.

Now, Jason Kenney, leader of a province that could soon pass British Columbia to become the 3^rd most populous (it already has in terms of GDP), has boldly declared his government will spend $10B on infrastructure. We must always ask, regardless: on what are you spending this money? When are these amounts being spent? Is this an action, a promise, or an intention? The UCP have promised schools, hospitals, roads, long term care facilities. This is good. Now, when? Who can say?

The Relaunch Plan fails regarding these questions quickly and comprehensively. Don’t mind the details – since there aren’t any outside of Alberta’s new public investment hotspot: Peace River. Focus on the numbers. Is this really a new investment of $10B? Apparently not. First, the government already earmarked $7B for infrastructure spending in its catastrophically short-sighted first budget in March (the “oil at $58/barrel” budget), which is consistent with previous NDP budgets. This number is included in the $10B, however, so the response to COVID-19 is reduced to $3B – less than 1% of Alberta’s GDP. That’s not all: also included in that figure is the $1.5B given away to support the passage of the Keystone XL pipeline – money that is likely going to be written off when the Democrats win in the USA in November and finally put that white whale to rest.

If you’ve been following, that leaves the government proudly leading our revival with $1.5B in new infrastructure spending. For perspective, that’s as much as the New Cancer Centre at the Foothills Hospital costs. This amount could build two new “Grande Prairie” hospitals. It could build 2/3 of the Stoney Trail ring road. In fairness, this amount could build, potentially, 50 new high schools modelled after All Saints in Calgary. Or, more fantastically, a single new arena for the Flames in the West Village. As you can understand, this amount of cash, likely representing less than 0.5% of the Alberta economy, in the face of the greatest economic challenge since the 1930s simply isn’t significant or remotely world changing.

Even this paltry amount isn’t even new either. The Alberta government, on April 9^th, announced a $2B investment in infrastructure in response to COVID-19. Is this a separate amount? If it is, why not roll it into the announcement of yesterday? $12B is a larger figure than $10B, and it almost equals what the Federal Liberals have committed to Transmountain. Given that the UCP already included two previous announcements in yesterday’s, why not a third? Oversight? Possibly, but more likely that it is included – the half billion-dollar discrepancy could very well stem from elimination of duplication or redundancies.

As a last – yes – last component of this issue: the Calgary Green Line. The provincial government promised $1.5B in funding for the Green Line, yet issued a letter to the city immediately after the municipal government voted to go forward with it. Basically, the letter threatens to remove that funding. A project whose can has been kicked as long as I’ve lived just might have got its final, Jon Ryan-punt into the red zone. Ottawa save us.

So, is $10B a lot? Yes. Is it needed? Yes. Is it a lot? Maybe. Yet, there remain many questions concerning this plan: when will that money be spent? On what? Is it even $10B? What of the Green Line? Is this $10B the end?

So, we have a big announcement: the biggest infrastructure investment in Alberta history, and none of it is new or anywhere as significant as alleged. It may be more aptly declared the biggest non-event in Alberta history since Aberhart’s recall election. So why include it at all? First, probably because without it, the plan doesn’t look like a plan, but a number on a napkin. Second, because that number on a napkin: corporate tax cuts, is a tired, Hail Mary pass to Toronto, Canada’s business capital.

The Corporate Income Tax Cut

                This is the centre-piece of the whole plan, and it echoes throughout the pages of the short document. As of Canada Day, Alberta’s CIT will be immediately reduced to 8% - 2/3 of the CIT in British Columbia. We aren’t even out of the pandemic yet, but the government’s only real decision in their whole plan was to speed up the pace regarding their planned cuts to big business taxes. It seems a little crazy that with insurance rates increasing, liability growing, uncertainty reigning, a pandemic raging, that any private enterprise would decide to gamble on Alberta, but there goes the UCP. As economist Dr. Andrew Leach has pointed out, this cut isn’t even news to business, who would have been making plans about the 8% CIT since the last election – so their moves or non-moves would already be planned or decided. Really, this smacks of a last desperate attempt by neoliberals to right the sinking ship of their ideology. It has to work, this time, it has to!

