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Technically speaking, Jason Kenney's 2021 budget "sucks ass"
63 Plays3 years ago
Duncan and Jim were in the budget media embargo and sifted through hundreds of pages of facts and figures, tables and charts, spin and counter-spin and came to this conclusion: the 2021 Alberta budget sucks ass. They break it down and get into the details in the latest Progress Report podcast.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Progress Report
00:00:12
Speaker
Hey folks, you are of course listening to the progress report on the Harbinger Media Network. We're one of several very good and excellent left-wing podcasts on Harbinger and a new episode that I want to recommend is the latest from the forgotten corner. Friends of the show, Jeremy Appel and Scott Schmidt talk with Dr. Gosia Gasparovitch and her worries about a third wave as the hyperinfectious B117 strain of COVID takes hold in Alberta right as the government is opening up
00:00:38
Speaker
quote unquote, the economy. And that's the kind of content you'll get at Harbinger. We're challenging right wing and liberal corporate media dominance with a political point of view you won't find anywhere else. Get access to exclusive shows and other supporter only content at HarbingerMediaNetwork.com.
Overview of Alberta's Budget: A Critical Analysis
00:00:54
Speaker
Now, on to the show. Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiscotiva, Skuygan, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty Six territory.
00:01:06
Speaker
Joining me today is our friend, the man behind the boards and the Adobe Audition account, the editor of the Progress Report and my friend and colleague, Jim Story. Jim, welcome back. Hey, glad to be here. Although I wish we had something more interesting to talk about today. The budget's a little dreary this year.
00:01:25
Speaker
It's jury every year. I can never recall in my lifetime a budget that I was like, woohoo, everything I ever wanted out of a government. You know what I mean? Well, no doubt. But jury in the sense of not being super exciting in any particular direction, despite the change in tone, which I'm sure we'll get to very quickly, this is really a business as usual budget.
00:01:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's a budget that kind of pleases no one. It's the neutral character from Futurama. It has no strong opinions. It's a big soupy lump and mess of bad politics. But before we get into the details of the budget, I want to ask you about your very first budget lockup. You took part in your very first budget lockup. What were your thoughts?
00:02:18
Speaker
Well, they didn't take any of my questions, which didn't surprise me. It was very difficult to go through a day without posting, which also didn't surprise me. Beyond that, I don't really have a lot to say about the process. I know that the biggest thing is the seven hours without posting. It's a lot for you and me to just go that long without letting the world
00:02:44
Speaker
know what we think about X. But we were able to hold it in. We followed the rules of the embargo. We get to go to the next one.
Healthcare Funding: Promises vs Reality
00:02:54
Speaker
But yeah, let's get to the budget reaction and breakdown. What's the kind of top-level narrative that you're pulling out of this one, aside from boring business as usual? Give me something else.
00:03:06
Speaker
Well, you had, when we were talking about this in our post, our first post about the budget yesterday, you had a nice little line in there about the UCP pretending to be the NDP, but not doing a very good job of it. And I think that really is what we see in this budget. Over the past couple of weeks, you've really seen Kenny and Taves and those guys moderate their language around cuts, their austerity language.
00:03:32
Speaker
and replace it with a lot of talk about now is not the time for cuts, now is not the time for taxes, now is the time to keep the ship afloat, so to speak.
00:03:45
Speaker
But the budget does not really match those statements. Cuts do continue apace in this budget, especially to post-secondaries and to municipalities. I think it's perhaps the UCP felt like those were areas where they could get away with continuing the cuts, whereas health is getting a lot of attention right now. There's a lot of focus on it. But even the health budget is not getting a significant top-up.
00:04:13
Speaker
No, I mean, the health thing is interesting, right? Because if you listen to them, they kept saying, we're funding health care, we're funding health care, we're funding health care. And it's like, no one believes you, man. Like, like if Rachel Notley... It's not even in the, it's not in your budget documents that you published, right? Yeah. The number does not go up. The line does not go up. The increase in health care funding in this year is pretty modest.
