Notley’s government-directed spending and Kenney’s market-driven policies couldn’t be further apart. So which will voters choose?
CALGARY — Jason Kenney, running to be Alberta’s next premier, is lunching on a salad at the Blackfoot Diner, a popular truck stop eatery just outside Calgary’s downtown, but offering red-meat economic policy proposals to his base in historically conservative Alberta.
Kenney, 50, and Rachel Notley, the NDP’s popular 54-year-old leader running for a second term, agree on little else. “You couldn’t ask for more diametrically opposed economic policies,” according to Duane Bratt, Mount Royal University political science professor. “The more value add that we have in Alberta, the more we hedge against the price of the feedstock commodity going down,” Notley said in an interview, adding that she believes $7 billion in credits could attract $75 billion in spending on projects.
“With all of these things that we’ve done so far, they all have a return on investment to Albertans in terms of the impact on the economy writ large and none of these things that we’ve invested in doesn’t pay for itself in terms of our own revenue,” Notley said. Debt ratings agencies downgraded the province’s ballooning debt at multiple points after successive budgets showed rising debt in a period of low oil prices.
Notley says Kenney’s promise to shred the deal is “ridiculous” and would end up costing taxpayers money and also “extend and expand” the need for oil producers in the province to curtail their production given a lack of new export pipelines. “I appreciate his ‘free markets’ angle but this is one issue where, given how much of it has been screwed up by multiple levels of government, the risk/reward merits the continued involvement of the Alberta government into 2020,” Nuttall said. “It’s not a risk worth taking.”
The UCP asked School of Public Policy research director on tax and economic growth Bev Dahlby to study its plan to cut the corporate tax rate from 12 per cent to 8 per cent. Dahlby found it would lead to 6.5 per cent higher real GDP growth. For her part, Notley doesn’t believe corporate tax cuts are an inefficient way to attract investment “particularly in a place like ours where we are already a very competitive province relative to other provinces around investment.”
Outside of the oilsands, few exploration and production companies have high corporate tax burdens because they reinvest all or most of their earnings into new production, said Tertzakian, who is one of the top energy economists in the country, and was a member of Notley’s oil and gas royalty review panel.
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