The Economic Education Association (EEA) is bringing a discussion around restoring the “Alberta advantage” to Kitscoty.
The local non-profit organization is having National Post Columnist John Robson as one of their speakers and he will be speaking about things that he believes made Alberta prosperous in the past.
“You didn’t spend money you didn’t have, you didn’t impose a crushing tax burden, you didn’t over regulate the economy and so there was a feeling that Alberta was always going to be naturally prosperous because it was always going to have fundamentally sensible public policy.”
This year Alberta will run a $8.8 billion deficit focused on diversifying the economy. The provinces 2018 budget has taken into account revenue from the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and the Keystone XL project. Robson says that Alberta has become the highest spending province in the country per capita.
“If you look at spending in Alberta it doesn’t matter how much revenue comes in, revenue has been increasing dramatically over the last 20 years, but spending has out run it.”
Chair of EEA Danny Hozack says that the delay of the Kinder Morgan pipeline is making it more difficult to the meet the fiscal realities Alberta is facing with increasing deficits.
“We either need to be able to sell our resources or were going to have an awful lot smaller province and so people need to be involved in this discussion. The future of Alberta is quite frankly at stake and it’s in quite a serious predicament.”
The event will be taking place Saturday at the Kitscoty community Hall at 7 p.m.