00:04:39
Speaker
Was it around 900 mil? Which sounds like a lot, but the health budget is massive. It is the single largest item in the provincial budget by a very large margin. And then after this year, they've got a freeze, a spending freeze planned through until 2024. You would think that in the wake of this awful pandemic that apparently completely blindsided Alberta because we're dealing with it so poorly,
00:05:06
Speaker
that it would have highlighted some areas that need to be improved in our healthcare system, you know. It would have demonstrated the need for a little more resilience, a system that is not kind of patched together with duct tape and twine and kind of rickety just holding on, but a system that is tough and that can weather storms like this pandemic, the UCP don't agree. That's not how they feel about it.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, just like no one believed Rachel Notley when she was all raw, raw pipelines. We love pipelines. We're going to build pipelines. We're the best pipeline party. No one believes Jason Kenney when he says, you know, that we love health care, that we're going to fund health care. You know, the you got to think about when this budget was made, right? Like when the decisions were happening and the decisions were happening in December, you know, height of the pandemic, worst of the shutdown. You know, we were seeing
00:06:03
Speaker
nearly 2000 cases a day, the deaths were peaking back then. And so we get this bad impersonation of mid-term NDP from Jason Kenney and Travis Taves. And it doesn't please anyone. It doesn't please the psychos in his base, and it doesn't please the people who are still
00:06:27
Speaker
very justifiably angry that they are going to get laid off or have their jobs privatized or have their wages possibly cut, despite the fact that the nurses and the lab techs and the janitors, the hospitals and those public sector workers, those are the people who got us through this pandemic.
00:06:47
Speaker
This is just a theme at every single Alberta budget ever, which if you cover more of these, Jim, and get into the lockup and get into the data, you will just see that it is always the same. Every single Alberta government forever until we die is just going to keep kicking the can down the road and pray for rain.
00:07:07
Speaker
There was a lot of having your cake and simultaneously attempting to eat it in this budget. There are government departments where they're claiming that they're going to hire a couple thousand more staff and simultaneously they're saying they're going to reduce compensation across the board in those departments.
00:07:28
Speaker
So I don't think anyone's going to be particularly pleased that they're not getting laid off if their wages are getting slashed to accommodate, you know, expanded, expanded hires.
Economic Strategy: Dependence on Oil and Gas
00:07:39
Speaker
It's not great. It's not great for anybody. No, like you said, it is very much a kicking of the can down the road to Tom, Trevor Tom up in Calgary, the friend of the center, right? Yes, yes. We do really love his analysis.
00:07:57
Speaker
Yeah, he absolutely loves it when you reply to his tweets. I recommend that everyone out there engage with him on Twitter as much as possible. He's a big fan of fans of this program in particular.
00:08:11
Speaker
Tom estimates that if the relatively high resource prices continue, because oil and gas have kind of ticked up over the past month or so, mostly due to reduced supply, because a lot of things were shut down during the COVID.
00:08:31
Speaker
Basically, if everything works out in the absolute best possible way, if there is not another disaster, if there is not another unexpected economic disturbance and resource prices stay high, then the budget gets kind of close to balancing itself in 2024 if they don't do anything else.
00:08:52
Speaker
And that seems to be what this government is banking on. They are planning for the absolute best case scenario. They don't really have any ideas in place for what they're going to do if everything doesn't line up perfectly. And that is very typical of an Alberta government budget.
00:09:10
Speaker
You're definitely right. That's what the PCs were doing for years. It's what the NDP did when they were in power and it seems to be what the UCP are up to now too. Yeah. I mean, not only is it pray for rain and just kick the can, but it is just like actively
00:09:26
Speaker
refusing to engage with the question of what the hell do we do in Alberta if the golden goose, our oil and gas industry is just going to stop laying golden eggs. You just have to read the material of every oil and gas company that they send to their investors.
00:09:45
Speaker
Every oil and gas company that exists these days knows that they're not a long-term play. Their pitch to investors is that we promise to return as much profits and as much cash to you via dividends and share buybacks as we possibly fucking can before we go under.