                Because, if we remember – it didn’t work from 2019 to 2020. The UCP were in, the NDP were out, the CIT was cut, and yet companies still moved away. 50,000 people were laid off in just that year (granted, many were public service employees), but making Alberta cheaper for the most successful didn’t make anyone want to come here. At the sacrifice of hundreds of millions of dollars every year in revenue – compounding year after year – the UCP have doubled down on this strategy that has failed since its introduction to the world almost half a century ago. Toronto Banks and Vancouver video games companies aren’t going to rush over to fill our empty office space. They probably don’t want to fill office space anywhere, honestly.

Prospects

                In a world economy shackled by fear of the Coronavirus, it’s highly unlikely that the UCP will achieve success in its goals of attracting major businesses to Alberta. This was a failure, after all, before the virus, and was a failure for the previous NDP too. The risks from moving a business are simply too complicated for the foreseeable future, on top of being difficult in the best of cases. At worst, it is simply old-fashioned thinking.

Further, the virus has depressed the value of Alberta’s premier natural resources – oil and gas – in a period where many fossil fuel assets are at risk of becoming stranded. The current temporary collapse in demand for fossil fuels is a taste of what the near-future holds as the world weans itself off traditional oil and gas energy systems for renewable energy. Alberta, which has some of the highest marginal costs for oil extraction in the world, is in no condition to compete in a shrinking market. Ultimately, this means the province loses billions in lost royalties and bad investments, and not just this year, (AIMCO), but in perpetuity. However, in a more immediate sense it is the royalties and their impact on the deficit that will have the greatest effect.

This deficit risk is further compounded by the sacrifice of revenue to cut the CIT permanently. This feeds into a structural Alberta deficit situation that no amount of wage-rollbacks or spending cuts can correct, as much as it may pain Conservatives or the general public to admit. However, we can all look at the Relaunch plan, past UCP habits (mid-year budget changes, by which I mean cuts) and guess that when public service contracts expire at the end of August, the UCP will be seeking grotesque quantities of wage and spending cuts both.

In summary, we can anticipate a milquetoast, if not negative reaction from the private sector (Fitch has already downgraded the province’s credit rating, releasing a re-assessment of the province’s finances less than 24 hours after Kenney spoke). The infrastructure spending, though sounding big, is too small and too shallow to impress investors, no less aid even a small fraction of Alberta’s unemployed under the plan’s own wildest dreams. Lastly, a spiralling deficit situation only ensures that a belligerently and dogmatically anti-labour, anti-public service UCP government attacks Alberta’s already lean public sector in the near future, ensuring the last years of the 30^th Alberta Legislature is punctuated by lots of business-attracting public labour conflict. None of this is transformative in a positive sense.

The premier’s plan is just a big hat and a big blue truck. The cattle have left for BC.

Thoughts on the US Election

This is going to be an unorganized rip through my thoughts on the US election.

Since the winner was a narcissist, I will begin with some ego-aggrandizement of my own. I predicted (not here, but on facebook) that Donald Trump would win the election, while losing the popular vote by over a million. The first thought is blatantly true (I had no idea he would win so much, though), while it appears the second thought may come true soon. Also, and this I felt essential, voter turnout was much, much lower than in 2012. Isn't it amusing to know Mitt Romney got more votes than Clinton?

Nonetheless, my thoughts are certainly with the protesters. It's hard to defend a man being elected in such a dubious way, and clearly the electoral college needs to be abolished. Get working on a constitutional amendment, now.

My other thought concerns the importance of messaging during an election. Here I will draw comparisons to the last two elections I voted in: Canada's last October, and Alberta's in April, 2015. I really think Hillary Clinton suffered for lack of a message; when during her concession speech, she said, "this was never about me," I had to laugh. Your election slogan was "I'm with her!" and beyond that, she had no ideas about the shape of things to come, just that she had more experience than Trump (which isn't hard. Arguably, so do I - at least I was in an actual military).

