1 Alberta Exceptionalism and Taxation as Affront

Alberta’s Self-Image

Albertans understand themselves to be different than other Canadians—to be rougher, tougher, and more industrious. To be special. Since before it became a province in 1905, Alberta has been known as a place of singularly majestic mountains and towering ambitions, of vast plains and boundless opportunities for whosoever was willing to put in the work. Aritha van Herk’s (2001) Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta recounts some of these tales of adversity, sacrifice, and hard work in the early days of western settlement. These are not stories of oil and railway barons, but of men and women whose sweat built the province’s early roadways, coal mines, and sod houses—stories of gritty labourers whose doggedness earned them their survival. These stories of hardship and sacrifice, hard work and perseverance have been passed down through several generations of Albertans, instilling in them the conviction that prosperity was the result of individual initiative, not collective, government-orchestrated policies and programs.

Closely related to these narratives of individual triumph is Albertans’ insistence on their right to independence, both from one another and from regulatory meddling. C. B. Macpherson (1953, 11–20), for instance, characterized Alberta’s class structure up to the 1950s as dominated by independent—that is, discrete—commodity producers. Alberta’s rural residents were accustomed to functioning autonomously. While they still relied on government for basic services such as schooling, roads, telephone lines, irrigation canals, and so on, in the end they made their own decisions. This safeguarding of individual autonomy is reflected in the strongly libertarian attitudes commonplace in the province today. Take, for example, the resistance of some Albertans to wearing face masks and getting vaccinated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even at the cost of endangering others, many Albertans do not like to be told what to do, least of all by government.

Flowing from this embrace of rugged individualism and a fierce independence is a third manifestation of Alberta exceptionalism: a sense of collective victimhood at the hands of federal government policy, central Canadian manufacturing, and central Canadian financial interests. Almost from the moment Alberta became a province, Albertan farmers harboured an antagonism toward central Canada’s commercial control over shipping and banking—an anger that propelled the United Farmers of Alberta (UFA) to victory in the 1921 provincial election. Attitudes did not improve with the August 1935 election victory of William Aberhart’s Social Credit government, which attempted to pass legislation that would limit federal control over the licensing of banks and credit arrangements. Social Credit politicians at the time declared Alberta to be “at war” with Ottawa. More than banks and credit, this “war” was, and continues to be, about Ottawa’s power over the development of Alberta’s natural resources—power that the province views as the theft of its wealth, harming Alberta to benefit the rest of the country.

This ongoing sense of victimhood is also manifest in Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party (UCP), elected to government in 2019. Take Kenney’s Fair Deal Panel, for example, the mission of which, according to the Government of Alberta website, was to consult Albertans “on strategies to secure a fair deal in the Canadian federation and advance our vital economic interests.” Predictably, the panel’s final report, delivered in May 2020, was a survey of the outrage of those Albertans who feel that Ottawa mistreats their province. The embers of old grievances about the structure of Confederation, including equalization payments, federal regulatory policies, parliamentary representation, and federal spending in provincial jurisdictions, are continually fanned into flame.

From Alberta’s early days, these three factors—individualism, independence, and victimization, whether perceived or real—combined to forge a unique sense of identity within the province. In 1935, with the election of Aberhart’s populist Social Credit government, Canada was forced to contend with Alberta exceptionalism. Exceptionalism again flourished in 1973 when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), headed by Saudi Arabia, instituted an oil embargo that tripled oil prices virtually overnight, making Alberta suddenly wealthy. Federal-provincial conflict over the division of the economic rents1 from higher commodity prices reinforced Alberta’s sense of victimhood, sporadically fanning the flames of an independence movement.

Oil wealth led to a frantic period of state building that again included fostering unrealistic expectations for provincial government infrastructure and services throughout the province. Government largesse flowed, eliminating municipal debt, fully funding (for a time) public pension plans, building rural hospitals, expanding highways—all while lowering taxes. The Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund was another example of Alberta’s exceptional capacity to save for future generations, and would become pride of place for many Conservative politicians decades after its founding. This largesse also fuelled a strong sense of pride in many Albertans.