00:10:03
Speaker
Like, everyone knows oil and gas is not a long-term play, but we still do not have a plan in Alberta. Nor does this government seem interested in diversifying away from oil and gas. There's a quote in Travis Tabe's budget address that is worth reading out because of how hilarious and stupid it is. The quote is this, some suggest diversifying the economy requires a transition away from our traditional sectors such as energy. Let me be clear, Mr. Speaker.
00:10:32
Speaker
That is not this government's position. Like, come on, man, come on. And their ideology is quite simple and clean when you look at it, right? We will set up the conditions for private enterprise and the profit motive and entrepreneurs to show up and solve all their problems. If we do everything that the CFIB and the Chamber of Commerce want, we lower corporate taxes to nothing, we'll cut red tape. We will absolutely clear a runway for whatever corporations say they want, policy-wise.
00:11:00
Speaker
they think that this will somehow lead to them magically spending money. And it's like, no, they're just going to people at the top are just going to get richer. Like that's how this works. And whether it's, I mean, it's irrelevant, whether it's venal or whether they actually believe it or not, like the outcome is the same, but like, it's important to kind of call it what it is. And, and it's, it's magical thinking, right? Like,
00:11:24
Speaker
It's never worked anywhere. It's always been extremely successful at making rich people richer and fucking over everyone else. But there is much more in this budget that we want to
Impact of Budget Cuts on Education and Municipalities
00:11:36
Speaker
get to. I think that it's worth taking a few minutes to talk about the sectors that got it the worst, and that particularly is post-secondary education and municipalities.
00:11:47
Speaker
I feel like ever since the Redford era, post-secondary has just taken it on the chin over and over and over again. What's your hot take on what they did to post-secondary and why they are the continual punching bag of the Alberta government?
00:12:11
Speaker
I mean, this is a classic case of the kid who keeps getting the shit kicked out of him at school because he never stands up to his bully. The students unions are generally pretty tepid when it comes to criticizing the government. They are tepid. You don't have to equivocate there. They are absolutely not interested in fighting.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, half the time you've got those student councils filled up with kids in ties who want to become PCs, you know, they they're, they're not revolutionary types, for the most part.
00:12:47
Speaker
The boards, too, they are continually filled with appointments of well-connected, good old boy types. And so obviously, the boards are not going to scream and shout when the establishment puts the screws down. No, not when Janet McKinnon is on the board at the U of A.
00:13:09
Speaker
We'll compare and contrast the post-secondaries getting the shit kicked out of them in this budget yet again with the AMA who looks like they have finally got what they wanted out of this government. Dr. Compensation is not going to get ground down like was expected because the AMA went out there and they fought hard for a year and a half.
00:13:35
Speaker
And the AMA, I mean, we're talking about like wealthy, relatively wealthy people, doctors. Portioners, yeah.
00:13:45
Speaker
petty bourgeoisie for the theory readers out there. These are not folks who are naturally considered like allies of blue collar working class people. But when the AMA started screaming about how the doctors were all getting screwed, working class people, we all got in line and helped out and helped support that AMA campaign. I know the opposition were also very into supporting that AMA campaign.
00:14:14
Speaker
You had a lot of doctors publicly just throwing up their arms and leaving the province, either in protest or out of pure necessity. It was a good, powerful campaign. The AMA won. They fought. They fought hard, and they got something for it. Meanwhile, these post-secondaries
00:14:33
Speaker
They don't fight. They're very poorly organized. The people holding positions of influence and authority, both in the student body level and in the faculty and board level, generally don't have it in them to fight. There's no sense of struggle. There's no history of striking, you know what I mean? You're starting from scratch if you do want to build that, right? And I think the accounting on just how badly the unis are getting it
00:15:01
Speaker
and the universities and colleges are getting it in this budget is still going to come out. I mean, we found $135 million cut, but based on some conversations I've had, we're really not going to know how bad it is until you get the institution by institution numbers out and the actual cuts are made real. And I think the NDP had a $400 million cut. The numbers on this are bad. And again, it's incredibly short-sighted. If you want to attract and retain
00:15:30
Speaker
people early in their careers to be, you know, people to live and work here and raise families here. You need good universities and we had good universities and over the past decade, we've decided to not have good universities.
