Western Standard - Saturday Long Form - Bill Bewick of Fairness Alberta

00:00:00.000 Greetings friends, welcome to this long form interview with on the Danielle Smith show.

00:00:26.860 we have been doing a series over the last couple of weeks, talking about those who are advocating

00:00:32.500 for greater autonomy for Alberta, a new deal with the rest of the country, reconfederation.

00:00:39.400 And we're going to continue on with that theme with somebody who has been working in this area

00:00:42.680 for the last couple of years, longtime researcher, but he turned his attention more recently to the

00:00:48.700 issue of getting fairness for Alberta. In fact, that is the name of his organization. It is called

00:00:54.200 fairness alberta and joining me now to talk about it is executive director uh dr bill buick dr bill

00:01:00.120 thanks so much for being with me today my pleasure so let's begin by by talking about where the idea

00:01:06.680 of fairness alberta came from because there's been so much activity over the last few years

00:01:11.560 different panels different discussions um obviously when the the we had a change of government with

00:01:17.000 the ucp the issue of more alberta autonomy was front and center and so why did you feel like now

00:01:23.320 was the time for for your organization to start right well the uh the the president and some of

00:01:29.400 the original founders started it actually as far back as 2015 uh because they noticed how great

00:01:36.440 the sums coming out of alberta were and how little was coming back but at the time everybody was

00:01:40.920 doing well and nobody really wanted to to make a fuss about it uh which is sort of where we're

00:01:46.520 kind of coming back to but they realized there wasn't quite the enthusiasm for it at the time

00:01:51.400 so they got it all cranked up again as the recession started to hit and as some of the

00:01:56.320 unfairness towards Albertans became unbearable. And in 2018 and 19, they ramped it up and we

00:02:03.040 launched in 2020 officially. And it was just because at 2020, it was five years of recession.

00:02:11.120 Alberta's economy was struggling and looked like it was increasingly under threat and is

00:02:17.320 increasingly under threat from federal policies and in addition despite our relative economic

00:02:24.600 troubles we were still sending 15 17 18 billion dollars net to ottawa and when combined with

00:02:32.280 things like the fiscal stabilization fund being exposed as basically a fraud when we dropped 8

00:02:37.960 billion dollars in 2015 and got three percent of that covered to help stabilize our finances

00:02:43.480 they're just a combination of things including uh the 2019 election here in alberta that showed

00:02:49.640 there was a renewed appetite and and a lot more interest in these topics i want to go back to

00:02:55.160 something that you'd said about the level of appetite to fight this back in 2015. i had rob

00:03:01.240 anderson on last week and he showed this chart which made me almost fall off my chair about how

00:03:09.160 that net contribution to ottawa actually grew during the harper years and continued to grow

00:03:17.320 while we were in our worst recession i guess i kind of always thought that we we'd had this

00:03:22.520 imbalance and i think we had this expectation that those who were aligned with us at the federal

00:03:28.440 level all we had to do was get a guy who wanted the west in and we would be able to solve things

00:03:32.920 and it doesn't look like that actually happened so i i'm wondering what you think the what what

00:03:38.120 happened at that time why is it that we decided to take our foot off off the gas why is it we

00:03:43.560 didn't want to kick up a fuss because i i only asked that because i worry that we're going to

00:03:47.720 do it again i've said this before in a couple of my shows that people are really excited about the

00:03:52.280 rejuvenate rejuvenation of the federal conservative party and it's like if we just get our guy in

00:03:57.000 then we'll solve everything and i'm not sure that the evidence shows that so what do you think is

00:04:01.400 going on there i i think at the time a lot of people point out in 2014 the program was just

00:04:08.040 renewed quietly under the conservative government and there was a bit of a trade-off where the the

00:04:13.960 prime minister managed to get a major additional equalization element taken out of the health

00:04:19.080 transfer so that we did get about a billion dollars more out of that but uh the the problem

00:04:24.200 is inevitably political blowback for taking money away from some of the recipient provinces that

00:04:31.080 have grown very used to getting these large checks and uh and frankly province of quebec is much more

00:04:37.960 effective at uh complaining raising a stink and scaring ottawa than alberta is and that's that's

00:04:45.720 been the case for a long time it's not going to change overnight but we're hoping that the key

00:04:52.280 won't be just someone in there that wants to do alberta a favor because there will be so much

00:04:56.840 blowback in places like quebec and and and maritimes it has to be uh we have to put them

00:05:04.840 in a no-win situation where they either are going to alienate voters in the 70 of the country that

00:05:12.040 pays into equalization or they're going to alienate the 30 that receive it and if and if we can just

00:05:18.920 speak up nearly as loud as the inevitable complaints will be then they'll have to do

00:05:23.640 something about it so that's interesting you know i hadn't i hadn't thought of it that way

00:05:27.640 because i we always think of alberta as being the largest net payer but maybe we should just go

00:05:33.720 through what the current state of of the nation is who are the payers and who are the recipients

00:05:41.320 overall it's uh alberta and ontario are by far the biggest uh bc isn't that far behind ontario

00:05:49.320 depending on the year so over the last sort of 20 years albertans have contributed more than

00:05:55.880 ontario and bc combined actually but bc and ontario's numbers are very close so um so it's

00:06:02.840 those three saskatchewan is basically a break even although on equalization it fully pays and gets

00:06:08.200 nothing and uh newfoundland is the other one that never seems to quite make it into a overall net

00:06:16.200 payer but certainly on equalization they're paying almost as much as we are per person

00:06:21.400 and all their neighbors are getting significant funds to fund their provincial governments while

00:06:28.040 newfoundland's in a major crisis right now fiscally so there's there's five provinces

00:06:33.080 that pay into equalization with getting nothing back and then five more who also pay in but get

00:06:39.720 back far more than they put into it so when you said that 70 percent of the provinces are paying

00:06:45.960 nations are are paying jurisdictions pardon me misspoke there are are they uh is that based on

00:06:51.400 population or size of gdp how do you do that 70 30 split population yeah when you combine the people

00:06:57.720 that pay in in ontario bc alberta and uh saskatchewan and newfoundland it's about almost 70

00:07:04.840 of the country that's paying in and 30 gets significant benefit from it it seems impossible

00:07:10.920 that newfoundland and labrador would not get some kind of equalization i mean they were the ones that

00:07:15.080 had the worst crisis just going into covid i remember reading stories and and and even letters

00:07:21.080 that have been written to the federal government saying we are on the verge of bankruptcy here how

00:07:25.000 can they be a net payer uh their their natural resources provide a kind of line of of taxation

00:07:33.720 and revenue generation that is considered uh significant enough to put them they've been up

00:07:38.440 at second or third for a while in the country before 2015 and i i think i also read a report

00:07:45.240 that said they had utterly mismanaged their public finances and had spent themselves into this

00:07:51.080 problem so it's a it's a combination of a bit of an unfair equalization and uh on on irresponsible

00:07:57.960 spending at the provincial level it's a it's a real challenge because we and i'm a bit torn on

00:08:03.880 this i'll be honest with you let's put quebec aside for a minute because i can i can understand

00:08:09.640 a principle of support where you would give relatively more federal transfers to some of

00:08:15.880 the small provinces to make sure that they were able to continue to attract nurses and teachers

00:08:20.840 and have good schools and good hospitals and good post-secondary you want to be in a position

00:08:26.760 where they can support their municipalities it's a roughly equivalent rate that you see in some of

00:08:32.360 of the richer jurisdictions. I think that makes us maybe a little bit different than the U.S.,

00:08:36.060 which I don't think has those same kind of support programs. But if we were just talking

00:08:40.760 about helping out PEI, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Manitoba, perhaps as well,

00:08:47.580 maybe Newfoundland and Labrador, now that it's got itself into such a difficult position,

00:08:51.460 I don't know that you'd get as much pushback on that. And so I want to start there because that

00:08:55.920 seems to be the easiest case to make around this issue of equalization. Are you opposed even to

00:09:01.940 a smaller program that would be more targeted, more directed to the small population provinces,

00:09:07.380 or is there a reason not to support it there either? I'm not. I'm certainly open to the

00:09:14.780 argument, though, that it's almost redundant at this point, given how massive the health

00:09:20.420 transfers are, how big the Canada social transfer is, how much more federal funding is going to be

00:09:26.100 coming for dental care and pharma care and senior care and child care uh there's a almost 50 of the

00:09:32.900 federal budget is basically being spent in provincial jurisdiction at this point so uh

00:09:38.480 equalization could disappear tomorrow and there would still be an enormous amount of redistribution

00:09:42.780 going to help those provinces uh if you look at a kind of tracking of fiscal uh fiscal capacity

00:09:50.260 I think New Brunswick and PEI do sort of stick out as being notably below average.

00:09:58.540 Manitoba and Nova Scotia, not quite as much.

00:10:02.420 They're closer to the average than you think.

00:10:04.500 And Quebec, if you count them right, is right at the average and should be getting nothing.

00:10:08.640 Interesting.

00:10:09.520 So I think there's a case to be made for drastically reducing the payments in this program

00:10:15.440 and still absolutely maintaining every expectation anyone ever had of it.

00:10:19.780 You're probably not an expert in the finances of every province, but interesting that those two stand out. I can understand why PEI would stand out. It's pretty difficult as a small jurisdiction. I think population 100,000 or thereabout. It'd be pretty difficult to provide all of the services that a province provides without needing some support. So I'll give them a little bit of a pass. But why is New Brunswick? Why are they such an outlier? What's going on?

00:10:45.300 i i i know i mean halifax is a major economic hub with a major port and ship building and

00:10:52.660 uh there's actually more federal spending that goes on in nova scotia to support those

00:10:57.140 industries so could be a bit of a combination of legitimate economic uh opportunity and and

00:11:03.460 government funded uh opportunity um but yeah and their neighbors but um for whatever reason

00:11:11.140 new brunswick is notably lower whereas um it's not so clear how much nova scotia really needs

00:11:18.260 from this program so then let's talk about the other ones so you say manitoba and quebec i mean

00:11:23.700 the thing that sticks out is the commonality with both of those is they've both got hydro resources

00:11:28.980 and so we're not even though we're penalizing those provinces that have natural resources i

00:11:34.980 mean isn't being able to have robust hydro electric power isn't that also a natural resource

00:11:40.740 and maybe you can explain a little about why that is treated so differently under the equalization

00:11:45.860 formula. Sure. A lot of people think that Quebec's hydro isn't counted. It's not that it isn't

00:11:51.600 counted. It's that Quebec hydro purposely does not try to generate profit. It's there to provide

00:11:59.940 low-cost electricity to Quebecers is kind of its mandate. And so it subsidizes rates considerably.