Experience can be good or bad. In Clinton's case, unfortunately, her experience resonated with Americans as being of the negative sort. It is ok to be sceptical of "experience" being a primary factor in hiring a politician anyway. While Americans wondered just who she owed debts to, I think historically to the disastrous governments of Lloyd George after WW1 and Winston Churchill in the 1950s. Experience isn't everything. Canada has enjoyed a relatively successful history of experienced leadership. If a Prime Minister served longer than two terms in office, they seem to do a good enough job to earn a place on our money.

Two-terms (8-9 years) seems to be a big barrier, especially to Conservatives, to break. Borden needed to leave office, having nearly destroyed the country (and conveniently fallen in with the British establishment). Mulroney resigned as the most unpopular Prime Minister ever, and last year, Stephen Harper went down to colossal defeat. With his cabinet members abandoning ship, Harper still charged into the election believing his experience alone would vanquish his rivals.

When the Liberals swept Atlantic Canada, I was surprised only that the NDP didn't win a seat. Having family from there, and keeping track of their affairs, it did not shock me that they universally rejected a party that patronised and insulted them. My neighbours here in Alberta, on the other hand, wondered just how dumb they could be. I hear echoes of this discourse in the aftermath of the American election.

Harper's record, outside of Alberta and Saskatchewan was pretty shit, and he should have known it. Those two provinces, insulated by oil economies, survived Harper's time as PM as the only two which enjoyed any real growth. His stewardship of the rest of the country was undeniably worse. British Columbia saw it's average annual income drop year after year. Economic decline in the rest of Canada was concealed by blowing up the housing market to titanic proportions. Now the country is worse off than the USA in 2007-2008, and the new Prime Minister is doing a great deal to try and diffuse it. So, campaigning on experience when most of the country hates you we must admit is a poor formula. That the Clinton and Harper campaigns couldn't believe the facts must point to a great amount of conceit in both groups.

As a last word on messaging, I would like to compare the "surprise" NDP government of Alberta to that of the perennial heirs-apparent, the Wild Rose Party. Notley's victory in April 2015 is, depending on your point of view, intensely correlated to the fact that she had a positive message that resonated with the province. The late Mr. Prentice was eternally trying to remove his foot from his mouth, and most importantly, the Wild Rose Party, didn't have a message for Albertans. Who can forget the debate, when Brian Jean successfully imitated a medieval monk with his mantra of "no new taxes." The NDP won because in April 2015, they appeared to be the only option.

So Donald Trump won, too. He acknowledged there was a problem in the way the USA was doing things. The people who had suffered from decades of de-industrialization and mergers and downsizing who spoke up and handed him power. This possibility was always present; it was the failure of the Democrats, and pollsters, and media, that they ignored the data they did not welcome.

Will they learn from this? Not by the looks of it.

Thanks for reading.

An Argument for a Deficit, Part 2: the Financial Side

I my last episode, I tried to establish an historical rationale for Alberta's current deficit. In sum, I had tried to make the case that our deficit is largely the result of the historical neglect of government investment. I have since realised I needed go deeper into certain areas of Alberta's history to increase the strength of my argument, and this post is such an attempt. I feel that the finances of the Alberta government demand more scrutiny; so too does an examination of the Alberta government from the day it paid off the debt to its defeat in May 2015. We'll leave the latter for later, and dive into Alberta's crappy fiscal situation - one the NDP inherited, rather than created.

Alberta's Deficit History

It may be popularly believed that deficits started with the NDP, but a quick examination of budget tables (like this one: http://www.rbc.com/economics/economic-reports/pdf/provincial-forecasts/prov_fiscal.pdf) reveal the provincial government had only run a single budget surplus since 2008. That, of course, was the year of the likely misnamed "Great Recession." Is the Great Recession wholly to blame for Alberta's running deficits from 2008 to the present?

