Notley Nation by Sydney Sharpe & Don Braid

Author:Sydney Sharpe & Don Braid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: 2016-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

At first, there was some hope for economic recovery that could give the new premier the fiscal cushion she needed. On election day the price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil, the measure that matters most to Alberta’s petroleum industry, seemed to be stabilizing above US$60 per barrel for the first time in months. Some forecasters were saying it would average US$63 for the rest of the year. That estimate was US$40 per barrel below boom-time pricing, but still a level the government could adjust to if the price persisted.

It did not persist. By the end of 2015 prices had crashed again, into the range of US$30 per barrel. At this level of fiscal stress, Alberta budget numbers become so contorted that they actually showed the province owing money to the oil and gas industry, rather than collecting royalties from it. This wasn’t a real-world concern (“No damn way we’ll be paying them,” said one government official), but the accounting anomaly illustrated a fiscal crisis so severe that even numbers could be bent, like light waves by gravity. Jim Prentice, at his most pessimistic, hadn’t envisaged a crash this dramatic.

The economy seemed to call for government caution, but Notley decided to forge ahead with nearly every element of her plan. Like many a leader before her, including most Alberta premiers, she chose to interpret her mandate as approval of the entire platform, even something she didn’t specifically mention during the campaign — a general carbon tax that would cost consumers $3 billion a year.

There was indeed a loyal and lively political market for such measures, especially in urban Alberta. The province’s environmental lobby is as active as any in Canada, and in a sense it had won the election. Thousands of relatively new migrants to Alberta weren’t stuck in the traditional conservative mind-set. Many of these people were overjoyed at the PC defeat. Notley felt she would betray those constituencies, as well as her own ardent caucus, if she stalled on major elements of the platform, most especially action on climate change. Delay could also mean she’d never get the chance to reform anything. It would take years, not months, for the system she envisaged to start spinning off abundant green jobs. If she couldn’t demonstrate significant economic progress by the next election in 2019, that could be the end of the NDP government.

The enormity of her challenges was obvious even before she was sworn in.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.