00:12:08.000 Whereas Alberta, of course, has a private generation system where definitely they want

00:12:13.900 to see some profits, and that's expected.

00:12:16.600 And it's a mix in different provinces.

00:12:18.780 But in Quebec, they subsidize their rates considerably so that there are no profits

00:12:23.680 to tax.

00:12:24.780 And equalization formula only looks at the profits and says, oh, I guess you couldn't

00:12:30.440 make any money off this.

00:12:31.700 And the impact it has on Quebec's fiscal capacity is, I didn't think it would be that big a deal.

00:12:38.860 It's a huge deal.

00:12:40.500 Quebec's, if you just gave them credit for the capacity that Quebec Hydro could have, they shoot up right near the average.

00:12:49.460 And their payment drops from $13 billion to $5 billion.

00:12:52.640 So that is the biggest single thing that could change and the biggest obvious thing.

00:12:57.680 quote manitoba when doesn't have the same level of subsidy so it wouldn't affect them as much

00:13:03.840 but the principle should be that when it's a major crown corporation like that that could

00:13:08.800 be making a lot of money they have to estimate what it could make because that's the whole point

00:13:13.920 of fiscal capacity it's not what you know alberta doesn't have a sales tax but the formula assumes

00:13:19.120 if you had a sales tax you could raise this whereas quebec uh doesn't generate profits on

00:13:25.840 its hydro the formula should also say if you generated profits here's what your capacity would

00:13:31.200 be if i'm understanding what you said that if they um i think the term is mark to market or something

00:13:37.440 maybe i don't have the right terminology but if they if you assume that they charge market rates

00:13:42.000 something that would be reasonable or consistent if they were a profit base like other utilities

00:13:47.440 does that just based on those numbers you told me does that mean that they would generate eight

00:13:51.840 billion dollars more for government and that's why that differential they'd be able to you'd be we'd

00:13:57.120 be able to reduce their equalization by eight billion dollars is am i getting the numbers right

00:14:01.360 in my head fiscal capacity doesn't translate dollar for dollar that quite like that but the

00:14:07.680 they would push up their fiscal capacity so close to the average that instead of collecting 13

00:14:13.280 billion out of the 22 billion pot they would be down to 5 billion just from that one change so

00:14:18.400 Trevor Toome put together something called an equalization simulator at a place called

00:14:24.320 financesofthenation.ca. And you can play with a few variables like that. I also convinced them

00:14:32.080 to put on something to account for the different levels of cost of services. So you were talking

00:14:37.200 about New Brunswick and Nova Scotia needing help to pay their nurses. Well, they don't need to pay

00:14:44.640 their nurses as much to live there if it costs 150 000 to buy a house uh compared to toronto or

00:14:51.440 vancouver and so to think that you can you can afford a nurse at 80 of the cost then you should

00:14:57.680 only need 80 of the fiscal capacity to provide the same services right so there's a there's a

00:15:03.360 couple variables you can play with at that site and and see what spits out and almost inevitably

00:15:09.200 what spits out is less money spent overall which saves all canadians from the debt down the road

00:15:15.680 or provides a pot that could go back to the half provinces to help temporarily or fiscal

00:15:20.400 stabilization or it could just be an increase to the canada health transfer um various things that

00:15:26.240 i i'd like to see health transfer increase is probably the least interesting of them but you

00:15:31.600 do a lot of things with that and moreover almost all the money comes from quebec's payment because

00:15:37.280 i wrote a column in the herald uh a while ago about how the three big flaws all favorite quebec

00:15:42.400 and it's hydro it's the cost of living not being adjusted for and just the overall fact that the

00:15:48.800 program grows with gdp regardless of need so uh from 2015 to 2020 the difference between the um

00:15:57.840 the median have and the median have not fell from 5 000 per person to about 1600 and when you

00:16:04.720 consider things like cost of living that's basically nothing that's remarkable but payments

00:16:09.440 went up 23 oh for goodness sake okay so let's walk through all of that because people are going to be

00:16:14.720 getting angrier and angrier as they're as they're listening to how unfair this program is but but

00:16:19.920 talk to me a bit more because i know the formula is very complicated so i don't want to get into

00:16:24.880 the nitty-gritty of it i think that ken bosun cool who was an expert in this said there's probably

00:16:29.040 only about five people in the country who understand how equalization is calculated i

00:16:32.960 think you've done a really good good job of explaining it so if we solve the one problem

00:16:38.400 by assuming a market rate for hydro that would probably would that affect bc and ontario too

00:16:44.880 because bc and ontario have hydro are they charging market rates it's basically market

00:16:49.360 rates yeah the the the way i used it was montreal is generally about four cents cheaper than uh

00:16:55.040 toronto so those are two similar sized cities and close together so i i just took the four cents

00:17:00.720 between those two and added that to quebec's and and that's the kind of changes you see all right

00:17:05.760 now what about this cost of services this is where because i wanted to start off by talking

00:17:11.120 about how complex the the formula already is the first one sounds like a relatively easy change to

00:17:17.280 make the the second one how do you assess what the cost of services are between bc and and albert

00:17:23.440 because bc and alberta don't even have the same cost of services and you pointed out a huge huge

00:17:28.160 issue which is vancouver and toronto are such outliers you can even have more affordable cost

00:17:33.920 of living in alberta and our two big cities because of a lower cost of housing but then as

00:17:38.480 you say go to uh go to some of the atlantic provinces and even go to some of the rural and

00:17:43.440 atlantic provinces now you're really saving some money so how would you how would you do a fair

00:17:47.840 calculation on that uh that is one that will inevitably have a whole bunch of uh arguments

00:17:54.320 uh demographics and and other things and you know bc is kind of an interesting case because

00:17:59.920 you would think it would be much more expensive to live in bc uh and yet somehow they managed to

00:18:04.880 pay their public servants less than alberta by just kind of holding the line through the last

00:18:09.120 20 years um the one that we he used as the easiest uh is cpi it's kind of a generally regarded very

00:18:17.920 rigorous uh method of calculating a basket of goods in one province versus another

00:18:23.200 and so he just crudely applied that to the problem and once you turn on the cpi adjustment

00:18:29.760 again things rapidly change quebec's payment similarly goes down from 13 billion to about

00:18:35.920 five and if you combine the hydro and that they go down to about 700 million like almost nothing

00:18:43.040 but what's interesting is if you do the cpi one strictly ontario suddenly gets a higher one

00:18:48.000 because they are close to the average in terms of fiscal capacity,

00:18:52.900 just barely above it.

00:18:54.220 And so once you turn on the CPI thing,

00:18:56.000 their cost of living drops them slightly below.

00:18:58.560 They don't collect anywhere near as much as their people pay into it.

00:19:02.080 So it's not that problematic to me.

00:19:05.240 But Quebec disappears and Ontario collects about four more.

00:19:08.540 And then a couple of the maritime provinces drop a little bit.

00:19:11.380 But I would argue legitimately for the reasons we've outlined,

00:19:13.860 which is they don't need to pay people as much as you do in Ontario

00:19:17.760 own Alberta. And, you know, public servant costs are at least half of what, what you spend on

00:19:24.220 social services. Okay, well, you have explained two very simple changes, I think that could be

00:19:29.860 made to a very complex formula. But what you've proposed makes good sense to me. So let's talk

00:19:34.240 then about why this grows with increasing in gross domestic product, because that when you on the

00:19:40.380 surface of it, you would, you could imagine the politicians thinking that as things become more

00:19:47.880 expensive in the have provinces is going to put even more pressure for us to keep up with that

00:19:53.500 in the have not provinces. But you're quite right that we've got to be looking at this differential.

00:19:59.160 And if the differential is narrowing, then the amount that we pay in support should also be

00:20:03.680 narrowing. That also seems to make sense. Why wouldn't that be factored into the formula?

00:20:07.900 in 2009 ontario 40 of the country was suddenly dropping into into the equalization pool and the

00:20:17.740 displacement from that was a little frightening i think so the government at the time uh which

00:20:23.660 was not a liberal government and again this is bigger than than just a party problem um

00:20:29.740 responsibly put a cap on how much the the program could grow and it did for the first four or five

00:20:36.780 years save us quite a bit because ontario's payment would have been much higher without that

00:20:41.500 but then once the provinces started converging after 2015 for some reason they didn't make it

00:20:47.580 a cap on how much payments could grow they made it a rule for how much payments will grow so

00:20:53.340 payments didn't need to grow nearly as much anymore but this rule that initially was put in

00:20:58.620 to keep it from going out of control was now inflating the payments more than needed so that

00:21:04.060 seems like the easiest thing to get rid of is to just say yes we're going to keep it sustainable

00:21:10.140 by making sure it never surpasses this level but when the provinces are relatively equal we won't

00:21:15.420 pay out as much so you know it's funny because it strikes me that what you've described should give

00:21:21.100 us a formula for how we would be able to get rid of equalization altogether that eventually you

00:21:27.900 would think if the country was operating properly and had good government eventually you would see

00:21:32.860 a convergence that there would be so little difference between the provinces that you

00:21:36.300 wouldn't need the program or any differences could be explained by lower cost of living so

00:21:41.420 you wouldn't need the program and every province would be doing what they could to generate

00:21:46.060 all revenue from all sources so that they could be more self-reliant so you wouldn't need the program

00:21:50.780 and so how i mean if if you if we're talking i know you don't want to get into the politics of

00:21:55.980 it because it seems like it doesn't matter which political party we have in there they don't want

00:21:59.100 to tackle this one but how would you begin that process i mean could you set some target up to

00:22:05.820 say by the time your province gets within x percent of the average you're you're cut off

00:22:12.780 equalization like there seems to be need to be some other way of graduating from this program

00:22:17.500 and saying bravo now go out and stand on your own two feet and i don't know what those objective

00:22:22.780 measures would be, but I bet you have some idea. Yeah, I mean, Premier Legault has said we look

00:22:29.700 forward to getting off equalization and becoming a half province. And so that's great. But, you know,

00:22:36.460 things like taking advantage of your natural resources would be one of the best ways to ever

00:22:41.680 achieve that. So it's fine to say that, but it'd be nice if actions backed it up. Yeah, I think

00:22:47.480 that you know obviously if you turned around i i've had a quote from the premier of new brunswick