00:15:43
Speaker
It's more than just short-sighted too. It's really in opposition to what the public generally wants in regards to post-secondary's free tuition, whether or not debts get erased. That's an incredibly popular policy proposal these days. A lot of people are very, very supportive of it.
00:16:05
Speaker
But what's going to happen with these universities when their provincial funding gets cut? Well, they're going to have to make up the gap by cranking tuition up the absolute opposite of what everyone out there wants. There would be a lot of public support for the post-secondaries if they stood up and they fought. I think a lot of people would stand in solidarity with them. But because they don't stand up and fight, because they just roll over, they continue to get the shit kicked out of them, budget after budget after budget.
00:16:30
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, whether people would stand with them or not, I don't think anyone gives a shit if tuition goes up or if students have terrible learning conditions. It's really up to them. It's up to the students. It's up to the profs and the workers who work at these institutions. No one is going to come save you. You are going to have to come together and figure out how you're going to work together to actually organize and put pressure on this government and make it hard for them to do this because if you don't, they will continue to do exactly what they have done for the past 10 years.
00:16:59
Speaker
The other big line item, the other ministry that really took it on the chin money-wise was municipal affairs.
Affordable Housing and Social Investment
00:17:07
Speaker
This is essentially the money that flows out to cities and municipalities. Based on some feedback I've gotten, there's been a 25% cut to this municipal sustainability initiative that's going to occur over the next four years.
00:17:23
Speaker
I'm still working to nail down what exactly this means. You've seen Nenshi and Ivison cut interviews where they're mad about it, but I just feel that both those guys seem to be on the way out and there's not really a lot of fire and energy to actually fight with this government. I don't know. What do you think about this, Jim?
00:17:45
Speaker
I think that, I mean, first of all, just in kind of top down objective terms, these continued cuts to municipal funding are bad. They are very, very bad. And every year that these budgets get cut, the province gets in a more and more fucked up situation.
00:18:05
Speaker
Because important programs and services exist at the municipal level, a lot of things have been handed down to municipalities to handle. But under Alberta laws, municipalities can't borrow, they can't go into deficit. So they're 100% reliant on funding coming in from other levels of government.
00:18:23
Speaker
most of which comes down from the province. And this process of handing things to municipalities and saying, okay, you guys take care of this now with your left hand and then slashing their budgets with the right hand is just kind of an obfuscated, stealthy way of cutting programs and services.
00:18:43
Speaker
There are some important things at the municipal level. One thing that Iveson was highlighting yesterday in his complaints was the budget for affordable housing. Affordable housing, the province kicks a little bit of money into it, even less in 2021 than they had previously. And spending on affordable housing is very important.
00:19:23
Speaker
it gets cold. But I think even speaking from a completely heartless, compassionless point of view, even if you cut all of the misery and human suffering of being unhoused out of the equation, even if you're just looking at this from a kind of, you know, no, no mercy. Yeah. Master Lich, Travis Taves, dark sorcery perspective.
00:19:35
Speaker
It's very good. It is very good to properly fund this. I don't really know how to say it any more accurately than that.
00:19:53
Speaker
The numbers just work out. It is just wise to get people off the street because it's very expensive to maintain high levels of inequality and high levels of homelessness in your society. Those people end up having to resort to emergency services a lot and it is really taxing for the system when you could save a lot of money and reduce
00:20:19
Speaker
aggregate human misery by a great amount by just putting roofs over their heads.
00:20:25
Speaker
And if there is not enough housing stock to go around, you pay some people to build some more and those are jobs. You borrow to build it. I mean, if you came to this podcast expecting numbers about debts and deficits, no, I do not give a shit about the debt or the deficit. It's high. It needs to be high. We're in the middle of a pandemic. It should be higher, precisely for the reasons Jim has laid out. There are homeless, thousands of homeless people in our province. Build them homes now.
00:20:51
Speaker
I don't care. Build them. And it is more expensive. It is more expensive in the long term to allow these inefficiencies with our programs and services and to allow things like extreme poverty and poor social determinants of health
00:21:11
Speaker
to exist than it is to put up with more borrowing costs. Like the deal is just better. It is just better straight up to invest this money and take care of these problems. And then as an added bonus, you also save human lives and make humans much happier, which is also a thing that governments should do.