Two unprompted examples of this sense of specialness or exceptionalism came up in interviews I conducted on the subject of a sales tax for Alberta.2 The first comment was made by author, retired financial planner, former banker, and fellow Albertan Inez Dyer:

I go back to Saskatchewan a lot [. . .] and you could feel that—“You guys, you go on the big trips, and you do this, and you do that, and you don’t have to have a sales tax because the money is just floating in from the oil all the time.” There’s a resentment there, and it does make you feel kind of special. [. . .] We don’t have a sales tax—and it’s because of the oil. [. . .] I’m sort of proud of that. (interview with author, 7 December 2018)

The second comment was made by Conner Peta, a graduate student in political science at the University of Alberta:

I remember in school social studies that you’re told, “We’re a ‘have’ province. Alberta has oil. Then there are all these ‘have-not’ provinces. They have taxes.” I think a giant shift would have to occur for that political culture to change. The whole notion of the Alberta Advantage will have to disappear before a sales tax [could be implemented]. [. . .] A provincial sales tax could be interpreted as a policy of the have-nots. (interview with author, 29 November 2018)

While these comments represent only two individual opinions, they lend credence to the idea that, even today, Alberta’s political culture is characterized by an insider belief that there is something exceptional about this province. This belief is a key barrier to even discussing the possibility of implementing a sales tax for the province.

The Development of Alberta’s Tax Aversion

Alberta’s period of expansion from 1905 to the Great Depression was supported by an optimism that, with individual hard work, the future would take care of itself. During this time, provincial government spending, especially on public infrastructure, grew rapidly. Both the Liberal (1905 to 1921) and the UFA (1921 to 1935) governments borrowed heavily to support a generally held belief in a limitless future. All types of public works projects—including irrigation canals, railways, public roads for the new automobile, rural electrification, and a public telephone system—were financed mainly by government debt sold in both the domestic and international markets (MacGregor et al. 1939).

As Harold Innis (1933, 64–65) pointed out, however, this rapid growth was pulled along by a sense of opportunity and ambition that ultimately risked exacting a high price on Albertans. Innis wrote, “expenditures made on the assumption that revenue will return from various directions has been responsible for the incurable and dangerous optimism which characterizes government effort. On the whole, public enterprises to which government contributes have introduced an element of uncertainty in the financial position of the government and a degree of unwholesome inelasticity.” The truth of Innis’s words was brought to bear in a Bank of Canada (1937, 34) study of Alberta’s finances:

By the end of 1922, Alberta had direct and guaranteed debt (on which it was paying interest or for which it later became liable) which was some 50 percent higher than in the much older province of Manitoba and more than twice as large as that of Saskatchewan, though Saskatchewan had a 30 percent larger population. Substantially more than half the Alberta total debt represented accumulated losses and deficits, or so-called assets which were proving a constant drain.

The unbounded optimism of the province’s business and political communities resulted in loose financial management, wildly optimistic capital expansion projects, and poor judgment on how these projects would eventually contribute future revenue to the province. By the 1920s, the provincial government had racked up a heavy burden of debt, which the UFA government inherited when they came into office in 1921. Fortunately for the UFA, the 1920s were a period of strong agricultural commodity prices, which allowed the government to continue to spend freely and borrow money without increasing taxes. By the end of the 1920s, according to the Bank of Canada’s (1937) analysis, per capita taxes in 1929 were lower than the 1921 level. As it pointed out, “the province could scarcely have expected a more favourable opportunity than that presented in the years 1925–29 to recoup itself from the rural areas for some of the large expenditures made on them. The opportunity was allowed to pass, and no reduction in the dead weight debt took place” (12). In this first period of economic growth, optimism for the future trumped good financial management. Taxation seemed unnecessary as the province’s economic future would be even bigger and better—or so Albertans fervently believed. This first period ended, of course, with the province defaulting on its debt in April 1936. It was the first and remains the only Canadian province ever to have done so.

A year prior, in 1935, a new party came into power: Aberhart’s Social Credit Party. Despite the 1936 default, the Social Credit administration continued its policy of keeping taxes low for the next thirty-five years. This approach to political management changed with the election in 1971 of a Progressive Conservative government led by Peter Lougheed. With the 1973 OPEC oil embargo and Alberta’s resultant sudden wealth, Lougheed was able to rapidly expand and modernize the provincial state (Richards and Pratt 1979). After a skirmish with the oil and gas industry over royalties stemming from the rapid rise in world oil prices, the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta realized that, for its full political and economic goals to be realized, it had to gain more complete control over resource management. Section 92A of the federal Constitution Act, 1982, answered the party’s prayers, establishing exclusive provincial power over natural resources, including non-renewables such as oil.