00:22:54.280 higgs and saying you know this is about 25 of our our budget and he he put in the context of

00:23:00.200 worrying about alberta's economy and if albertans aren't there to kind of pitch in and make some of

00:23:04.760 these programs sustainable for us we'll be in bankruptcy problems before long so um i can see

00:23:12.280 why you wouldn't be able to just cut them off tomorrow but something like a 10-year phase out

00:23:18.440 and and and restructuring the program so that it really only is there when people really need it

00:23:25.160 you know sort of like the fiscal stabilization program in theory it's there for when you have

00:23:29.400 a drop of more than five percent in a given year so it's you know it's a it's a it's the kind of

00:23:34.840 emergency you would you would do an insurance claim over um not something that's there every

00:23:40.280 time you you know need a little bit of cash and something you become chronically uh accustomed to

00:23:46.280 so that there's in theory yes that is entirely possible in practice there will be people who say

00:23:52.440 uh where they're you know the constitution says we're committed to making payments to help make

00:23:57.160 sure everyone's reasonably equal um again it's it's extremely vague in terms of the constitution

00:24:05.160 i've i've seen virtually no constitutional scholars think that the government could turn

00:24:10.520 around tomorrow and say you know what we're cutting this down to uh 25 of what it was before

00:24:16.040 and and saying the biggest four provinces can't can't ever be eligible for payments uh they could

00:24:21.720 do that tomorrow and nobody would have a constitutional leg to stand on so there's

00:24:26.200 there's a lot of flexibility uh there's a lot of principled things you could do to reduce

00:24:31.960 the size and make problems as more independent. But it's a matter of generating the will amongst

00:24:40.520 people and then the will amongst the decision makers and then the political will amongst the

00:24:45.240 leaders. You've given us a couple of ideas about how we could adjust it. So maintain federal

00:24:50.920 transfers but transfer differently. So tell me a little more about this fiscal stabilization fund

00:24:57.640 because i think you've got the nut of a really good idea there because if you had it sitting

00:25:03.320 there as basically an insurance policy in the event everybody declines i think you said by

00:25:09.560 five percent is that is that what it currently is first of all let's talk about this tell us

00:25:13.400 how the program currently works and then tell me how it is that alberta got so disadvantaged out

00:25:18.840 of it so we can see if we can solve two problems at once so what was the the notion behind this

00:25:24.040 fiscal stabilization fund it was there because you know in a similar way to the equalization theory

00:25:29.800 that we don't want to see people in one province unable to provide basic services or afford basic

00:25:36.280 services you know we don't want to walk across the border to lloydminster saskatchewan side and

00:25:41.000 see people dying in parking lots because they can't help them in a hospital um and so the

00:25:46.040 fiscal stabilization is recognizing the provinces are the main deliverer of services and if there's

00:25:52.360 a collapse in revenue in a given province in a given year we don't want them you know suddenly

00:25:57.160 severely rationing basic services to avoid bankruptcy so we'll putting in this stabilization

00:26:04.200 fund to ensure that for that year at least they can be covered and and manage their problem but

00:26:10.200 it only kicks in when you drop more than five percent so there is a kind of we expect certain

00:26:16.040 fluctuations just like we might expect fluctuations between you know ontario and quebec but that

00:26:21.880 shouldn't trigger massive financial payments. That's just the natural course of things. But

00:26:28.300 when there's a sort of catastrophic drop in revenue, then this kicks in. The problem was

00:26:33.780 that in 1982, they decided to set it at a per capita level and didn't adjust it. The

00:26:40.680 per capita level was entirely vaguely determined. There was a pretty much arbitrary number they

00:26:47.260 picked from the most recent thing that happened in BC at the time. And so the result was a 1982

00:26:54.940 arbitrary cap turned into Albertans only being eligible for 250 million dollars of

00:27:01.180 stabilization when the revenues had dropped 8 billion. And so when Albertans were suddenly

00:27:08.380 in dire need of something to help make sure they can keep services going, all that was there was

00:27:15.100 250 million now pei gets 400 million every year from oh my goodness so we're a province of 4.4

00:27:22.940 million have an eight billion dollar collapse in revenue we get 250 million you got a province of

00:27:27.260 a hundred thousand people that gets 400 million every year regardless oh boy those numbers really

00:27:32.700 stand out and manitoba and new brunswick which are a quarter of our size or less they get a

00:27:38.220 2 billion a year from equalization. So it was just manifestly preposterous that this is all we got

00:27:45.740 in return. And so if there was something like that for equalization that basically said,

00:27:51.100 you know, if you're running below average, if you've had some struggles with your economy,

00:27:55.260 here's a kind of sustainable amount of money that will give you to help get you through it

00:28:00.540 for the next five years. I think that's something everybody could get behind. It's this chronic

00:28:06.300 redistribution to the same five provinces every year uh at such staggering levels uh that's that's

00:28:14.140 you know i would argue that after when you see how much quebec is getting uh 13 billion dollars

00:28:21.100 even though they're very close to average or added if you if you count it correctly when on when

00:28:26.060 quebec can balance budgets and start putting away a savings fund that's going to be bigger than our

00:28:31.740 heritage fund pretty soon providing the highest levels of services yes that's partly funded by

00:28:37.180 their high taxes but without the 13 billion a year they were getting from equalization

00:28:42.300 they wouldn't be balancing anything and they would maybe think twice about some of their lavish

00:28:46.700 services so i would say that if the purpose of equalization is to ensure promises are relatively

00:28:53.260 equal in their service delivery it's over equalizing is actually making it relatively

00:28:59.580 harder for Alberta, Ontario, BC to keep up with Quebec and the expectations that they are setting

00:29:06.540 with all the free money that they're getting every year from a flawed program.

00:29:11.120 Well, it's such a good comparison on the other end to be looking at the 13 billion they get

00:29:15.580 consistently and then comparing it to the 250 million we got back when we had such hard times.

00:29:21.480 Do you have a recommendation for how that fiscal stabilization formula should work? And as you say,

00:29:27.380 it's the kind of thing everyone should be able to get behind, even when the NDP were in power.

00:29:31.280 Joe Sisi, who was finance minister at the time, and Rachel Notley, both said that it was

00:29:36.940 manifestly unfair as well and wanted to make the change to it. Did we ever get a revision

00:29:42.840 to that program that is something that's sustainable in the long run?

00:29:46.080 Yeah, interestingly, a lot of people say that, you know, with regard to the referendum,

00:29:53.840 Why didn't why don't we just go get shouldn't you just bring this up with the first ministers and shouldn't you just, you know, write a letter to the prime minister?

00:30:03.000 We managed to get every premier to agree to give Alberta a retroactive payment for that 2015 collapse.

00:30:12.080 And it's pretty it's not you know, it's not hard to get all the premiers to agree for the government to give them all more money.

00:30:17.600 But it's pretty unusual, I think, for them to single out one province.

00:30:21.480 I think Saskatchewan would have got a tiny bit as well.

00:30:23.840 But we would have had a multi-billion dollar retroactive payment and that went to the federal government and they did tweak the cost of living up that $82 per person up to $180 or whatever.

00:30:40.660 But maybe we could get 9% next time instead of 3%.

00:30:45.140 So there was a small concession made to update that arbitrary cap a little bit, but they totally ignored the retroactive payment.

00:30:52.940 So, yeah, I don't see why there should be a cap. I mean, it only kicks in. I mean, how many times can you drop more than 5% of your revenues, right? And if you do, you're in real trouble and you do need help. So, I don't see why there should be any cap on it.

00:31:09.360 um when if i write off my car tomorrow uh i get my full car back i have to pay a premium so there

00:31:17.200 should be a you know take off five percent for for what you uh for a premium but how about you

00:31:23.520 help out the province that suddenly had a collapse because chances are if it's that much of a collapse

00:31:28.240 it's one of those revenue producing natural revenue rich provinces who've been contributing

00:31:33.600 immensely for the 20 years before that so exactly reciprocity there would be much welcome and help

00:31:40.400 national unity let me make sure i understand how it would work so in this modern time that we're

00:31:46.000 dealing with i think we're up to about 60 billion dollars with the revenue right now so if we had a

00:31:51.360 five percent decline off of that now we're now we're down three billion dollars and if we went

00:31:57.040 down as low as you know 10 billion dollars uh because that can happen with our resource revenues

00:32:02.640 is it a dollar for dollar uh way of of support or do you give 50 cents on the dollar or what is the

00:32:08.560 what would be the rule of thumb it's it's i think it's dollar for a dollar after the five percent

00:32:14.640 and you think that would be you think that would be acceptable to the rest of the country because

00:32:17.760 i guess this is just it our our resource revenues are so volatile volatile and such huge variations

00:32:23.120 so we're getting almost 13.8 billion this year in resource revenues i think it's been down as low

00:32:27.760 as 2 billion it would seem like that fiscal stabilization formula might be unfair in the

00:32:33.600 opposite direction where people would feel like we would get overcompensated quite sure resource

00:32:37.680 revenues are only counted at 50 percent so that this uh adjusts for some of that volatility and

00:32:44.080 yeah you could uh definitely curtail the amount of that's subject to resource revenues and just

00:32:50.320 look at things like personal income tax because that was a major part of our drop in in 2015 was

00:32:56.320 general tax revenues so yeah there's ways you could tweak it but it just when when a province

00:33:01.760 faces that kind of collapse it should be getting somewhere close to the amount of support that

00:33:08.160 these chronic recipient provinces are getting every single year that's it's such a good point

00:33:12.720 and i think the other point that you raised that even if it is a resource revenue drop chances are

00:33:18.560 there's it's been preceded by a series of years where that particular province has paid multiple

00:33:24.720 billions into the general pot and so the that that itself would would probably not be over overly

00:33:30.960 compensated if it's just a year or two of additional support no and another way i put it was

00:33:35.120 albertans have been fiscally stabilizing this country for 20 years uh over about 324 billion

00:33:42.640 went from 2000 to 2020 um so we put in 324 billion that's about uh 324 000 per house per family uh

00:33:57.040 over 20 years and then when when we have a collapse and need help they cap that out at

00:34:04.080 70 per person after we gave oh my god in the year we're basically giving 5 000 a year to stabilize

00:34:12.160 the country and when we need something back it's capped at 70 or 170 dollars now per person okay

00:34:19.120 what do you think would if if we were thinking this through and talking this through what what

00:34:23.440 was the ask for that one-time retroactive payment in 2015 what should it have been should it have

