Gather round the gas flare for a big Alberta boost
By JEFFREY SIMPSON
Globe and Mail
Saturday, October 22, 2005
EDMONTON -- Each Albertan will be receiving a $400 cheque in January. Called a "resource rebate," it's each taxpayer's share of $1.4-billion carved from the huge provincial surplus. It's really, really dumb policy.
Maybe the rebate is great politics. Maybe Premier Ralph Klein's popularity as Alberta's Santa Claus will jump a few points in the polls. As policy goes, however, the rebate stinks.
The first page of the economics textbook says: Don't overheat a hot economy. Alberta's economy is the hottest in North America. It doesn't need more heat, which is what the rebate will provide when people spend the money.
When recipients spend, retailers will be happy. So will manufacturers in Ontario and the United States. And hoteliers in Arizona or Hawaii. Some of the rebate money will stay in Alberta, where it isn't needed economically, and the rest will go elsewhere.
The rebate's unfair, too. The millionaire gets it, and so does the person on welfare. If the government wanted to help people on low incomes, the rebate is perverse.
Alberta already has Canada's lowest taxes. It also has the brightest future within Canada. The place is crying out for visionary political leadership. Instead, it gets cheesy rebates.
The paranoid right-wingers in Alberta think the rest of Canada lusts after Alberta's wealth. They're coming. Just you wait. They're cooking up another national energy program. As with all paranoia, it's not based on facts, just memories, fears and an ideological agenda.
No one in the rest of Canada wants to hold Alberta back. Instead, they want to grab hold of the province's coattails and soar into the future.
Alberta has an amazing opportunity to show Canada how to succeed in a globalized world driven by knowledge, innovation, research and brainpower.
The places in the world that hard-wire this message -- It's global, stupid! It's knowledge, stupid! -- into their genes will be the ones with the highest standards of living, the best jobs and the best social programs.
Alberta has the people, resources, wealth and power to lead. It needs the political vision to set high targets for a big-sky place.
So here are a few.
Make the province's two leading universities -- the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta -- rank in the world's top 50 by 2020. The ambition for the largest university, the U of A, should be No. 20 in '20. University operating budgets are rising by 6 per cent annually for the next three years (after years of previous neglect). The U of A has a terrific new president, Indira Samarasekara; she can aim for the top 20 if she gets the resources.
Make Alberta's school system, already one of the continent's best, the best in North America and one of the top two or three in the world. Alberta has the power to make this happen -- if the political leaderships exists.
Make Alberta's training systems, public and private, the best in Canada. Labour shortages are everywhere in the province's hot economy. It's going to take public investments in skills development and upgrading to keep abreast, or ahead, of demand.
Make Alberta one of the top two or three places for medical research in North America, and one of the top five in the world. Former premier Peter Lougheed's brilliant invention, the Alberta Heritage Fund, already finances medical research. It could do so much more. What does the world call the breakthrough in diabetes treatment? The Edmonton Protocol, because that's where the discoveries were made. Build on this legacy. On second thought, leap from it.
Make Alberta a continental leader in sustainable development. Don't just burn huge quantities of natural gas to develop the tar sands, because the carbon emissions will be huge. Finance urgent research into carbon sequestration, shipping and burying carbon, so that a virtuous circle is created of energy exploitation with diminished atmospheric impact.
Make Alberta the model for health-care experimentation. Help break Canada free from the existing model that is devouring public budgets everywhere, depriving governments of the ability to make more sensible investments in the future.
Make Alberta the country's fairest place. Shrink poverty, because poverty holds back development. Unequal societies are often less productive than more equal ones. Lower taxes don't necessarily mean high productivity, right-wing ideology notwithstanding. If they did, Finland wouldn't have the world's most productive economy.
Make every important decision revolve around this question: How does Alberta become the most outward-looking place in North America? The world isn't at all "flat," as one pundit pretends, but space is shrinking.
Alberta has a superb private sector, a competent civil service, creative people, an excellent work ethic, a can-do spirit, and natural resources in high demand. It's been hugely influential in reshaping how people elsewhere think about public issues, whether or not the province understands this influence.
Alberta has the power to do better than cutting cheques to itself. That's why its future political decisions are so important to Albertans, and to the rest of us.
COMMENT:Well, we should be cooking up a national energy program, despite intimidation by Alberta.. We have health policy, environment policy, industrial policy, trade policy, but no energy policy.
Oh, let's see, it's the most important economic activity right now in the world. It's the largest resource economy in the country. It makes and breaks governments and nations. Energy is the stuff which is driving American international policy. And it pits little old Canada against the largest richest corporations the world has ever known.
And we shouldn't do a little national strategizing around it? Gimme a break. Of course we should, and it's only because Alberta Ottawa is afraid of an Albertan hissy-fit that it won't talk about what we so obviously need. Canada needs a national energy policy.
British Columbians are up in arms over the Kinder Morgan takeover of Terasen. You don't think that's the stuff of national energy policy? Kinder Morgan is the agent of US energy policy. Terasen should be a part of Canada's.
Canada's largest ever energy project is the Mackenze Gas Pipeline, controversial for a generation, and still the subject of intense debate. No policy guides its implementation or abandonment - oh, no - just a bunch of companies pushing their interests on government and indigenous peoples.
How about all the public discussion about using energy as a weapon in lumber wars with the US? And what about NAFTA and Canada's impossibly dumb commitment to ensure oil and gas keep flowing to the US? What about paced development, instead of market-driven expansion that does its thing without reference to local needs or sustainability. What about the fiscal and regulatory environment in which renewable energy could be thriving?
We need a national energy policy, and we should be developing it right now. - Arthur Caldicott