Lougheed resigned from provincial politics in 1985—a well-timed exit that left his successor, Don Getty, to run the then highest-spending provincial government in the country. Although Alberta had virtually no debt when Getty took office, Alberta’s economy was struggling with rising unemployment levels, crashing residential and real estate markets, collapsing financial institutions, and a lack of capital investment. More importantly, non-renewable resource royalties, which I will simply call resource revenue, fell dramatically as oil and natural gas prices plummeted from $40 per barrel in the early 1980s to $11 per barrel in July 1986. Various bailouts and ill-fated investment ventures resulted in a significant rise in debt and dissatisfaction among right-wing supporters of the Progressive Conservatives. Perhaps because of this already-smouldering dissatisfaction, and despite the province’s desperate need for cash, taxes were not materially increased during this period. Since the Alberta government’s capacity to borrow remained high, Getty chose to go into debt rather than raise taxes on Albertans. Unlike the Liberal and UFA administrations of the early twentieth century who borrowed to build the province, however, under Getty’s Progressive Conservatives, government borrowing was employed almost exclusively to simply maintain existing government programs.

Enter Ralph Klein. Klein was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Association and appointed premier in December 1992, after Getty retired. This signalled an entirely new fiscal direction for the province, specifically in terms of the ascendance of what is commonly referred to as neoliberal policies of austerity—that is, reducing government debt by cutting spending and, importantly, not increasing taxes. Conservative and even some Liberal politicians of the time could frequently be heard intoning the mantra “We have a spending problem,” essentially blaming government deficits on bloated expenditures, not insufficient tax revenue. In 1992–93, government expenses totalled $17.6 billion while revenue stood at only $14.3 billion. By 1996–97, expenses had been trimmed to $14.2 billion, and revenue had grown to $16.7 billion (Kneebone and Wilkins 2016, 11). In short, the province had moved away from the debt accumulation that began under Getty and, in the space of five years under Klein, had begun generating a comfortable surplus. In the eyes of the conservative government, the correlation between the spending cuts and the elimination of the deficit was rock-solid proof that government spending had previously been out of control. Evidence suggests, however, that spending was far from the only factor in this economic about-face. Arguably, rebounding oil and natural gas prices in the late 1990s played a much more critical role in the budgetary shift from red to black (Government of Alberta 2003). Resource revenues rose from $2.2 billion in 1992–93 to $4.6 billion in 1999–2000.

Let’s back up for a moment to better understand the Klein-era beliefs around taxation and spending. In 1990, a new force entered the field: the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. The Alberta chapter of the organization, led by the young Jason Kenney, effectively attacked Getty’s government for gaffes committed in its twilight years, including the deeply unpopular, gold-plated MLA pension plan.3 Thus was born a very effective mouthpiece reinforcing the message that “government is the problem, not the solution.” It’s easy to see how this belief fuelled the related conviction that taxes should continually decrease. If government spending is the issue—that is, if taxpayers can’t trust government to responsibly spend their money—then why give them more money to waste? By the end of Ralph Klein’s first term, the political assumptions around taxation had hardened. The only possible way that taxes could go was down. This conviction, coupled with the apparent success of the spending-cut experiment, laid the groundwork for a twenty-year policy of reducing corporate and personal income taxes while paying down debt. It was packaged and sold as the “Alberta Advantage.” According to successive Progressive Conservative governments, it reduced taxation and low oil sands royalties, not rising oil prices worldwide, that were responsible for the prolonged boom that extended more or less uninterrupted from the early 2000s through to 2014.

To put it plainly, Alberta’s political culture displays a hostility to taxes. The belief appears to be that taxes inhibit economic growth or simply contribute to a bloated bureaucracy. Its logic goes like this: Taxation is nothing more than citizens and corporations handing money over to government to waste. Alberta’s exceptional wealth is a predictable result of the independent entrepreneurialism and individual hard work of Albertans. Taxes dampen this entrepreneurial spirit by taking away—and ultimately mismanaging—the fruits of its labour. Ipso facto, tax reductions spur economic growth. This deeply rooted political belief system has long discouraged Alberta politicians, regardless of their party affiliation, from uttering the words sales tax.