00:34:28.160 been more like five billion dollars seven billion number was we calculated it should have been about

00:34:33.120 eight i think they ended up asking for about six and a half and we and we've got a a bit of a

00:34:38.800 raspberry okay so so let's then uh let's then talk about another solution because i think that

00:34:46.080 there's some wisdom in what you've put forward there for fiscal stabilization making it a i mean

00:34:51.920 it should be a true stabilization program so that you don't end up having to dramatically cut any of

00:34:56.960 your social services but would it then require for there to be a pot of money just sitting there

00:35:02.480 and how big of a pot should it be yeah i mean i don't i don't see why they couldn't uh uh

00:35:09.360 when when the provinces are relatively equal maybe the amount that isn't used for the 22

00:35:16.080 billion should go into a special provincial assistance pot for things to draw down on

00:35:21.440 things like that or um or you know pandemic suddenly they decide to to break into that pot

00:35:27.360 and give every province a thousand dollars per person to help with pandemic health supports or

00:35:32.880 something like that but you know if there's if there's resistance to the idea of cutting provincial

00:35:38.640 spending from the feds entirely then let's do it differently and do it smarter and have things

00:35:43.600 like that in reserve for when provinces have real problems well miss i guess you raised a good

00:35:48.480 example with covid because that's the only other circumstance is um alberta was in an unusual

00:35:54.800 situation where we got hit disproportionately hard because of the decline in resource revenues but

00:36:00.080 you'd expect that if there's some dramatic drop in revenues is probably across the board is probably

00:36:06.000 everybody's suffering the same the same problem is that is that i don't know historically if that

00:36:10.240 would hold true but that would be my guess yeah there was a lot made of suddenly alberta being

00:36:15.760 a net recipient that one year in the middle of the pandemic but that was a little bit uh that

00:36:20.960 that was not really honestly presented because that was the result of the federal government

00:36:25.720 suddenly taking $350 billion of debt to pay everybody.

00:36:30.320 And most of those were employment supports.

00:36:32.220 And yes, Albertans have more employed people usually than other provinces.

00:36:36.660 So we got a little bit extra money out of that.

00:36:38.980 But guess what?

00:36:39.980 It all came from debt.

00:36:40.980 And when you factor in the amount of Albertans that are going to pay that debt, we actually

00:36:45.000 still paid about $15 billion net that year.

00:36:47.820 So yeah, just happy to clear that one up.

00:36:50.560 Yeah, I'm glad you did.

00:36:52.360 But yeah, I mean, I don't know.

00:36:54.720 The premiers are, I don't really agree with their desire to have the Canada health transfer

00:36:59.360 increased, and we can talk about the redistribution in various other programs.

00:37:04.260 But if they all want that, and maybe the trade-off can be, okay, you know what?

00:37:08.820 We're going to shave down this equalization program over the next four years and shift

00:37:13.400 those dollars to an equally distributed Canada health transfer, and that would certainly

00:37:18.260 benefit Albertans.

00:37:20.140 But the thing I'd ultimately like to see is just the whole shift in the balance of tax power.

00:37:27.180 The federal tax power is kind of problematic. It makes our provinces dependent on Ottawa,

00:37:35.500 it makes them subject to their whims on how they want us to spend the money. And when you think

00:37:40.460 about what services matter to us on a day to day basis, health and education and roads and things

00:37:48.460 like that um why do we pay twice as much to ottawa as we do to the province they it doesn't

00:37:57.020 make sense so what i'd like to see is a tax point shift so that the wealthier provinces that have

00:38:02.780 different pressures and different costs and higher cost levels and and that need the resources to

00:38:09.180 keep up with you know so they can pay a teacher as much as their neighbor who's working on a welding

00:38:14.300 rig those kind of pressures are real in the prosperous provinces and we want the prosperous

00:38:19.980 provinces to remain prosperous and attractive to labor uh so i just think there should be a shift

00:38:25.500 of tax points of a significant nature so that at least we're paying if anything we should be paying

00:38:30.140 twice as much as the province as the feds but if we get to 50 50 i think that would solve a lot of

00:38:35.420 our problems oh i love what you're saying i do my own taxes and i was just looking at that sheet

00:38:39.900 where it does the summary documents i couldn't believe it that it literally is double that you're

00:38:44.940 you're paying federal versus provincial let's walk through in case people don't understand

00:38:49.900 the different approaches that you've just outlined here because i think that there is one solution

00:38:55.740 where you look at the other transfers that we do which are based on a per capita basis which would

00:39:01.100 be less onerous or less unfair to uh to albert and i want to walk through why it is you you think

00:39:08.060 that that that might be an interim step but not a not a permanent step because i think that that

00:39:12.540 sows the seed of of us having a really constructive conversation with the rest of the country so if i

00:39:17.660 remember the history on this we used to have a canada health and social transfer and then they

00:39:24.700 split out the canada health transfer from the canada social transfer and they had different

00:39:29.420 rules for them both i don't remember what the original rules were for the canada health transfer

00:39:33.740 you might have to remind me of it. But it was significant because I think that Stephen Harper

00:39:40.080 might not get enough credit for this. It was significant that he did say, we're going to

00:39:45.060 transfer to each province on an equal per capita basis, because that allows for at least some

00:39:51.140 fairness between individuals. It doesn't get at this original problem. We talked about that the

00:39:55.660 cost of living is higher in some of the half provinces. So those transfers don't go quite as

00:40:01.600 far as elsewhere, but at least you get something as opposed to nothing. I mean, imagine having a

00:40:06.740 Canada health transfer that only went to the five have not provinces or a social transfer that only

00:40:11.820 went to the five have not provinces. That would be seen to be absurd as well. And so I think

00:40:17.660 they've moved in the right direction on per capita, but you said that there is still some

00:40:22.280 disparity or equalization aspects of those programs that we need to be aware of. What are those?

00:40:27.640 Yeah, well, when Albertans pay for a federal dollar on a per capita basis, they pay about $1.15 lately, and it was as high as $1.20 just because we pay more taxes per person because of the higher incomes.

00:40:46.900 yes but the fact is albertans pay about 15 to 20 percent more per person in taxes than other

00:40:53.300 provinces so to get that dollar back from ottawa we have to pay a buck 15. whereas someone like

00:41:01.540 quebec only pays 95 cents to get that buck back and in new brunswick it's 90 cents to get that

00:41:07.380 dollar back so because of the different incomes across the country every time the federal

00:41:13.140 government grows by a dollar, Albertans lose at least 15 cents. And that's only when we get the

00:41:18.340 full dollar back. So what you had happening before 2014 was there was an equalization component in

00:41:25.520 the health transfer. And they basically said, if you're over a certain amount of fiscal capacity,

00:41:30.020 I think is how they used it. And Alberta was the only one that fit that bill. You get your

00:41:36.140 health transfers clawed back because you don't need as much help. And so in addition to paying

00:41:41.820 a buck 15 for all the dollars that were going out we were only getting about 80 you know 80 85 cents

00:41:47.440 on the dollar back so there was a double equalization that that the harper government

00:41:51.740 got rid of uh but but still today you know if we just paid alberta our tax dollars to pay for health

00:41:59.760 we wouldn't lose anything it would all stay in the province every dollar we put into health would go

00:42:05.280 into health in our province but as it is because of the different disparity across the country even

00:42:10.920 And when you get a dollar back, you're paying a buck 15 for it.

00:42:13.620 So I would like to see instead of increasing the health transfer, I would like to see the federal government or someone get into the federal government that says, you know what?

00:42:22.780 Ottawa has gotten too big.

00:42:24.120 Ottawa has gotten too meddlesome.

00:42:25.900 We are going to shift the way this all works and we will drop taxes 4% or 5% and we expect the provinces to raise it 5% to even it out.

00:42:37.460 But maybe your province needs to do 6%.

00:42:40.340 maybe your province can get away with only doing 4%, but we are giving up 5% of our tax base to

00:42:46.600 the provinces to promote independence and get auto out of their business. That would be my dream

00:42:52.140 scenario. Yeah. So you have a couple of numbers off the top of your head, which I think really

00:42:56.900 well illustrated it. What about our friends in Ontario and BC who should be just as mad as we

00:43:02.080 are? How is there, what's the proper term for this? Is it tax efficiency? I mean, if you're

00:43:06.580 paying a buck 15 or a buck 20 to get a buck back. That doesn't seem very efficient to me. So

00:43:11.200 I don't know what the correct terminology is. It's the have provinces that have more incomes

00:43:16.600 to tax, pay a bigger share. And theirs is about $1.5 in BC and $1.7 in Ontario. So it's basically

00:43:25.240 a 7% premium on every federal dollar. And so it's frustrating. I did speak with the

00:43:32.220 parliamentary secretary for premier forward on intergovernmental relations uh when i a couple

00:43:36.380 years ago when we visited there and i just said you do realize though that you know as someone

00:43:40.860 running a provincial budget you might love it when ottawa gives you free money but your taxpayers

00:43:46.220 probably don't because they're paying about a buck seven to ottawa in order to get that dollar

00:43:51.660 to come back to their provincial government and he's you know i hadn't really thought of it that

00:43:56.220 way so i'm we're having some success and getting some people to think about these things uh from

00:44:01.900 a taxpayer's perspective because ultimately that should be what matters uh but it's but it's always

00:44:07.180 hard when you're a person when you're a premier running a province you know i think back in 1957

00:44:12.140 probably when they started this there was these negotiations and quebec wanted to raise their own

00:44:16.780 taxes and and told ottawa to butt out i think some of the other problems were like hmm do i want

00:44:22.380 ottawa to just give us the money or do i want them to then make us raise taxes and tax people

00:44:27.980 directly and and maybe the politicians kind of prefer to have someone else do the raising of

00:44:34.220 the money for them even if it means giving up some of the autonomy interesting it would be nice to

00:44:39.580 reset that clock uh all the way back to 1957 and have premiers look ahead and say you know what

00:44:45.420 ottawa thank you for the offer of refunding some of our federal tax dollars but how about you just

00:44:49.740 cut federal taxes and let us tax it ourselves you have just solved a mystery to me about why we've

00:44:55.100 put up with this for so long or where it began and everybody likes to poke poke to the other guy and

00:45:00.780 say oh it's their fault when a bad decision is made but it's my uh it i get the glory when it's

00:45:07.580 a good decision so if provinces want to get all the glory for spending the money and they wanted

00:45:12.140 to pick the ottawa as the bad guy for taxing in a way that makes that makes more sense to me than

00:45:17.580 anything i've heard because this allowing it to get this out of whack is so unacceptable i have

00:45:23.100 to wonder what are the political motivations of keeping it there and you've helped fill one of

00:45:26.940 the gaps for me now the other the other thing i want to just really underscore what you said

00:45:32.540 because i've said this in speeches and now you've given me some some actual dollar figures i can use

00:45:38.140 to to talk about this is i say every time the federal government announces a new national

00:45:45.660 program. They want Alberta to disproportionately pay for it, that we will always end up paying

00:45:52.240 more and getting less. And so when you talk about national daycare, national dentistry,

00:45:58.220 national pharmacare, national long-term care, I saw a story that suggested that those were going

00:46:03.260 to be $25 billion a year, more in federal spending. And based on what you've told me,

00:46:10.360 that for every dollar Alberta gets back, we're going to be spending anywhere from $1.15 to $1.20

00:46:17.200 in extra taxes. Another way to do it is take whatever this total envelope is, and about 15%

00:46:24.800 to 17% of that is going to come from Albertans, but we're never going to get more than 11.5% back.