Alberta Government Priorities

During the 1990s, Alberta had cut the budgets of its services both broadly and deeply in the name of fighting a "debt crisis." The revival in the price of both Oil and Natural Gas in the mid-1990s allowed the government of Alberta to defeat this boogeyman in no time once-soever - this partially because the debt was never that big to begin with.

Having eliminated the provincial debt, the government was faced with two courses of action. It could either play catch up in its massive infrastructure deficit, which I discussed earlier, or it could use its fiscal wiggle room to cut taxes. Of course there were other possibilities, like investing surpluses into the Heritage Fund - but I doubt this was ever a serious priority. Using debt to finance the "catch up" was totally out of the question, so budget surpluses would have to provide the funding for Alberta's myriad issues, something even the great surplus of 2007 was likely inadequate.

It should be remembered the make-up of the Alberta government in the later Klein years, and before the rise of the Wildrose Party. The PCs were the dominant political party in Alberta, but they dominated the over-represented countryside, while the cities were more of a competition with the Liberals and NDP (and later, Alberta Party). So while the PC Association was as big a tent as one could imagine, the center of gravity for the government actually lay in its rural representatives - who would one day be replaced by Wildrose MLAs.

It is probably not surprising then that the Alberta government, having defeated the debt, listed through a series of tax cuts, as this was most agreeable to the future Wildrose heartland. Alberta was a cheap place to have a business, and be rich. Money was indeed invested in infrastructure - but a drive across the province will reveal where most of the money went: rural ridings, with hospitals, airports, paved roads and new schools, while cities languished. The tax cuts did come at a steep price: billions of dollars in stable revenue each year, lost; and Alberta made itself more vulnerable to a danger looming on the horizon.

The Transition to Oil Sands Oil

Revenue from oil royalties, land sales and leases began to make up more and more of Alberta's government revenue. The rise in oil prices to record highs in 2008 masked a great transition underway in the province. Natural gas revenue had already disappeared with the cratering of its international price - and now oil was going the same way. Obviously, not because oil was worthless, but because of the royalty rules the government had established in the past.

To encourage development in the Oil Sands, the government had granted very generous concessions to oil companies investing in the province. These concessions allowed companies to recoup 100% of their investments before the Alberta government would begin to receive a share of the investment, a share that was considerably lower than the royalty levied on "conventional" oil.

Around 2007, the new Premier, Stelmach, was faced with a dilemma. In our rush to exploit our resources as rapidly as possible, we had exhausted the majority of our conventional oil reserves. As most of Alberta's oil production now came from the unconventional oil sands, the province was poised to lose billions of dollars in revenue as oil royalties disappeared in the short term. Accordingly, he began a royalty review. The result was no increase in oil royalties, but a whole lot of corporate support going behind the Wildrose Party.

So Alberta began a series of deficits. These were masked by the global economic crisis - but I encourage you to examine the graph I linked to above. You will see other oil exported provinces were running surpluses while Alberta was mired in deficits. Something uniquely Albertan was occurring.

The Latest Collapse

When Jim Prentice became the Premier of Alberta, he too was faced with a dilemma. The price of oil was imploding, thanks to price manipulation out of the Middle East and the American Shale boom. The Shale boom had done Alberta a massive disservice by eliminating our only real customer: the United States. Alberta had all this oil, and nowhere to sell it.

Investment was already plummeting and people were being laid off when he admitted that his government was going to have to raise taxes, cut services, and still run a deficit over $5 billion. He acknowledged the province was on a "resource roller coaster" (viewable here http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/fig1-1.png) and it needed to get off. Then he lost the election and disappeared.