The Story of Alberta’s First (and Only) Sales Tax

The story of Alberta’s first and only sales tax begins in 1929, when Alberta’s overreliance on agricultural staple production had become endemic. Nearly 40 percent of provincial income was derived from the agriculture sector. With the collapse of equity prices on Wall Street and rising protectionism at the beginning of the Great Depression, deflationary pressures set in with a vengeance. The average price per bushel of wheat fell from $1.75 in 1928 to $0.32 in 1932. Grain farmers saw a staggering drop in their income, and the provincial government, because of the Alberta economy’s heavy reliance on grains, seeds, and hay, saw a similar drop in its revenues. By 1933, farm receipts had dropped to one-quarter of their 1928 level, even though total production fell by only one-third. While other agricultural sectors also suffered, such losses were not as consequential as those experienced by single-commodity wheat producers. Persistently weak grain prices forced the federal Conservative government to find a band-aid solution: stockpiling wheat (Ascah 1999, 54).

A key worry in the 1930s was the ability of the farming community to make their loan payments. Farmers faced a crushing debt burden as grain prices plummeted and interest on their loans consumed one-quarter of their estimated expenses (Government of Alberta 1938, 196–97). They claimed that bank interest rates exceeded the legal maximum rate of interest at the time (7 percent) because of the practice of discounting farmers’ promissory notes.4 At the same time, threshing charges cut deeply into their incomes, reducing the total value received by farmers by more than half—a situation not unlike the predicament of oil producers in 2018 in the face of costly rail transportation. On top of such a dismal economic situation, Albertans were living in a peripheral economic region that did not produce manufactured goods. They thus paid dearly for tariff-protected central Canadian industry. The Rowell-Sirois Commission calculated that by 1931, the cost of tariff-protected manufactured goods had doubled in the province (Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations 1940, 159). It was the perfect storm.

Municipal and provincial finances were in disarray owing to the collapse in grain prices and resulting unemployment. In the larger cities of Edmonton and Calgary, finances were wobbling because of social relief costs, huge property tax arrears, and a shrinking revenue base caused by falling property assessments. School finances were no better. In 1934, over four hundred school districts were in default, with more than $265,000 in unpaid teachers’ wages. The province’s insufficient revenue base combined with the “dead weight” nature of the provincial government’s debt (and of the debts of municipal governments, government entities such as Alberta Government Telephones, and other guaranteed entities such as irrigation districts and railways) led Albertans to thoroughly examine their provincial and municipal taxation systems.

The Alberta Advantage: Conservatism and Fiscal Austerity

On 6 March 1995, Progressive Conservative MLA Jim Dinning, Premier Ralph Klein’s provincial treasurer, introduced Bill 1, the proposed Alberta Taxpayer Protection Act. The June 1993 provincial election was a precursor to this referendum legislation. It is important to understand this bill’s provenance, as it reveals how deft electoral management of the subject of a sales tax can create political winners and losers in Alberta—so let’s back up for a moment.

Although Alberta was in 1993 a much more prosperous and populous province than in 1936, the 1980s and early 1990s had been difficult years for the Alberta economy and broad segments of the population. During the 1980s, the double whammy of falling oil prices and exceptionally high interest rates caused unemployment to rise from 3.3 percent in October 1980 to 12.7 percent in March 1983. By October 1989, the rate had fallen to 5.8 percent. By January 1992, however, it had crept back up to 10.3 percent (Statistics Canada 2021). The province experienced a brutal recession from 1982 to 1984 in which its real GDP fell by nearly 10 percent. The economy started growing again in the mid-1980s, only to be faced with a brutal real estate crash, exposing a legacy of weak regulation in financial institutions. As early as 1983, people whose home equity value was less than their mortgage simply walked away from their homes, often selling their property for a dollar (Nelson 1983).

Don Getty was in charge of dealing with this crash. As it wore on, numerous Alberta financial institutions failed, including significant portions of the credit union system, dashing hope of a recovery. Notable institutional failures included Northland Bank and Canadian Commercial Bank (both federally regulated), the North West Trust Company, and the Principal Group, an alliance of investment companies. As the economy flatlined between 1990 and 1992, the popularity of the Progressive Conservatives plummeted. Getty announced his retirement in September 1992.