00:46:31.320 So the bigger that bill gets, the bigger the net transfer to Canadians gets. So if you scaled

00:46:38.460 everything back to core federal government functions uh you know defense national banking

00:46:45.580 the the things that they're constitutionally required to do you know no albertan would say

00:46:51.340 i i don't you know i don't care if i make more money i'm not willing to disproportionately pay

00:46:56.300 for national defense no they wouldn't um but the problem is the federal government is getting

00:47:02.380 so big and getting further and further into provincial affairs that albertans are paying

00:47:07.580 thousands, you know, $2,400, $600 per person it works out to roughly, just taking the total

00:47:14.660 tax base out of Alberta for equalization. Now that $600 is going, more than half of it's going

00:47:20.880 to Quebec to fund their provincial government. Now I have no say in how Quebec's provincial

00:47:28.060 government decides to spend those dollars. I have no say in how the economic policies they decide

00:47:33.880 on that maybe keep them from reaching their potential but i'm forced to pay 600 equivalent

00:47:41.800 every year to pay for their provincial government and and the ones beside them it's just it's just

00:47:48.680 so it divorces the accountability for the people making the decisions from the ones collecting the

00:47:53.640 money from the ones paying the money and it's and it and if if the federal government would just

00:47:58.600 take seriously that the people the government leaders making the decisions should be asking

00:48:05.080 the people for the money for the things that they're spending the money on it's a pretty

00:48:09.160 much basic principle of representative democracy that's being continually undermined the bigger the

00:48:14.040 federal government gets and the more the redistribution happens the uh i guess the

00:48:18.520 argument would be and this is what ottawa always says is that when they tax it at federal level

00:48:24.520 it's their money and so they would be able to argue well the democratic accountability comes

00:48:30.760 when we campaign on these things we campaign for all these national programs therefore we got the

00:48:35.800 mandate therefore uh we have the ability to spend it as we as we please i'm sure you've got an answer

00:48:41.640 to that yeah i'm not saying it's illegal i'm saying it's bad politics and and that and but

00:48:48.520 people aren't really aware of it and so we're you know if people can help us out and try and get this

00:48:53.880 word across and people should share your show when you're talking about these topics and just

00:48:59.320 kind of re-educate people as to what's actually going on with their tax dollars because it's too

00:49:06.040 you know it's it's not something the mainstream media gets very excited about and and those who

00:49:11.880 kind of prefer bigger government and don't really trust people keeping their profits to themselves

00:49:18.040 um they're never going to want to open up this this topic generally or make a or highlight it

00:49:24.200 so it's just something we have to keep working at to get people to understand it and and like i said

00:49:30.360 we're trying to target people in bc and ontario because they're the ones that have a lot in

00:49:35.960 common with us on this uh equalization is hardly just an alberto problem we've got saskatchewan's

00:49:41.560 already on board um but the general problem of of well productive regions footing an increasingly

00:49:50.040 large bill for the federal government to redistribute to for political reasons and for

00:49:55.480 other reasons uh it's just a growing growing problem and it needs to have somebody willing

00:50:01.400 to put a stop to it and and it requires millions of people to want to put a stop to it completely

00:50:07.320 And I, you know, I did have somebody come up to me after I talked about some of the data that you put forward and Rob and others have put forward and they said, I didn't know it was that bad.

00:50:18.440 So now thank you for the role that you are doing in educating people, because I had felt like the solution on equalization might be to just roll it into transfers, because I think that was one of the things that Scott Moe suggested.

00:50:31.640 he said fine keep 50 of what we currently have in the fund let's call it 20 billion dollars just for

00:50:37.160 ease of calculation so if we're gonna have 20 billion dollars in equalization take 10 billion

00:50:42.440 of it and distribute it out to the provinces on a per capita basis because then we'd at least get

00:50:47.560 something in the half provinces and then you still have a pot of money in in equalization there seemed

00:50:52.280 to be some merit to that what did you think of that proposal i i mean i like it as the kind of

00:50:58.120 of politically compromised sort of solution that should be something people could sell.

00:51:06.400 I'd much rather get 90 cents back on the dollar than zero, which is what is currently the case.

00:51:12.320 But as I said, I'd rather maybe that be part of a bigger picture where they say,

00:51:18.120 we're going to top up health transfers with this bit of equalization money. And then we're still

00:51:24.120 going to uh do a tax point transfer to shift the the tax room from the federal from the federal

00:51:31.480 government to provinces i just i feel like there's a message there that most would resonate with

00:51:36.600 yeah like how upset could quebecers get uh about the government wanting to give them tax points

00:51:44.040 i mean and they would but they'd say oh they're trying to screw up well we're giving you tax

00:51:49.160 points you get more autonomy i just feel like it it's a sellable message uh if if you lay the

00:51:55.320 groundwork if you put it if you did it correctly i guess i i have no one has this long uh time

00:52:00.520 horizon but i figured what if if it's 20 billion dollars just shifted a billion dollars per year

00:52:07.400 towards the transfers and then each province could make their own deal with the federal government

00:52:12.600 to do the tax point transfer that you're talking about so it seems to me like we need a simultaneous

00:52:17.400 elimination of this equalization approach towards something that is more fair, which gives you the

00:52:24.460 individual per capita transfers. But knowing how unfair it is to us, it's pretty clear we should

00:52:30.200 switch automatically to just saying, you know what, we don't want transfers from you anymore.

00:52:35.800 We'll take the equivalent amount in tax points. I need people to understand a little better about

00:52:40.780 how that works. Because part of the issue is that we're not really synced up on our tax rates

00:52:47.020 anymore. We've got different tax brackets that kick in at different levels, and there's different

00:52:51.920 percentages. So I'm still a bit unclear about how it is that we would make that adjustment. I'm

00:52:59.200 sure you've given some thought to that. But let me let me ask the first question, because it sounds

00:53:03.320 to me like you've done this calculation. The federal level of government is actually pretty

00:53:07.780 boring weights and measures and central banking and international agreements and i mean defense

00:53:17.060 is the most important area and it's it's woefully behind what our international commitment should be

00:53:23.620 foreign aid is important but again i don't think we're meeting our international commitments there

00:53:27.780 seems like the federal government wants to deliver on every program except for take care of the

00:53:33.860 business that they are constitutionally mandated to take care of now if they were just to focus

00:53:39.540 on the things that they do and do it well how big would that not be do you know how like i'm trying

00:53:45.780 to figure out how small we can get our federal government is there some way that you can put

00:53:50.500 that into numbers for us yeah the easiest way i i did a looked at their budget a couple years ago

00:53:57.620 and uh they were just a little over 300 billion dollars overall 75 billion of that was going to

00:54:04.900 provincial transfers direct to provinces so the health transfer you know 55 billion for chd and

00:54:11.780 cst that's kind of social transfer and then 20 billion for equalization another 4 billion to the

00:54:17.140 territories so that was about a quarter of their budget another quarter though was in payments to

00:54:22.500 persons for things like child child care uh child benefits seniors benefits um disabilities the

00:54:31.300 things like that which which under the original constitution should fall under provincial as well

00:54:37.220 so if we got them entirely out of those two things that's half the budget and then there's that's not

00:54:42.820 accounting some of the things like post-secondary uh there's there's still cult arts and culture

00:54:48.980 you could say shouldn't really be federal um there's a there's a bunch of smaller things

00:54:54.020 but it's at least half the budget all right let's be let's be ferocious about this then

00:54:59.220 so let's assume that we want to get to a position where we are only sending to ottawa the money

00:55:06.900 that is our portion of their of the the uh of of the federal programs that they provide

00:55:13.860 and we're telling them we don't want your transfers anymore we just want the tax points

00:55:18.100 we will collect all the money that we need and don't you worry about transferring us or our

00:55:22.340 people one penny how would that adjustment look from a tax point point of view would it essentially

00:55:28.020 be i mean you talked about it would basically like if because if if a federal is double the

00:55:34.260 size of provincial and we're talking about cutting federal in half then the provincial

00:55:38.100 would be doubled and it would it would just flip them yeah so yeah so in that circumstance

00:55:45.220 it wouldn't seem to make much sense for the federal government to collect our personal

00:55:49.460 income taxes on our behalf now would it i mean if if the lion's share of the money

00:55:54.420 is coming to us and ought to come to us and a smaller portion goes to them wouldn't it make

00:56:00.980 sense that one of the reforms we should be looking for is to collect our own personal

00:56:04.740 income taxes so that we can take more control over that yeah that would make sense um but

00:56:11.540 again we're talking about the federal government kind of giving up a lot of its like even even the

00:56:18.980 smaller government folks at the federal scene usually want to do different smaller government

00:56:25.140 things with federal dollars there's just um it's it's a long uphill battle to get you know get the

00:56:31.780 king to give up that much power to the nobles uh and and but but if you work hard enough at it and

00:56:38.260 don't give them a choice and get enough people uh demanding it then you know if if it means

00:56:44.980 i'm holding on to the greater toronto and greater vancouver area and staying in government then you

00:56:49.540 might get somebody to do it but but it's going to take a lot of of plowing the fields in places like

00:56:55.380 that to get the people on board because that's the only way it's going to happen so tell me

00:57:00.260 are there any efficiency arguments that you can make from canada revenue agency because that's

00:57:05.620 what uh i mean even our own provincial politicians obviously no one has ever decided to pursue that