A Downturn Like No Other, or where we are today

The NDP inherited a massive mess when it took office. The tax increases they effected did little to fight the size of the deficit, as the hole left by cratering royalties and leases destroyed any chance they had of balancing the budget. Further, they realised they did have to spend money in order to prevent the damage from spreading from the oil sands and overwhelming the rest of the provincial economy. Cutting provincial employees and services would not only stress communities further, but would also encourage the spread of the oil collapse throughout the province.

The largest employer in Alberta was not the natural resources industries, but construction. The decline in oil sands in activity had already put tens of thousands of workers out of work, but as many were "fly-out" workers from elsewhere, their absence was mostly felt in Alberta's busting hotel industry. There was a significant danger to the province if more of these people lost their jobs. Their unemployment would lead to a bigger housing bust, bigger out migration, increased government costs, and likely more crime (as was experienced in Edmonton). The bad wave coming from the oil sands would only get bigger as it picked up construction workers and laid them off.

It wasn't that long ago that the heads of Alberta's construction industry stated they would be out of work to do by this year. Fortuitously, there is a government willing to spend to keep these people working. As I've argued elsewhere, the government is leading a charge on infrastructure that should have been done decades ago. So, while the recession is the worst since the 1980s - the province is experiencing, in contrast, a lower unemployment rate and a lower emigration rate. As an added bonus, that debt the government is raising is cheaper than the debt it was being burdened with in the 1980s by several orders of magnitude.

There was simply no way of avoiding a budget deficit. Past inaction had cursed the Alberta government, regardless of who is premier, with one. Albertans elected the party that promised to do the most to get Alberta off the "resource roller coaster," and the party that promised to rebuild the province. They are trying to that - we shouldn't be surprised it comes with a price.

Thanks for reading.

An Historical Argument for a Deficit

When I was a younger man, I did the first part of my teacher training at a High School in North Calgary. During our orientation we were told not to go into a certain room while a certain class was in session. To do so would be to break the fire code: the room was already so crowded students were sharing desks, and just one of us would push things over the edge. During my brief stay, I also learned that almost none of the students - this in a residential neighbourhood - could not walk there; the school's placings where reserved for the students who lived further to the north. Local students would also have to be bussed south, to the schools closer to downtown, as nothing existed to serve the city past this place. I commented that it seemed like Calgary was built like a refugee camp - all houses, with services to follow. The professor who I addressed could only mumble in agreement.

That was only a few years ago. Alison Redford was premier; then Dave Hancock, and then Jim Prentice. During the latter's short term as premier designate he had to admit, that due to the low price of oil, the province would have to make cuts and raise taxes - which is interesting, as the province had been in deficit for several years already. He even briefly proposed a sales tax - one of those famous "trial balloons" of which he was so fond. An election was called, and he, and the PCs, lost, and lost badly. They also lost in the most unexpected of ways - to an NDP that promised no cuts to essential services and to raise taxes higher than the PCs were comfortable.

So far, the NDP have done as promised. There have been cuts - especially to the gargantuan piggy trough the PCs had installed across the province. As promised, there were no cuts to essential services, though they didn't greatly increase spending in these areas, either. The tax raises were large by the standards of the Alberta legislature, but it must be acknowledged that taxes on almost everything are lower today than they were under Ralph Klein, sin taxes excepted. The only new tax of any significance was the Carbon Tax - which has yet to go into effect.

But, there is the elephant in the room: there is not just a deficit. It is a relatively big deficit. So in spite of the tax increases, the deficit went up, too. However, this is reflective of two things: one, that Alberta was excruciatingly dependent on oil revenue (not just royalties, but land sales and leases), and secondly, taxes are still too low to provide the acceptable minimum of services to the population.

There is a third major factor in the "massive" deficit the NDP is running at the moment. That factor is history.

After the downturn of the 1980s, Alberta was, as one book had it, "the Second Promised Land." The population of the province almost doubled in the time that I have been alive. Though our high birth rate is part of the story, the majority of the increase was from immigration, from Canada and abroad.