In the ensuing leadership contest for the Progressive Conservative Association, premier-to-be Ralph Klein ran against Getty’s record. With the support of Ken Kowalski, an influential rural MLA, Klein defeated the party establishment’s preferred candidate Nancy Betkowski, Getty’s former health minister. A key plank of Klein’s platform, and a key distinction between him and Betkowski, was his opposition to Getty-era bailouts. According to Klein, Getty had aimed to support businesses by handpicking “winners” who turned out to be losers. Klein saw this strategy to be a waste of money and bad fiscal policy. Appealing to Albertans’ sense of gritty independence, Klein sought instead to “get government out of the business of business,” and thereby kickstart an economy led by entrepreneurs.

The 1993 election was to take place on 15 June. Leading up to the release of a pre-election budget, Klein and his treasurer, Jim Dinning, acted quickly to frame the fiscal debate. On 21 January, Dinning announced the appointment of the Financial Review Commission, headed by TransAlta Utility’s former chair and director Marshall Williams. This commission, which reported back at the end of March 1993, had a mandate to investigate the province’s financial situation and accounting practices. On the report’s opening page, a heading announced that “The Need for Albertans to Support Change Is Urgent”—a message no doubt tailored to the upcoming election. It billed the annual deficit as “serious” and “getting worse.” “We cannot support this level of spending,” it declared. “We have spent our savings,” and we can’t “just go on borrowing.” We must “act now” (Alberta Financial Review Commission 1993, 1–3). The report went on to call for more timely and effective financial reporting, improved accountability, better coordinated and more streamlined systems of oversight, and the more prudent use of loan guarantees.

The commission’s report came out around the same time that Alberta Treasury held a budget roundtable. According to Paul Boothe, then an advisor to Alberta Treasury, the roundtable “confirmed, as no polling results could, the willingness of Albertans to make significant sacrifices” (Boothe 2002, 4). These sacrifices ended up being two years of government cuts to services and public sector employees. Still, there was some debate over the matter of raising taxes versus cutting spending. According to Al O’Brien, “six of the ten groups that reported [to the roundtable] either supported a sales tax or supported a temporary sales tax. Most of them said we need to bring in a sales tax to get rid of the deficit and stop the bleeding and then we should eliminate it.” However, the Klein team managed to interpret this sales tax “wisdom,” as O’Brien called it, as being about “spending cuts first” (interview with author, 3 November 2018)—an interpretation made plain in the workbook prepared for the roundtable, subsequently published as Right on the Money (Dinning and Wagner 1993).

Why so much emphasis on spending cuts? Federal politics of the time might give us a clue. After Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and his Conservative government implemented a federal goods and services tax (GST) in 1991, they made a historically dismal showing in the 1993 general election, losing all but two seats in Parliament. With the federal Conservative Party debacle going on in the background, O’Brien figured that Klein—like Aberhart before him—“was convinced that spending cuts and other, subtler, less controversial revenue increases were the way to go” (interview with author, 3 November 2018).

Alberta Exceptionalism in the Twenty-First Century

The subject of a sales tax, and the issue of provincial revenue sources, continued to be a highly charged third rail of Alberta politics during the final years of the Klein era. In 2002, a new financial commission report—this one from the Alberta Financial Management Commission, chaired by David Tuer17—was released. Entitled Moving from Good to Great: Enhancing Alberta’s Fiscal Framework, this report effusively complimented the Klein government’s “outstanding” financial management—but it also observed that government needed to reduce the province’s reliance on resource revenues (Alberta Financial Management Commission 2002, 1, 4). Noting that nearly one-half of the provincial economy was associated directly or indirectly with the energy sector, the commission recommended that only “an appropriate and sustainable level of resource revenue be spent on an annual basis” (8).