00:57:11.780 even though we have great capacity to raise taxes we seem to be able to manage complex programs to

00:57:17.220 collect royalties and everything else but somehow we're to believe that it all falls apart when it

00:57:21.860 comes to personal income tax but it does strike me that if there are all of these inefficiencies

00:57:27.540 in every other program that we pay more than we get back in return i'm i'm questioning whether

00:57:35.060 there are very many efficiencies in canada revenue agency i'm questioning whether it really would cost

00:57:41.380 all that much for us to repatriate that function because let's face it businesses are the tax

00:57:46.580 collector for the country they're the ones who write the checks to the employees and remit the

00:57:52.100 taxes on their behalf the only real function that a bureaucracy has is an audit function to make

00:57:58.420 sure that everybody's telling the truth so it doesn't strike me that this should be a huge

00:58:03.620 additional expense but maybe there's something i'm missing and i want to put it to you have you

00:58:06.500 thought that through yeah i mean i also remember 10 years ago people suggesting we should stop

00:58:12.100 collecting corporate taxes because it's just we can empty out one tower of bureaucrats uh close

00:58:16.820 to the legislature there if we just let the feds do it uh i do but then i've heard there are very

00:58:22.020 good reasons given the uniqueness of our energy sector and other things for us to be doing that

00:58:26.180 ourselves i've i've read something recently about quebec i did a study on how much they could save

00:58:32.020 by letting the feds by giving up their provincial revenue collection and it was about 400 million

00:58:37.860 they thought they could save if they just let the feds do it so given that they're twice our size

00:58:42.900 i'm assuming it's something like uh um 200 200 maybe 170 million dollars uh to add those

00:58:51.380 bureaucrats to do it here and and i'm just not sold like if you asked me if i'd rather spend

00:58:56.980 170 000 on collecting our taxes and having bureaucrats uh downtown or a provincial police

00:59:03.460 force i think i'd much rather spend the money on something like that which seems to have a more

00:59:07.940 meaningful uh and also a possible improvement on services so uh but i think it wouldn't be a little

00:59:15.860 you know it's a sizable expense if out of principle we wanted to do it we could for sure

00:59:21.060 there's no problem with the competency etc but uh but it is it is a significant cost and and i think

00:59:28.020 probably people would maybe agree with me that if we're gonna put 170 million into something the

00:59:34.180 feds are already doing i'd rather do the policing side you know what it is for me it's it's to make

00:59:38.660 those lines very clear it's that right now ottawa acts like it's all their money and they're doing

00:59:44.820 us a favor to give us some of it back and i think it's also masked just how unfair the differential

00:59:52.580 has become because let's face it i don't think most people are nerds like me and do their own

00:59:56.100 taxes they they probably get h and r block to do it and they just know either they're getting a

01:00:00.020 return or they're not they're probably not all that clear on who gets what right and on the payroll

01:00:04.900 payroll tabs it just says income tax right right so i i kind of like to demand that in alberta you

01:00:12.020 separate the two and say nice parts estimated for feds and which is estimated for province

01:00:17.300 oh well i like the clarity around that because people then would ask the question how much are

01:00:21.220 we getting back all right we're not going to cut we'll we'll we'll fight this one to a draw i still

01:00:25.540 think that personally collecting our personal income tax is the the most important step that

01:00:29.380 we can take as a step to telling ottawa that we really are going to be doing things differently

01:00:34.500 now so let's let's walk through then um i i asked you a double-barreled question so the other part

01:00:40.740 of the question was the transfer of tax points so does that mean that you just look at all of the

01:00:46.740 different tax brackets we have and i think it's like a 12 and a or there's a 10 and a 12 and a

01:00:52.740 15 i think there's four it would basically be the feds would decide what they're cutting so they

01:00:59.060 maybe they would take their 26 and drop to 24 and take 23 and drop to 21 and like shift everything

01:01:05.140 down however many points worked out to the amount of dollars they were basically willing to give up

01:01:10.020 got it um and then the provinces would turn around and say okay they were now going to be getting um

01:01:16.260 like alberta gets about seven billion dollars in health transfers so now we're only going to be

01:01:20.500 getting two billion we need to find a way to make up that five billion in alberta that's about five

01:01:24.420 percent tax point so they would the provinces could then just figure out what they need to

01:01:28.820 increase to make up for the lost revenue that makes sense and so you you could you could put

01:01:33.460 all of them up equally or you could decide that the middle group was going to take a little bit

01:01:37.460 of a higher hit or you decided the higher income group was going to take a higher hit but it would

01:01:41.460 be it would be a negotiated amount okay well that's fair enough and how easy would it be to

01:01:45.940 do that okay so like let's say we put aside the issue of collecting our own personal income tax

01:01:52.020 we can do this this tax point transfer even with the status quo system that we have what if we

01:01:56.740 decided tomorrow all right all right ottawa we don't want to take your transfers anymore we're

01:02:02.100 just going to shift to tax points let's do it ottawa would well i would think ottawa would say

01:02:08.100 well interesting thought well we'll give it some thought but no we're going to keep sending you

01:02:12.420 your transfers and taxing your people um but if if a government had a different opinion and saw

01:02:18.740 there was a movement afoot that people wanted more provincial autonomy uh yeah it'd be extremely

01:02:24.900 simple uh ottawa could announce as of you know july 1st our tax rates are blank and here's the

01:02:31.540 new amount of health transfers you're getting and provinces you know figure out how to make up the

01:02:37.380 shuffle and you now have more tax power you're welcome look at us uh making uh making the

01:02:42.980 empowering the provinces i mean now quebec has been able to do that so why wouldn't we be able

01:02:48.820 to do that or is it did it happen so long ago that everybody's forgotten the reasons for it and

01:02:54.020 everybody just quietly uh ignores it and hopes no one else asks for the same thing well i mean it's

01:02:58.900 it's less a matter of who is collecting the taxes and who you're sending your money to because you

01:03:05.540 know the tax points would mean that suddenly you know if i was paying uh five thousand dollars to

01:03:11.460 the province and ten thousand of the feds this year for taxes next year i'd be sending ten thousand

01:03:16.900 of the province and five thousand the feds and again that makes the the people delivering the

01:03:22.100 service the ones that are accountable to the people they're delivering it to to pay for it i

01:03:27.860 I mean, it's a very simple principle and it, I think, leads to better government.

01:03:32.560 And if the feds really wanted to hold on to a chunk so they could still threaten with Canada Health Act transgressions and things, that's probably something we can't get around.

01:03:43.840 But just a major shift in just, you know, we don't need your help collecting our taxes for our services.

01:03:49.880 And in fact, when you're Alberta, BC and Ontario, we don't need your help subsidizing other people's services.

01:03:55.820 You know, either have equalization or do all this subsidization through all these other schemes where we pay in more than we get back.

01:04:03.460 Pick one or the other, equalize through health transfers or equalize through equalization.

01:04:07.560 But why are we double equalizing everything?

01:04:09.940 That's such a good point.

01:04:10.840 OK, so I know that a lot of what you've done is trying to get the other have provinces on board with your campaign.

01:04:18.940 So we've talked a little bit about Ontario and B.C.

01:04:22.220 and i i wonder if if it's that we feel it more acutely because the numbers are so huge on a

01:04:28.220 per person basis per family basis and the amount that we pay versus what we get back in services

01:04:33.980 is just so stark in alberta so i think more and more people are concerned about it is the attitude

01:04:39.660 in on in ontario and bc and not worth the fight and we've got enough money and we're managing

01:04:46.780 just fine as we are so it's sort of inertia we've always done it this way why do a big change

01:04:52.220 I think, yeah, I'm sensing it's more than just the sheer number of dollars, that there is a cultural, political culture difference.

01:05:03.380 I think Ontario sometimes sees itself as sort of the big brother that needs to keep the peace and not ruffle anybody's feathers.

01:05:11.420 And BC kind of used itself as, you know, on the other side of the mountains.

01:05:17.200 and we don't really want to be bothered with uh and it's kind of a nice blissful existence

01:05:23.280 i would imagine but um but but there's also you know in social media you know we send out

01:05:29.360 something to our supporters it's it's you know half albertans and then 20 or 30 percent ontario

01:05:36.400 and 10 or 20 bc so there is people with whom the message is resonating we did get some media

01:05:43.280 coverage uh in in ontario and we went to to present there and launch a billboard we got

01:05:49.440 our equalization column ran in the vancouver province so there there's some appetite that's

01:05:54.560 growing uh i think the more the more the federal government continues to expand uh the more people

01:06:04.240 will start trying to figure out you know what's where's where's the other shoe gonna drop on this

01:06:09.280 because they can't just keep bringing in 10 billion dollar programs every few months uh

01:06:15.680 without somebody paying a price and and i think um you know i'm we're going to be asking every

01:06:23.680 premier to and then yeah so the other part was that the equalization uh will expire in 2024.