Arguably, having children is less of a fiduciary burden on society than immigration. While a newborn requires hospital services (sometimes a lot of them), and will one day come to engage in our 15+ year education system, a newborn does not require its own home. It does not require new roads. It does not require the infrastructure a mature adult immigrant requires immediately upon arrival in a given place. Further, immigrants come with their own families too - so much of the services a newborn would receive are received by an immigrating family, too. Go anywhere in the East of Canada and you realise the people who came here were the young - in some cases, all the youth and young families of some communities moved here.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. I am a firm believer that we can do as much as we wish to do; only a lack of ambition really holds us back. The Alberta these people came to in the 1990s had no other ambition than to pay off the provinces debt. Nothing else mattered, and herein lay the problem.

The population of Calgary almost doubled in the past 30 years. However, in that time, almost nothing was done to accommodate all these people - except build wasteful suburbs. Calgarians could look back and remember a city with the highest homeless population in the country; a city with no new schools; a city with its own "highway of death" (the 22X if you didn't know); a city with a massive poverty problem (in 2005 about 40% of adult Calgarians lived at, below, or just above the Canadian government's Low Income Cut-Off). But at least here you could find work.

Consider the school question. No high schools were opened in Calgary between 1991 and 2005, when Bishop O'Byrne and Centennial opened. Lord Beaverbrook High School had the highest student population of any in Canada - over 3000 - making it larger than many of Canada's universities at the time. Since those two schools opened, only two more have opened, with another opening this fall. In that time the population of the city grew by a half-million. High Schools are not cheap - they require a lot of land, technical engineering, and investments in technology, not to mention upkeep. So we just didn't bother. When one friend ran in the provincial election in Northwest Calgary, we discovered his constituency - a very new one - had only six schools for a population of 55,000, equal to the population of Medicine Hat. Promises made for schools in the early 1990s were simply never honoured. All over Calgary, and I would imagine, Alberta, there were hundreds of fields in residential neighbourhoods that were meant to house schools. Those schools never came, at least until the NDP were elected. The irony was delicious when one PC MLA was quoted in April 2015 talking about how ridiculous it was that his daughter's kindergarten class had 30 pupils. If only there was something he could have done about it.

Ralph Klein famously had blown up half the hospitals in Calgary during the 1990s. The situation in Edmonton was no better. Again - with a booming population, but also with a population with some abnormally high levels of obesity and drug use, among other ailments. There was a persistent shortage of doctors and nurses, and I'm sure many people remember the difficulty in finding a family doctor ten years ago. Health Care services were increasingly privatised - which served to drive up health care costs, in all areas studied, while the cost of dentistry skyrocketed relative to neighbouring provinces.

Infrastructure was - and remains - far behind the needs of the province. With support from the Federal government, the LRTs in Calgary and Edmonton were expanded. Consider the case of the ring road in Calgary - its development has literally taken half a century. Some progress was made - we no longer have "highways of death" south of Calgary and from Edmonton to Fort McMurray; but much of Calgary remains in gridlock due to a combination of poor planning, poor development, and a historical lack of leadership.

The PC government of Alberta was caught in a bind. They had paid off the province's debt - but had lowered taxes too much. When oil royalties started drying up in the mid-2000s, thanks to the transition from "conventional" to "unconventional" oil, the government preferred to do nothing than either raise taxes or debt finance - such was the power of Alberta's low tax, no debt myth. Well, that myth has cost us. Jim Prentice at least had some bravery to confront the power of that myth and accept reality, but his steps were too few, too short, and too late. He did acknowledge something else though: the downturn had brought with it decreased cost of business and lower interest rates. Government spending had not been so cheap in years.

We now have a government willing to raise revenue and use debt finance, and they are doing it. There is much dismay about the size of the deficit - but all people can criticize is the amount civil servants get paid. Apparently, the government isn't blowing this money on unnecessary crap - I am sure we would know about it by now. They are doing what had to be done ten and twenty years ago, today. Perhaps we should be thankful.

Thanks for reading.