2006.01.27
Thanks for the $400, Ralph, but…
Yesterday I received a $400 cheque in the mail from the Alberta government. I imagine many Albertans are quite pleased with this; I can’t think of many families who wouldn’t like an extra $1600 (assuming there are four people in the family).
In case you’re not from my neck of the woods, the Alberta government is giving each resident of the province $400 tax-free, because our 2005 provincial surplus was quite large.
I’m left with mixed feelings about this. I can’t deny that I can use an extra $400 (who couldn’t), but I also feel that this $400 was a waste. Consider this: $400 multiplied by the roughly 3.2 million people who live here is $1.28 billion.
It’s great that we have a surplus, but there are better ways to spend the money than giving a cheque to everyone. Our universities are in need of funds for any number of things, not to mention that as a province we don’t really have enough post-secondary education capacity for our size. Our cities need massive transportation infrastructure upgrades (although Calgary needs to stop sprawling first, but that’s another story). Our health system is understaffed, underfunded, and requires additional infrastructure just to keep up with demand. And that’s just for starters. The list goes on, but that’s not the point.
Though I’d be the last to advocate allocating the surplus to ongoing expenditures – we’re probably not going to have that kind of surplus every year, and it wouldn’t be prudent to count on it. But infrastructure projects aren’t ongoing expenditures – they’re projects with budgets and completion dates. Building new infrastructure and upgrading existing infrastructure are ways to invest that money in our future, rather than placating the masses in the short term. And you don’t have to look very far to find $1.2 billion of infrastructure projects that could use the funding.
And before you point out that the $1.2 billion wasn’t the entire surplus, that isn’t the point either. I realize that a lot of money was allocated to projects that need it, but how much more could we have done with this $1.2 billion?
In any case, this whole $400 rebate idea was decided upon months ago, after the goverment made a token attempt at getting input from Albertans. I’m personally not convinced they even read the opinion cards that were returned, and yes, I did return mine. So there’s not much use complaining about it now. That cheque is little more than a bittersweet $400 reminder of what we could have had instead.
Take a bow, Ralph. You’ve managed to leave your legacy for Alberta. All $400 of it.
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