01:06:30.160 we think there's been enough um enough interest and and i think if anything the referendum has

01:06:37.360 done it's sort of made it really hard to just renew that in 2024 again so i will be trying to

01:06:46.240 reach out to every premier and sort of say hey would you like to meet and we can explain this

01:06:50.720 to you but it's really important that we don't just renegotiate again or don't let it renew again

01:06:56.560 in 2024 it needs to be renegotiated uh and we'll try uh the the leadership candidates uh and and

01:07:03.440 the leaders of every provincial or federal party and just start beating the drum that started

01:07:10.480 hopefully in october and keep uh keep beating it through the next year because it's kind of

01:07:14.640 a critical period if it if nothing's been done by the end of 2023 then it's just going to get

01:07:19.760 renewed in 2024. exactly so um so tell me what you think that the the premier of alberta should do

01:07:25.760 because the we we have a mandate that was given to us by the people to to take equalization out

01:07:33.280 of the constitution so that may have been overly ambitious to attempt to do that but to have the

01:07:39.200 federal government respond with oh here's our answer to equalization we're going to give you

01:07:43.600 environment minister stephen gilbeau that's about the biggest poke in the eye i could possibly

01:07:47.440 imagine the most the the most extreme radical green activist in government who climbed on the

01:07:54.720 roof of ralph klein's home climbed the cn tower to oppose fossil fuels that immediately followed

01:08:00.240 the equalization referendum and i i can't imagine that that was oh i didn't realize that how it would

01:08:05.040 be perceived i think it was directly that we just pounce that we're not even really interested in

01:08:09.760 what you have to say and there's been precisely nothing done on it so was it that we really

01:08:14.320 didn't have any power to do anything anyway or is there some practical steps that that the premier

01:08:19.120 could take to put that mandate into practice uh i think it is building coalitions i think the

01:08:28.160 government in ontario right now is solely focused on trying to coast through an election campaign

01:08:33.840 without stirring any waters uh we've already got saskatchewan on board bc is the interesting one

01:08:40.320 because while you know i don't know how many things uh the bc and alberta governments agree on

01:08:49.440 this is straightforwardly the federal government is taking a bunch of money from your taxpayers

01:08:55.440 and giving it to quebec and the maritimes uh i don't see why the ndp populist uh premier there

01:09:03.200 wouldn't be just as keen to say hey you know this isn't just forget about alberta's referendum this

01:09:08.560 is a rip off and we want this renegotiated so i i feel like there's a chance to get if you can get

01:09:15.920 ontario and bc on board then then suddenly you've got a pretty significant coalition of people who

01:09:22.160 can do that um you know exact strategic considerations on how to get a hostile

01:09:30.240 federal government to do things you want when you're only 10 11 of the country i don't know

01:09:36.240 exactly how to do that but uh yeah i i i don't think this is over by a long shot and we're

01:09:41.600 certainly not gonna let it be over and uh and i think there's a real hope that we can get

01:09:46.800 significant reforms by 2024. i don't know if you remember this but i i remember somebody making me

01:09:53.040 aware that going into i think i'm trying to remember how often these agreements get renewed

01:09:58.720 i think it's every five years and so it would have been in 2014 it was coming up for renewal

01:10:03.360 and someone made me aware that Quebec had a 30 page position paper about what they wanted out

01:10:10.320 of equalization and we started asking questions well does the Alberta government have a position

01:10:15.920 paper going into these negotiations it ultimately didn't end up mattering because initially Harper

01:10:22.000 just uh grandfathered the five-year deal and then so maybe that's why you know maybe that helped him

01:10:27.200 say like Quebec's already you know way ahead of everybody on this one they're the only ones who

01:10:32.080 care about it why would i risk their wrath when no one else is even asking me to so maybe we need to

01:10:38.720 have an official government position paper about what to do about equalization do you know if

01:10:42.800 something like that exists or is in the works uh i don't know uh but i agree it's a that's a good

01:10:50.320 plan and i was thinking about that myself uh because the more that that people are aware i

01:10:55.680 mean i think like i said the referendum helped show that albert and and saskatchewan coming up

01:11:00.400 with proposals for reform shows that there's two provinces that aren't just going to sit around

01:11:04.640 when you try and push this through next time uh the key is to have a couple more but i think a

01:11:09.360 position paper outlining uh i think there may be in a in a bit of a pickle on that at the moment

01:11:14.880 because they the referendum was to remove it entirely so it's it's even though it was presented

01:11:20.960 as let's make this radical step so that we can at least rattle their cage and get some negotiations

01:11:26.640 going uh shifting to okay here's what we're excited for is maybe tricky but it's obviously

01:11:32.400 what was always planned so i i don't think it's too difficult to come up with some reforms like

01:11:36.800 the ones i've pointed out you know count hydro correctly take off the growth escalator for gdp

01:11:43.600 and make some adjustment for cost of living and suddenly you've got a program that doesn't change

01:11:49.040 all that much for the most of the recipients uh but except quebec and well sorry quebec is actually

01:11:56.400 at the average and they shouldn't be getting anything so that's what's fair well it does

01:12:00.880 seem to me that you can also write a position paper where this is the mandate we were given

01:12:05.280 where we want to get to eventually and here is a one or two or five or ten year plan to get there

01:12:12.800 and then you can have all of these incremental steps outlined and it may well be that alberta

01:12:18.080 decides to chart a different course than some of the other provinces maybe some of the other

01:12:21.920 provinces like the federal government collecting money on their behalf and transferring it to them

01:12:25.680 And then relying on that, maybe they wouldn't want to have the tax point transfer.

01:12:31.140 But those provinces who do should be able to argue that.

01:12:34.720 And I think if we can couple those things, that would make some sense.

01:12:38.360 Now, here's the other big problem, because all of these discussions seem to center around

01:12:45.320 whether you're a federalist or whatever the opposite of a federalist is.

01:12:49.840 I mean, I think I'm a provincialist.

01:12:51.920 Is that such a thing?

01:12:52.740 I kind of think that the way our country ought to work and would work better, because each province has its own unique identity, its own unique priorities.

01:13:03.400 I think trying to overlay a federal government perspective, which is so heavily influenced by the Quebec government perspective, trying to overlay that across the entire province, it just is asking for division.

01:13:16.920 And so it strikes me that we would have a better federation if Quebec could be Quebec and Alberta could be Alberta.

01:13:21.480 But I think that the opposite of that is that I think the federal government really feels it needs to take an activist role to keep us all together, that there's going to be something fundamentally unstable if they don't provide the baseline so that we have national standards.

01:13:37.400 And I'm wondering how we argue that point, because I do really firmly believe that we would end up with less polarization and greater unity if we didn't constantly feel like we had programs or ideology or anti-energy sector rhetoric shoved down our throats.

01:13:57.300 I think that it would actually lead to a more peaceful federation.

01:14:00.800 So how do you see it?

01:14:01.760 I think all the things that we've been talking about will enrage some people. They have been enraging people for decades. But if the government can't get off its obsession with Alberta's energy sector and this notion that it's somehow untenable to keep Alberta's main economic engine functioning

01:14:30.620 for the next 30 or 40 years while the world wants the product uh i mean i i did a political philosophy

01:14:37.180 degree and one of the first sort of modern theorists was thomas hobbes and he basically said

01:14:41.820 the state of nature is nasty and awful and you should just be happy to have a king who can keep

01:14:46.220 order and as long as he's not trying to kill you you should you should be respectful and obey but

01:14:52.060 then tom john locke came around and said yeah okay he as long as he's not killing you and stealing

01:14:57.500 your property and making it so you can't you know thrive as a human being in economic sense

01:15:04.140 then you kind of also have a revolution uh right to revolution so there's all these this is all the

01:15:11.020 background these fiscal unfairnesses that are chronic and now there's this acute shift where

01:15:16.700 our main sector is under attack and i i don't like it's it's to be to be just so disrespectful

01:15:24.940 on so many levels and then ultimately to threaten people's future livelihood and the chance of their

01:15:30.700 children to having anything like the life they had uh it's it's a awful recipe and i don't see

01:15:38.260 how they can think it's sustainable um and there needs to be some wins and recognition and and uh

01:15:45.840 and give something back to alberta and saskatchewan and bc or else it's just severely negligent

01:15:52.180 governance and so yes i think provincial autonomy on a lot of these fronts uh is is uh is critical

01:15:59.860 and i think it would go a long ways towards uh ensuring that country actually functions for

01:16:06.020 another 50 years i i have to hope that it is not just uh targeting us for um for the for the sake

01:16:14.660 of of winning votes in the rest of the country because it does appear that way i i i would i

01:16:19.620 hope that there's just a disconnect of not fully understanding and appreciating how big the energy

01:16:26.740 sector is how much it employs how much how integrated our various economies are because

01:16:32.900 i remember when there was a fundamental turning point in alberta was when francois legault said

01:16:40.020 we don't want your dirty oil but because of this escalator clause and equalization there's money

01:16:44.340 left over so they ended up with an extra billion dollars at the same time as we're suffering with

01:16:48.100 deficits and shortfalls and not able to get fiscal stabilization and they're not only bragging about

01:16:54.580 balanced budgets but as you point out putting money away in the in their uh in their own savings

01:16:59.940 account it just seems to me is there is there really that kind of disconnect i mean do they

01:17:05.620 do they not understand how connected everybody's prosperity is because of alberta's prosperity

01:17:11.540 again i i we used a lot we used that quote from premier higgs a lot and he just basically said

01:17:19.220 if if alberta isn't prospering and paying the federal bill i don't know how we keep getting

01:17:23.980 the payments we need to survive and provide basic services so he got it uh it's it's even i think if

01:17:30.120 even if a quebec leader got it he couldn't say it out loud but on top of that there's this sort

01:17:36.140 a slap in the face of geopolitical reality. I think it's one thing to think that what the world

01:17:43.620 needs most is less carbon emissions and think that's the most noble thing you could sacrifice

01:17:49.480 for. But when Canada decides to just boy scout itself, mostly at Alberta's expense, it then

01:17:57.780 finds that people like Vladimir Putin suddenly feel like they're empowered and rich. And

01:18:05.120 And, you know, Quebec also cancelled its LNG port, Saguenay facility it had planned.

01:18:12.660 If that was in place right now, suddenly Europe would have an alternative to Putin.

01:18:17.180 So it's just it's so short sighted to think that somehow making Canada poorer is going to save the world.

01:18:25.740 And that really is what's at stake here, because there's no way any of these renewable projects are going to be anywhere near as beneficial to Canada

01:18:34.180 as the energy sector has been uh we have this amazing world resource that anyone in the world

01:18:39.940 would kill literally kill for uh and we're willing to basically strangle this goose that could lay

01:18:46.660 so many golden eggs that go all over the country um and it's it's it's really infuriating maybe

01:18:53.060 even more than things like uh chronic equalization payments you better before i ask you one one

01:19:00.020 final question because i want to pursue this a little bit more with you how big is quebec's um

01:19:06.500 heritage fund or whatever it is that they're calling it because i didn't even know that they

01:19:10.500 were socking money away until i i think there was a maybe a column you wrote or a column i read in

01:19:14.820 the newspaper and it's what in the world i mean we're if you've got billions of dollars to sock

01:19:21.380 away then why are you still getting the same amount of equalization it seems so obvious to me

01:19:26.100 that there's a problem here but what's the history of that fund yeah uh ted morton wrote about it i

01:19:31.860 think first he's one of the vice presidents of fairness alberta and uh they they had a cert

01:19:37.700 finally had a surplus uh four or five years ago and said you know what the responsible thing would

01:19:42.900 be to do is put some of this away for for the generations fund and uh and it's it's scheduled

01:19:50.500 to surpass the 17 billion in our heritage fund i think next year i don't maybe the pandemic affected

01:19:56.740 what kind of results it had but that quickly they can they can sock away four or five

01:20:03.940 billion of their surplus which is again instead of a five six seven billion deficit they have a

