Alberta, you're on your own

Prime minister Justin Trudeau returned home recently after a brief visit to Alberta, leaving behind a $250-million tip, courtesy of an obscure federal stability program, and his promises that our current economic pain is not being ignored back east. Call it political tourism.

Pain? True enough, but pain can be relative.

A recent report from the right-wing Fraser Institute says Alberta's revenues currently are still on a par with revenues from 2012-13. That's down from the revenue peak in the years that followed, but I don't recall anyone claiming Alberta was a basket case four years ago.

Likewise, the report says though Alberta's unemployment figures are way up, they're still on a par with levels the rest of the country has dealt with for years. And for those Albertans still employed, average wages remain well above the national average, while taxes on those wages is well below the national average.

Pain? Get used to it, the message seems to be. This may be the new normal, if ever there was a state of normality in Alberta.

Trudeau's jet had just landed before our close and loving neighbours in B.C. were holding us up — as an example of how not to run a province.

Lieut-Gov Judith Guichon read the words set before her by premier Christie Clark, warning the people of her province in the speech from the throne, sounding like a mother warning her kids: “Don't you be like those Albertans in the house across the tracks!”

Well, good idea. But it's hardly likely that British Columbia will ever live like those Albertans across the tracks.

To do that, you'd need a 40-year run of boom-and-bust resource cycles that contained a lot more boom than bust. You'd need to see many billions worth of foreign money invested in the province, and many billions more removed in the form of profits and dividends.

You'd need the discipline to not save a significant portion of your share of those profits and dividends through all that time. You'd need to buy your way out of labour problems in education, health care and civil service. And you'd need to spend your resource money every year on a services that a minimal tax regime could never support, to keep everyone else happy.

Rock-bottom income taxes, no sales tax and no saving for the future. That's what you'd need. For 40 years.

B.C., you don't have that kind of discipline. If you're fortunate, and maintain prudent management and stay away from pie-in-the-sky, we’ll-be-an-energy-superpower, you'll never need it.

B.C.'s warning should have come earlier, and it should have been directed to our loving neighbour to the east, Saskatchewan. Their energy boom was just gathering steam when the global oil price collapsed.

But there was no plan there for prudence, either. No plan to save significantly to smooth the cycles and to prepare for the day when energy revenues no longer flowed like a gusher from the ground. They never had a chance to be like our family, across the tracks.

I don't see a significant reason why the rest of Canada should feel particularly sorry for Alberta. Neither do I buy the argument that the billions we sent to Ottawa in the form of equalization money demands some kind of special payback.

When you're rich, you pay your taxes. You don't get to ask for them back if you piss your fortune away, or fail to prepare for an inevitable future.

I don't much care for the Fraser Institute. Research is one thing, spinning the numbers is something else. But it is still true when they tell us that in the last years of the long death of our Tory dynasty, government spending ramped up nearly double the rate of our population growth, plus inflation.

A series of weak premiers, beginning with the last few years of Ralph Klein's reign, through Ed Stelmach, Alison Redford, Dave Hancock and Jim Prentice, all used the province's cash flow to minimize the effects of decades of poor planning — or no planning at all.

If you don't see parallels between the Alberta experience and the CBC show Schitt's Creek, you're not looking.

You can blame the NDP government for whatever happens next, but for what got us here, look in the mirror.

When even a friendly federal government has only a tip to leave on the table for us, and when other provinces hold us up as a bad example of provincial stewardship, that means we're on our own.

As Voltaire once wrote, we need to learn to take care of our own garden.