00:21:31
Speaker
Agreed.
Public Sector Compensation Challenges
00:21:32
Speaker
Okay. There's Muni and PostSec. They're the two that got it worse, but the other group that's getting it bad is workers, specifically public sector workers. You look at the budget documents. Jim and I spent a whole seven hours in lockup, sweaty, glistening, going through spreadsheets and tables and data.
00:21:55
Speaker
And what we found was that the government of Alberta expects to be paying more than $1 billion less in public sector compensation from the year we're in now to next year. How they're going to do that, not explained. But there's really only a couple of ways to do it. And it's all of the stuff that they've previewed before, right? It's layoffs, it's privatization, it's wage cuts, legislative wage cuts.
00:22:20
Speaker
And this is, again, the paradox that Jim spoke about at the top. They're like, oh yeah, we're not going to cut people. We're actually going to give a short-term bump in funding to healthcare, but we're somehow going to pay less in compensation next year.
00:22:39
Speaker
It's absolutely wild. I know the Alberta NDP has a number that says 15,000 layoffs are coming. I think that's an extrapolation from statements, from taves about how they're cutting the public sector by 7.7%, whether it's 15,000, whether it's 5,000. I mean, there's really no way to do what the government wants without laying off the people who got us through this pandemic, the nurses, the lab techs, the paramedics, the janitors, the hospital workers, the laundry folks.
00:23:10
Speaker
There's no other way around it. You could cut the wages of every single public sector worker in Alberta by half and still have a $5 billion deficit. Again, I don't care about deficits, it's just to illustrate the size of the number. How do you think Kenny is going to get a $1 billion less in public sector compensation by next year, Jim?
00:23:32
Speaker
I don't think he's going to. I think he's going to send people to the negotiating table with orders to grind down workers' salaries in an attempt to get there. And I think he's going to have a full-on labor revolt on his hands, and he's not going to be able to do it. I think it's a false promise.
00:23:51
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, again, overconfident, he thinks that he can grind those budgets down that much. Uh, layoffs are more likely to happen than, uh, than wage cuts, I think. Uh, so if the budgets do shrink, it's going to be either through attrition or through the elimination of positions. But, uh, he's absolutely not going to drive salaries down enough to hit that number. Uh, because if he tries to, he's going to get his ass kicked by the unions.
00:24:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, teachers have taken zeros the past, whatever, eight or nine years. I was about to say by no fault of their own. Absolutely fault of their own. They took zeros for the past eight or nine years. Other healthcare unions, AUPE, HSAA, they've seen very marginal increases. They took either nothing. Well, if their staff roles are going to be expanded at the very same time that the funding is reduced,
00:24:45
Speaker
then it's not going to be zeros that are on the table for them this year. The government is going to be asking them to take like minus fives, minus tens, and that's pretty big and that's not going to fly. No, I don't think there's any appetite for any large public sector union to take a five or 10% rollback in negotiations. They're going to want inflation at the very least. They're going to want one and a half, one and a half, one and a half.
00:25:08
Speaker
and that's incredibly fair. These are the people who got us through the pandemic. Pay them, pay them more. They're clearly worth it. I think this projection from the government about reducing public sector compensation by one and a half billion is about as optimistic as their projections of the
00:25:28
Speaker
the resource prices last year. It's a fiction. They know that they can't do it. They're just making shit up. It's as optimistic as their loss estimates on Keystone XL. How about we segue into that one? Yeah, let's talk about that pipe. There was a love talking about pipe. Can't do pipeline politics enough.
Keystone XL and Crude by Rail: Financial Missteps
00:25:47
Speaker
Conspicuously, not in any budget table, not booked in any way was Keystone XL. It did get one page in the budget. It got a page that explained what they were willing to disclose. But again, when you look at all of the numbers that say debt deficit, blah, blah, blah, there's an extra $1.3 billion loss on Keystone XL that was not booked. A lot of reporters were asking for more and more details on this.
