Could Alberta's fiscal future include a provincial sales tax?
CBC
This column is an opinion from Graham Thomson, an award-winning journalist who has covered Alberta politics for more than 30 years. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.
There's good news and bad news in the Alberta government's second quarter fiscal update released on Tuesday.
The good news: the province's economy appears to be turning the corner on a path to recovery.
The bad news: that path might yet turn out to be a dark alley where COVID-19 and its gang of variants are waiting to welcome our economic recovery with billy clubs and machetes.
That's the problem with announcing economic forecasts in the age of COVID: the pandemic stubbornly refuses to listen.
Last Friday, global oil prices fell by more than 10 per cent when COVID's latest variant, omicron, sparked fears of renewed travel restrictions that would undermine the oil market's recovery.
On Tuesday, as Alberta Finance Minister Travis Toews was announcing encouraging news about the province's economy, oil prices fell again after Moderna warned that current COVID vaccines are unlikely to be as effective against omicron as they were against the delta variant.
"Oil prices are volatile, as we see today," said Toews by way of understatement. "And major fluctuations can be difficult to predict. It's a story Albertans have been living for decades but one most acutely lived in recent years."
And we'll continue to be tossed around in that fluctuating energy-price roller coaster for years to come, no matter how nauseating the ride.
Sometimes the ride is thrilling, when oil prices rise, as they did this year. Indeed, Albertans are enjoying a good kind of oil-price whiplash as royalties pour in from non-renewable resources, mostly from oilsands bitumen.
This year, the provincial treasury is on track to receive almost $11 billion in non-renewable resources, an increase of almost $8 billion from the original 2021-22 budget documents tabled last February.
That's both good news and bad. Good because higher revenue is always welcome; bad because Alberta relies too much on volatile energy prices.
We still suffer from more bad whiplashes than good on this roller coaster ride that turned into the Drop of Doom in 2015 when oil prices dropped over a cliff and again in 2020 when oil prices, for a time, toppled into the grave.
This year's provincial deficit – once projected to be $18 billion – is now forecast to drop below $6 billion. That's a whopping, and welcome, drop of $12 billion but it's almost entirely due to more money flowing from oil.
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