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I had to respond after reading Tony Gull’s letter (St. Albert Gazette, Your Views, Oct. 31).
Blaming the NDP for the debt is ignoring one important fact. Ralph Klein’s government slashed taxes and replaced them with windfall oil and gas revenues. When those run out, we are left with a structural deficit that the NDP government inherited, not to mention the infrastructure deficit Klein ignored.
We have the lowest or near-lowest income and corporate taxes in the country and are the only province without a sales tax. If we had the same tax structure as Saskatchewan, we would have been in surplus over the last few years and have no debt whatsoever.
Jason Kenney’s good friend, Brad Wall, ran a larger than anticipated deficit even after raising the sales tax to six per cent from five per cent in his last year in office. If Wall couldn’t balance Saskatchewan’s budget even with far higher revenues, how is Kenney or anyone else going to do it here without raising taxes?
Kenney says he will actually cut taxes and still balance the budget. Education is the second highest departmental expenditure in Alberta. He would have to find cost savings equivalent to that to balance the budget. That’s without the proposed tax cuts. Even cutting back expenditures to the Canadian average leaves us a long, long way from a balanced budget.
We are going to have to pay for the services we want just like every other province does. Believing otherwise is just delusional thinking.
D. Watt, St. Albert
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