00:26:17
Speaker
A lot of reporters were asking for more and more details on this during the budget lockup yesterday, and the excuse that we got from the officials during the technical briefing repeatedly every time somebody pressed for these details is, well, principles of good accounting say that we can't put those numbers in the table yet because we're just not sure how big the loss was.
00:26:40
Speaker
We're looking at all our options. And I mean, the funny thing about this is the devil is really in the details. So the hilarious part to come out of this little one page disclosure is that the vast majority of that $1.3 billion loss that was booked, 870 or 890 some million went to Keystone XL in January of 2021.
00:27:03
Speaker
Hey, Duncan, when was Joe Biden elected? Good question. When was that American election? Was that Valentine's Day? I think it was a little earlier. I think it was before Christmas, right? I distinctly remember an American President election on November 4th or something.
00:27:20
Speaker
You know, you'd think that knowing that the guy who had been saying for an entire year that he was going to cancel that pipeline immediately, the guy who was the vice president of the person who originally vetoed that pipeline, you think that seeing him win the election would maybe give you a little pause about throwing a billion and a half dollars to TC Energy for a project that was obviously doomed. Yeah.
00:27:50
Speaker
And the fact that nearly $900 million went out the door on this project in fucking January is monstrous incompetence. If Jason Kennedy had only lost $300, $400 million on this thing in an equity investment, whatever. I mean, it still would be fucking terrible and stupid and a clear waste of money.
00:28:12
Speaker
But the scale of money that we're talking about here is fucking insane. And it gets even more insane when you consider something that is in the news a little less than the Keystone XL pipeline, but is more money. And it's these crude by rail contracts. And the minutiae of this is not super important, but essentially Rachel Notley in the final nine months of her term kind of
00:28:37
Speaker
signed a bunch of crude by rail contracts in order to move bitumen or move oil product on rail cars for reasons. I don't even really want to get into or debate the reasons, but that happened. Those contracts were signed. It occurred. Jason Kenney, as is his ideology, thought this was a terrible idea, campaigned against it, won the election, and shouted from the rooftops as loud as if anyone wanted to hear that he hated these things and he was going to sell them as soon as he possibly could.
00:29:08
Speaker
And we thought we were free of these crude by rail contracts. There was even a press release that went out in a press conference that happened in early 2020, where Jason Kenney said that we had gotten rid of all of them. Turns out that's not the case. 40% of the crude by rail capacity that was signed in these contracts was only 40% was gotten rid of. There is still the majority, 60%.
00:29:34
Speaker
of that crude by rail contract capacity still exists and is presumably costing this government money. And what it's costing us is, again, huge $2.3 billion.
00:29:47
Speaker
I am just a dumb ass journalist. I failed math a bunch in high school, but there was a thing that happened on the kind of the government briefing call in the lockup that I think is worth going over. And that was the pointy head guy, whoever they had from energy to answer questions.
00:30:06
Speaker
He was asked, what's the total liability? What was the worst case scenario from these oil by rail, these crew by rail contracts, if they had actually been executed? He was like, oh yeah, our estimate was it would have cost us $2.3 to $2.7 billion to just actually run it. Our total exposure would have been $400 million.
00:30:32
Speaker
I gotta say, again, I'm just a dumb ass journalist, I failed math a bunch of times, but a $400 million loss is a lot better
00:30:41
Speaker
than a $2.3 billion loss. A little bit. A little bit. And I think even the oil and gas producers would have preferred it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can't turn the bell. You can't go back in time and run the program because Jason Kenney obviously stopped it as soon as he came in. But that's the cost. Jason Kenney's ideology cost us, Albertans, $1.9 billion.
00:31:04
Speaker
at least at least $1.9 million. Yeah, that's the contract that's the worst case scenario that they're quoting you there. Those oil by rail contracts might have not lost much at all. Yeah. Yeah. In any other world, this billion dollar fucking boondoggle would bring down a government, but it's just like one of like half a dozen or two a dozen
00:31:27
Speaker
scandals that is just currently plaguing them. And this crude by rail thing doesn't even get nearly the amount of attention it deserves considering how much money goes out the door. Not to mention, the other thing that is just this corporate handout that continues to cost all of us money is this refinery that was built. And it's just like,
Failed Government Investments: A Review
00:31:49
Speaker
We didn't really get a good accounting of it this year because they booked most of the losses last year, but this sturgeon refinery that the government is a partner in is also just a giant money pit.