01:20:10.580 four billion dollar surplus because of the 13 billion they're unfairly getting pre-equalization

01:20:15.940 but at least they're i guess doing the responsible thing and putting some of it away for a future

01:20:19.860 generations um yeah it's it's it's it's pretty pretty uh infuriating while at the same time

01:20:27.140 uh you know yeah like you said not just taking a bunch of our dollars but sort of insulting us at

01:20:32.260 the same time and so part of the bigger picture i think is is also taking this opportunity with

01:20:38.820 the ukraine war and helping canadians get the geopolitical realities of canada shutting in its

01:20:46.420 resources uh but that's a campaign that we're going to be taking also to ontario and bc in the

01:20:51.700 next little bit because you know it's one thing to just view alberta as a cash cow but then it's

01:20:56.820 another thing to kind of have a negative view of the cow so we're gonna see what we can do to uh

01:21:02.340 help take this moment in in world history and and drive home messages that a lot of us have been

01:21:08.020 giving for 10 or 20 years well i'm glad to hear that and you know what let's say bravo quebec

01:21:12.820 they're becoming more fiscally conservative and that should be a positive thing but it would be

01:21:16.980 nice if they would allow for us to get the full benefit of our resources the same way that they're

01:21:24.420 that they have their autonomy to develop there's no michael binion who owns a company out there and

01:21:29.220 he he has a natural gas company in quebec which should be a pretty lucrative thing in the eastern

01:21:35.060 seaboard they all want natural gas out there and they want to export it but they've basically said

01:21:40.980 nope and you know i should say as well that that particular project by quest air he wants to make

01:21:46.820 it net zero as well because he believes that he can capture the co2 and either bury it or turn

01:21:50.820 it into useful products so it wouldn't even increase their greenhouse gas emissions but

01:21:55.380 he's still not sure they're going to even let that happen well that's what i'm curious about

01:21:59.220 because as you may know i've been an early adopter of the the net zero by 2050 aspiration because i

01:22:06.100 really think that with our poor space with the innovation that we have we've already figured out

01:22:12.260 how to use co2 for enhanced oil recovery so we can use it for other things like carbon nanofiber

01:22:18.260 and cement and plastics and uh and poly and plastics or an ethylene and so on and so forth

01:22:25.060 so i really and hydrogen as well there's a huge hydrogen conference last week that had 4 000 or

01:22:32.100 more delegates to it the federal government was there i feel like okay you set this target out

01:22:37.700 for us that you wanted us to deal with our emissions we're going to deal with it a different

01:22:42.020 way we're not going to keep it in the ground um we're going to develop our resource and we're

01:22:46.260 just going to do something useful with the co2 so it doesn't get into the atmosphere and that

01:22:50.900 seems to me like it should be enough of a unifying vision that quebec shouldn't be opposed to us

01:22:56.900 that we should be able to meet national targets but still also have some really exciting new

01:23:03.460 industries that develop here based on our traditional resources and our traditional

01:23:07.140 knowledge this seems like a win all the way around and that makes me wonder are they targeting

01:23:13.140 us because they want us to fail as opposed to because they just don't want a natural gas

01:23:19.620 or oil resources to be used at all, it almost feels like it's wishing that we didn't have this

01:23:28.920 dominant place in confederation. And that's a harder thing to argue against if that's really

01:23:34.380 what is underlying all of this. I was speaking to somebody a week ago who said he's been doing,

01:23:39.660 he's done meetings for a decade in Ottawa over energy issues. And he likes to ask at least one

01:23:44.900 point during the meeting, if the oil sands was on the Ontario-Quebec border, would it get a

01:23:51.880 different level of support? And as you can imagine, it's a rhetorical question which generates

01:23:58.100 much discomfort amongst the elites in Ottawa, because it's pretty obvious that it would.

01:24:05.680 And that is extremely frustrating. And again, I try to stick to the facts and try to be a happy

01:24:14.020 warrior on some of these things but it does get pretty frustrating that they don't see how unfair

01:24:18.980 it is it it strikes me that that's a fundamental problem that we've got to fight against because

01:24:24.580 i i've often wondered what do we really need to do here do we need to have an aspiration that

01:24:30.180 we're going to have a population equivalent to give back because if we had a population equivalent

01:24:36.260 to give back with our level of economic activity and not only are we an important voter base but

01:24:42.660 but then also an important economic driver,

01:24:45.580 would that change the dynamic of the country?

01:24:47.780 Should we just be going 100% full out to say,

01:24:51.220 we are going to be bigger than Quebec.

01:24:54.280 We're going to have, hands down,

01:24:56.800 a stronger economy than Quebec.

01:24:58.280 We'll be generating so much revenue

01:25:00.020 that they will want to look at us

01:25:02.300 as an important political partner.

01:25:04.120 Have our aspirations not been ambitious enough?

01:25:08.440 Maybe we need to be more ambitious,

01:25:10.340 or maybe that'll just generate more revenue

01:25:12.480 the federal government will continue to have more disparity but it strikes me that there needs to

01:25:17.200 be something that connects our important economic performance with that political performance that's

01:25:23.520 all that's almost the problem isn't it is that we punch above our weight is that we're we're able

01:25:27.840 to generate so much revenue on such a relatively small population base and politics is all about

01:25:32.960 where the votes come from maybe we just need to be aggressively trying to grow our major cities and

01:25:38.560 grow our mid-sized cities to a point where we're eight million people maybe that would change

01:25:42.720 everything i don't know put it out there because i i know one of the other columns that you wrote

01:25:47.040 was about quebec getting guaranteed seats on the basis of their of their population because of

01:25:51.760 their unique language issues and i'm just wondering if there's a seed there that we

01:25:55.760 should be thinking about politically if we're ever going to assert ourselves in the same way

01:26:00.560 yeah i that one i i sort of wrote about partly because it's just you know one more sort of

01:26:06.160 insult to alberta but it's really an insult again to bc alberta and ontario uh we are the there's

01:26:12.720 four big big provinces in this country uh one of them has guarantees in place that ensure it is

01:26:18.640 never underrepresented um and now they're going out of their way to make sure it even gets that

01:26:23.200 one extra seat on top of being overrepresented but that means that alberta bc and ontario are

01:26:28.880 more underrepresented so yes we're getting some more seats in this latest redistribution but one

01:26:34.400 of them should have come off of quebec's because their growth is so far behind the rest of the

01:26:38.800 country but politicians over there are going to interfere with an independent elections canada

01:26:44.720 report to make sure quebec keeps this one extra seat that it doesn't even need based on the other

01:26:50.960 guarantees it already has to be overrepresented so uh just constantly bending over backwards for

01:26:57.600 one province that is being decreasingly a major player in terms of population and economy i mean

01:27:04.240 i mean alberta and bc passed quebec in terms of population quite a while ago um and but you

01:27:10.840 wouldn't know it based on the way the national discourse goes so i i i think to me the key is

01:27:17.940 getting people in ontario you know regular folk the the arch uh green people are never gonna want

01:27:25.700 anything to do with us but the regular people that work and drive and have real lives they need to 0.99

01:27:32.320 see that their future, that Canada's future is in the West and that they need to align themselves

01:27:38.360 in their thinking with Alberta and BC and not be held hostage and not let their federal government

01:27:46.020 completely fixate all the time on trying to fix the problems of Eastern Canada.

01:27:52.520 More autonomy for everybody would be good, but if we have to decide on East or West,

01:27:58.060 west is the way to go because that's the future that's where canada can be a strong country in

01:28:02.920 50 years if we're constantly fighting uh the phantoms on the east side of the ottawa river

01:28:08.000 we're always going to be left behind such a great message so let me finish then with asking you about

01:28:14.180 the what you're seeing are you doing any public opinion polling because you talk about getting

01:28:18.160 people on board especially in ontario and uh and british columbia you you've been at this for a

01:28:23.780 couple of years now you've got wind at your at your back i think with this equalization referendum

01:28:28.260 that should give you some strength the numbers clearly show that there needs to be a change

01:28:32.620 especially as the federal government is coming through with even more programs that are going

01:28:36.760 to be unfair to alberta it seems like there's a lot going in your direction do you feel like

01:28:41.760 you're making a dent in ontario and bc because i think you're quite right that it's it's pretty

01:28:46.780 important to have some allies on this there's growth happening we've done some baseline polls

01:28:51.940 that that show a decent amount of recognition of alberta's economy being critical to coming back

01:28:57.300 from covid uh and to the amount of equalization payments and the fact they're growing while the

01:29:02.820 provinces get closer those are resonating with people uh so there is a lot of potential but we

01:29:09.220 do need some people in uh in bc and ontario to start on the ground they're helping us get this

01:29:16.020 message out so if you've got any viewers uh that want to get in touch with us from bc and ontario

01:29:21.140 we'd love to build more of a team on the ground in those provinces. A Fairness British Columbia

01:29:25.980 and a Fairness Ontario chapter so that you've got more than one voice. Bill Buick, thanks so

01:29:31.600 much for the work that you do on this. You're always such a wealth of information. I sure

01:29:34.780 appreciate it. My pleasure. You got it. That is Bill Buick. He is the Executive Director of

01:29:40.980 Fairness Alberta. And as he mentioned, he's been doing it for a couple of years now. And I think

01:29:46.200 we'll definitely see more out of him over the course of the next year and a half because

01:29:50.540 as we talk that through, if the crucial potential to change equalization is 2024,

01:29:57.860 now is the time before the end of this year to put our position on the table about how we want

01:30:04.360 that changed. And with the mandate that says we ultimately want it phased out, there needs to be

01:30:09.620 a position paper saying, here's the step-by-step way in which we would do it. And I love his idea

01:30:13.700 about making sure that we do the transfer of tax points. I think that's the only true way

01:30:18.120 that we're going to be respected here

01:30:19.840 is if we have a pretty clear idea

01:30:21.360 of how much goes to Ottawa,

01:30:23.700 how much stays here,

01:30:25.080 and we start taking care of our own affairs

01:30:26.580 and telling them just to bug out

01:30:28.620 when it comes to areas of provincial jurisdiction.

01:30:31.100 Anyway, folks, we'll continue on with this series.

01:30:32.960 Thanks so much for tuning in.

01:30:33.940 We'll be back at it again on Monday.

01:30:35.340 I'm Danielle Smith.

01:30:35.960 This has been the Long Form Danielle Smith Show.

Western Standard - May 08, 2022

Saturday Long Form - Bill Bewick of Fairness Alberta

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