Will Alberta bow and implement a provincial sales tax?

Who is the Conference Board of Canada and why do they feel the need to release papers on PST in Alberta if they're in Ottawa? Who hired them to make these "recommendations"?

From their website.......



Anyway....they can just shut up in my humble opinion. Anyone who wants to add more tax to people is an idjit.

If Redford does enact one, she knows she'll be out of a job in 2016, so I doubt it.

When it was floated last year it went over like a lead balloon.

Having said that, I wouldn't mind paying a little more to ensure services aren't cut.

Seems you guys have had it good for too long, and now winging when it's time to pay the piper. Should have had a sales tax long ago and put more money into your heritage account.

Hopefully not. Regressive taxes aren't the way to fund government.

They can implement a new sales tax right after they finish justifying why it is required.

AB Provincial Revenues: $40,300,000,000...population 3,847,119...so $10,475/person, give or take.

Let's compare that to some of the other provinces:
BC: $9,105 / capita
Sask: $10,074 / capita
MB: $8,846 / capita
ON: $8,113 / capita
QB: $8,163 / capita
NB: $10,311 / capita
NS: $9,403 / capita
PEI: $10,203 / capita
NFLD: $14,644 / capita

It seems to me that the Alberta government has a spending issue, not so much a revenue issue.

No sales tax is part of the 'Alberta Advantage', so I doubt it will happen anytime soon.

What should have happened though was changing our provincial income tax from flat rate (10%) to something more progressive to match the rest of the country.

Why? What is the justification for it?

If they proposed lowering the 10% income tax for low income earners and raising it marginally for the middle and upper brackets...sure, but that provides justification.

Raising it so they can blow more on nothing...not good justification.

Looks like it's right in line with Saskatchewan and Newfoundland - a couple of other boom/bust provinces.

I think comparing us to Ontario and BC isn't totally accurate, as they both have the majority of their population in one major urban area (Toronto and Vancouver), while ours here in Alberta is more spread out. They also have far more diversified economies to rely on, whereas Alberta and other boom/bust places don't.

Additionally, given the massive infrastructure deficit we face courtesy of Klein's slash and burn in the 90s, we probably should be spending more than other places that didn't enact similar policies.

It's called future planning. Our provincial government should try it out some time.



Have you seen any recent population density maps of Alberta? That argument holds no water, 81% of Alberta's population is urban with the Calgary-Edmonton corridor one of the most densely populated regions of Canada. It is very similar to Ontario's southern areas and British Columbia's south western corner...smaller than one, bigger than the other.



Revenues don't really care about source, so that argument would only hold real weight if our non diversified economy was in a bust cycle. Which it is not.

Our provincial buffoons are piss poor money managers, that is about it.

Stelmach/Redford went back to the Getty mistake of wildly over-estimating resource-based revenues. And they badly shit the bed several years ago when the proposed royalty increases pissed the companies off so much that they massively cut back their activities and expansion plans in retaliation. Redford's bigger problem is that all of her wild campaign promises are coming back to bite her in the ass. She promises over a hundred new medical clinics but then picks a totally unnecessary war with our doctors by threatening their income. She won the leadership race with a flood of new memberships, mostly from teachers who backed her when she said she'd restore funding that Stelmach had planned to cut, and who are going to freak out massively if she backs out on what she said she'd give them. Redford's been coming across far too often that she doesn't have a clue on what to do.

Klein-era cuts are off the table because no one wants to go that far ever again. Tax increases are also off the table because no one will tolerate them, period. I'd almost feel sorry for any government that had to walk such a fine line but Redford's group has done such a good job of repeatedly shooting themselves in their own heads that any sympathy for them is now ranging between slim and none. This is a bad government with a bad leader, plain as that, and if it weren't for a couple of mouthy social conservative 'tards in the WRP making asses out of themselves in the last election the PC's wouldn't even be the government of Alberta right now. And, come 2016, they won't be any more either.

It's called future planning. Our provincial government should try it out some time.

Actually, here it's called pushing spending off on the next generation so the current one can enjoy low taxes.




You sure about that? Here's Stats Can's density map;



Calgary-Edmonton is dense, but nothing like the Golden Horseshoe.

But for the sake of argument let's say that Edmonton and Calgary each have 1.1-1.2 million people each. That's just over half of the entire provincial population in those two cities, with almost another half scattered all over the place.

Toronto and the Golden Horseshoe represent far more than half of Ontario's population - if you want to compare corridors; Windsor to Ottawa is close to 80% of the province's population. BC's is closer to Alberta, but they still have closer to two-thirds of their population in the Vancouver area.

Finally, look at the huge geographic area in Alberta that isn't black - then compare it to BC or Ontario - nearly half of Alberta is yellow, but it's all very low density. That means more hospitals, more schools, more roads, in more towns etc than either BC or Ontario.



That's your opinion. I agree that they could do better, but the world economy is not entirely their fault, nor is the price of oil.

This is what we are currently doing, I want us to switch to future planning.


You might want an updated map. The corridor has almost another million persons in it.

As for the 'huge geographic area that isn't black'...whoop de fucking do...the 'yellow' areas are a whole 0.4<1 persons per square kilometre. If all of Alberta was yellow that would be between 265,000 - 662,000 persons...the rest, well, by your map, it all seems to fall inside the corridor.

That aside, let's factor in some of the major infrastructure costs involved...we cutting any roadways through shield like Ontario? Nope. Our highways cost a fraction of theirs to lay down. What about BC, we dealing with many mountains in Alberta, congested arable land, etc? Not so much...We are blessed with one of the most conducive infrastructure environments on the planet and we can't maintain it? Give me a break.


If you want to accept bullshit financial policy from our leaders, that is your business. Some of us actually expect better than that. A few of us even expect...competency.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't get frustrated with you, we are all entitled to our opinions, it just frustrates the nuts out of me that our province can rake in higher revenues than almost every other province, but can't provide services on par with half of them.

We don't have a revenue problem in Alberta nor will we. This is a spending problem as it is in the rest of Canada. Cutting funding to the core portfolios isn't the answer either. It's trimming the waste that is spent by governments. The government should look at all non-essential spending much closer, the arts comes to mind as one area that should be looked at closely.