00:32:01
Speaker
Exactly the kind of shit I was talking about earlier with governments talking about these nebulous terms like the economy and diversification and trusting that the average listener is going to incorrectly hear jobs. They're going to hear jobs for your family when they say that stuff.
00:32:22
Speaker
If the government really wanted to create jobs for your family, it could easily hire you to do something. But instead, it gets obfuscated through these pie in the sky deals that they fall flat. Usually, if the governments are lucky, they fall flat a few years down the line after the people responsible for signing the papers have moved on to something else. And so there are no consequences for them.
00:32:47
Speaker
But just imagine if any governing party, whether the PCs, the NDP, or the UCP, had just put all of this theatrics around pipelines, around diversification, around building the economy aside for a few years and just worked on actual material issues that are impacting actual Albertans.
00:33:10
Speaker
Like that 2.3 billion or so lost on the oil by rail contracts, all of the money lost on the pipelines. Imagine if that money had just been thrown in a pot to solve Alberta's housing crisis. They could have solved that problem by now. Instead, we're hurling money into these furnaces for no fucking reason. It's infuriating. Yeah. And speaking of just throwing money into a furnace, we learned of a brand new
Oil Industry PR Efforts and ESG Initiatives
00:33:40
Speaker
War Room. It's called the ESG Secretariat, the Environmental, Social and Governance Secretariat. ESG is a term you'll find in investment circles.
00:33:57
Speaker
It's very popular right now. BlackRock, this investment company that has trillions of dollars under management, has made a big deal about ESG. You have this whole massive section of capital and capitalism that has made the decision that it's better to invest in things that will kill us marginally slower. It's real. Investment decisions are being affected by it.
00:34:25
Speaker
And Jason Kenney kind of very famously described it as a flavor of the month back in 2019 in a meeting with the Globe and Mail editorial board. And and now, you know, this is this is ostensibly why the war room was created, right, was to burnish the reputation of Canada's
00:34:43
Speaker
Oil and gas, the whole ethical oil argument. We are good. Canada is good. Alberta is good. Because we are good, our oil is good, you should buy it. I mean, I don't have to belabor the argument, but it's obviously a stupid and reductive one. Yeah, this ESG Secretariat is attached to the Premier's office, and we get another baby war room because Tom Olsen is just bad at his job.
00:35:14
Speaker
It is incredible if you pour through all of the documents, how much funding in Alberta actually goes to paying for free work for the oil and gas industry, especially on the PR side.
00:35:29
Speaker
You don't just have the war room and the baby war room, but then Alberta Energy does a ton of this stuff. Alberta Environment even gets mixed up in it sometimes. The AER is out there doing free PR for them. We have Invest Alberta, which is another kind of war room esque corporation, weird offshoot corporation that's supposed to attract investment to Alberta somehow.
00:35:52
Speaker
None of these efforts ever get anything done. I can't even describe them as slush funds because nobody's really getting any benefit out of the money, aside from, I guess, a few comms people get cushy jobs, but it's all just a gigantic waste. It is an example, I think, of how all of our provincial governments here in Alberta, regardless of party,
00:36:15
Speaker
have come up against this problem of our oil and gas industry slowly lurching towards obsolescence. And they don't have an actual answer for it, but they know that they need to look like they're doing something. They know that they need to look like they're trying. And so they come up with these things, the ESG secretary at the war room,
00:36:39
Speaker
It's all, it's all theater though, right? It doesn't really accomplish anything. The money is wasted. Yeah. And it's just a long-term trend, right? Like big capital, big pools of capital that look at the oil sands and they're just not interested in taking that risk. And so they strike it from their investments. Like you've seen it, you know, Shell got out of the oil sands a few years back.