Klein’s successor, Ed Stelmach, appointed his own council in 2009: the Premier’s Council for Economic Strategy, chaired by former federal cabinet minister David Emerson. Stelmach’s challenge to the council was presented as follows:

• What must Albertans begin to do now to sustain prosperity through the next three decades and beyond?
• How can we ensure our children and grandchildren enjoy even greater opportunity than we have—that we hand future generations a legacy of “a better Alberta”?
• What will it take to make the Alberta of 2040 the place for creative and committed citizens to live, work, raise families, contribute to and enjoy society? (Premier’s Council for Economic Strategy 2011, 2)

In their report, the council drew a bead on Alberta’s vaunted tax advantage, saying that “the true Alberta Advantage is not the ability to create a low-tax environment by underwriting a significant portion of government services with funds received from the sale of energy assets. Rather, the advantage lies in the opportunity to use the proceeds from natural resource wealth to intentionally invest in shaping an economy that is much less dependent on natural resources” (96). In other words, the government should be an intelligent steward of the province’s natural resource wealth, taking into account long-term economic and demographic trends.

Since 2002, Alberta government budgets have contained a graph illustrating what has been branded Alberta’s Tax Advantage. These graphs illustrate how much more residents of the province would pay in taxes if the Alberta government taxed at the same rates as other provinces and had a sales tax. Seen in a different light, the graphs show how much predictable revenue the Alberta government is choosing to forego. The 2021–22 Tax Advantage graph is shown in figure 1.1. The numbers, when framed as individual savings, are impressive. When framed as lost revenue, they lead us to ask: Has the existence of this tax advantage served Albertans well? From the viewpoint of Stelmach’s Premier’s Council, the answer is “no.” The government was simply selling off its natural resources and consuming the wealth immediately rather than investing for the future. That being the case, a further question—a moral one—is raised: When, if ever, will the Alberta government turn away from repeated spending cuts in response to volatile oil prices, and towards a more stable revenue mix? When, that is, will it prioritize predictable funding for crucial public programs over its obsession with maintaining its “tax advantage”?

This question remains open. Even with the 2015 election of Rachel Notley’s NDP—the most left-leaning party with a chance of forming government in the province—Alberta exceptionalism and aversion to taxation remain solidly woven into the fabric of Alberta politics. Indeed, after coming to power, the NDP adopted the Alberta Advantage in its own provincial budget documents. If antitaxation can become firmly entrenched in NDP policy, it’s reasonable to ask: How could any discussion of alternatives to spending cuts ever be broached in this province?

These episodes in Alberta’s fiscal history confirm conventional political wisdom that taxes are “bad.” This political myth-making partly explains why politicians even today do not wish to speak publicly on the merits, or even the disadvantages, of a sales tax. The words themselves are taboo.

Perhaps the introduction of a sales tax is not, in the eyes of an Alberta premier or finance minister, worth the complications of administering such a task or the reputational costs of politically defending it. As Al O’Brien told me, “It’s a tough thing in a four-year period to address all these things at once. Premiers don’t have a lot of time to develop and to think about how this [sales tax] would happen. Premiers don’t have to raise money—it’s not top of mind. And treasurers come and go, and a new treasurer has not, typically, thought about the revenue side” (interview with author, 7 November 2018).

Certainly, there is an abundance of evidence that governing parties, not just in Alberta but in Canada as a whole, are punished when they introduce new taxes, as Mulroney’s federal Conservatives were in 1993. However, the aversion to taxes is not universal, and may have more to do with the political culture of a certain time and place than anything else. Take, for example, the BC Liberals’ attempt to mess with their province’s sales tax during the October 2020 election campaign. According to one opinion piece by Gary Mason (2020), “cutting the PST in half, for a year or two, sounds like a reasonable temporary measure to give the economy a jolt. But eliminating it entirely for a year and then reducing to 3 percent for another year smacks of desperation. It’s the Liberals looking for their own bridge-toll moment, a Hail Mary pass they pray changes the trajectory of the campaign.” As it turned out, the BC Liberal gambit did not acquire traction; they lost the election and the PST remained as is. It’s hard to imagine this happening one province to the east.

In the Alberta context, the Alberta Taxpayer Protection Act hardened the existing political establishment’s resolve to maintain low taxes as a way of upholding the Social Credit and Progressive Conservative belief in private enterprise, free markets, and “small government.” This rhetoric, of course, belies the fact that, by many measures, the Alberta government is, in fact, not a small government at all, nor has it been one since the early 1980s (MacKinnon 2003, 131). Despite efforts by the NDP to stabilize key programs like health care and education and to improve the progressivity of the PIT while in office, there remains a dogmatic consensus among major parties across the political spectrum that Alberta’s “low tax advantage” is sacred.

Notes

References