Prentice sticks by “difficult” budget delivered to Albertans
Posted Mar 27, 2015 12:16 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
“We’ve been living off our oil revenues and they’re entirely unpredictable,” said Premier Jim Prentice Friday morning, one day after delivering by all accounts, a very difficult budget.
In an interview with 660News, Prentice said he believes “we” have learned our lesson and looked at finding better, more sustainable funding.
He said the budget is about the future of our province and they had to ensure finances were on a sustainable footing, while protecting families and jobs.
“It’s not easy times, Albertans know this, they know they are tough and we can afford to pay a little more to get ourselves through this,” he said. “The government really has three levers we can use, we can draw on our savings as a bit of a shock-absorber and we’re doing that, we’ll basically draw down on the entire contingency account over the next two years, we can reduce the size of government and over three years we’ll get the cost and size back down the to the national average, but the third thing is we have to change our revenue profile.”
“There is $7 billion in oil money that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s a combination of those three things and it has to be done in a balanced way. And what we’ve heard is people across the province don’t want us to cut and slash our way through our public services. We’ve tried that, they want to make sure that we have good quality front-line services, health care, education, senior citizen care and that we do this in a measured and balanced way.”
Prentice admits forecasting for the price of oil was a challenge.
“I think we learned our lesson this time around in Alberta because we can’t be watching OPEC meetings to try and decide how many schools we’re going to build or nurses we can hire,” he said. “Essentially everyone we talked to tells us oil prices will not go over $80 a barrel over the next 3 years, so we have to start basing our budget on numbers that are more predictable and reliable.”
Given the amount of benefits there are to two-income homes or families, Prentice couldn’t talk specifically over what’s in the budget for Albertans.
He said he knows there’s been a lot of discussion around it and he’s hoping people will keep in mind we’re still among some of the luckiest in the nation.
According to Prentice, we have the lowest taxes on every single metric in the nation, including no sales tax, low income tax and gasoline tax.
“We’ve gone to great lengths to really make sure the Alberta advantage remains, that we are the lowest-taxed jurisdiction in the country for sure, those who can afford to pay a little more are going to be asked to pay a little more but by and large this is still a pretty balanced approach,” he said. “Our taxes are still about $10 billion lower than the next closest province.”
Prentice still sticks by his decision not to raise the rate of corporate tax, saying all it really would have done is cost jobs.
“Most corporate tax are paid by small companies, they’re paid by people we know on the streets and it’s pretty clear if you raise corporate tax you’re going to lose jobs,” he said. “It’ll be a big mistake to create a job-killing tax that would drive investment away, that’s what the NDP want to do and this won’t solve the problem, an increase in tax would raise only $400-million which would only be 10 per cent of the problem.”
When asked if we’re shouldering the blame for big business, if Albertans are all in this together, Prentice said most of those owners are small-business owners.
He also said the Wildrose comments about the budget being a “pre-election budget” is nonsense.
“The real thing with the Wildrose is they don’t have a plan at all, they would simply run this province into debt, destroy our ability to create jobs and run our public finances,” he said. “They have come forward with absolutely no ideas of how to deal with the problems we face, I came back to do the right thing by Alberta and Albertans, not to take this province into the ditch the way they’re proposing to do.”
Prentice is however, still coy, about whether or not he’ll put this budget up for Albertans to decide in a spring election.
“I don’t think I could be anymore clear with Albertans and we’ve been applauded for the budget because it deals with our problems and deals with them in a very clear way for people to decide on, but this is a budget that protects our future together as Albertans,” he said. “It’s a budget that will protect this generation of Albertans and will also make sure we’re on a sound footing going forward.”
“$7 billion in oil revenue, close to 20 per cent of the province’s revenue basically, evaporated overnight so we’re going to have deal with that together as Albertans.”
To here the full interview, click here.