00:37:05
Speaker
Total, the French super major, you've got the Norwegian investment fund. I mean, you can keep doing this. You're looking at trillions of dollars under management that are looking at the oil sands and saying, thanks, but no thanks. And some PR flim flam job where you're hiring your buddies to kind of burnish the reputation of the oil and gas industry abroad, it's a bandage on a bullet wound. You know what I mean?
00:37:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's magical thinking, as you described it in our write up the other day. I mean, there are efforts that are meant to trick voters, basically. They are intended to give the impression of the government having some control or some ability to solve these problems. The government doesn't, though. The government does not control the price of oil. The government does not control demand for oil. The government does not control the effects that carbon dioxide and methane have on global climate.
00:38:04
Speaker
There are no levers to pull here. Alberta governments would be much better served focusing inward, working on increasing the efficiency of the province itself by fixing our crumbling infrastructure, by properly funding programs and services, by dealing with the massive inequality and poverty issues here. But they don't want to do that, I guess because it's hard and it costs money.
00:38:33
Speaker
And they know that they can get away with appearing as the champions of the oil and gas industry with a lot of people, even if they're not actually getting anything done.
00:38:45
Speaker
Exactly. I don't have any good segue for this final section, but we had to read a bunch of bullshit in order to pull this podcast together.
Media Narratives and Budget Criticism
00:38:57
Speaker
Part of that involved bad budget takes, bad budget takes by people who we don't agree with or that are just outright venal or dumb. I want to start off this bad budget takes part
00:39:10
Speaker
the pod by talking about just how much the billionaire class loves Jason Kelly and his budget. The Business Council of Alberta, which is, if you're not familiar with the Business Council of Canada, you should really read
00:39:24
Speaker
Martin Lukach's book on Justin Trudeau. This business council model is this incredibly powerful way that capital gets what it wants. And yes, here's the tweet from the Business Council of Alberta. Provincial budget builds bridge over troubled waters. Budget strikes the right balance for the moment with focus on vaccination, economic recovery, and beginning the path to fiscal sustainability.
00:39:53
Speaker
So, you know, this is the type of organization where you know that if they're saying something good about the budget, the budget is shit. I mean, these, these Chamber of Commerce business rep groups, they are almost entirely composed of evil people with evil goals. You should be extremely skeptical whenever they say anything is good.
00:40:13
Speaker
Yeah, and when I'm talking about billionaires, I am talking about the Southern family and Nancy Southern and the Mannexes and Marie Edwards and all of the terrible, terrible people who have kind of wrung out Berta Dry in order to make their fortunes.
00:40:27
Speaker
But there's more, don't worry, there's a lot more budget, bad budget takes. Up next we have Kyle Bax of the CBC with Business Analysis. And this is kind of a very classic dumb journalism trope story. The headline here is Alberta's debt soars past 100 billion, stoking angst in government ranks.
00:40:51
Speaker
that angst in government banks, that actually sounds quite nice to say out loud, but this is just classic dumb journal. My new band name. Yeah, this is classic, classic dumb journalist shit, right? Lead with a big number about debt and then interview a schmuck like Drew Barnes who will say, yes, he's very disappointed. $100 billion is a lot of money, blah, blah, blah.
00:41:12
Speaker
Like, of course, of course the deficit and the debt are up this year and we're up last year. We were hit by an incredibly damaging pandemic. Dealing with a horrible pandemic costs money.
00:41:29
Speaker
There was no way around it. There was no way to get through all of this stuff, even if we had not waffled around and completely fucked up the response like the UCP did. It was still going to shut down commerce for quite a while. It was still going to depress consumer demand and tax revenue and all of those kinds of things for quite a while. It was still going to cost quite a lot of money to provide healthcare for all of the people who were infected by COVID.
00:42:00
Speaker
And so yes, yeah, we had to spend a fucking ton of money dealing with the pandemic. That's what happens. That doesn't mean that there is a horrible kind of structural problem with Alberta's books that demands huge austerity measures. Yeah, money isn't real. And like $100 billion debt does not affect you in any way. So pay no mind. It will literally never affect you. Don't think about it.
00:42:27
Speaker
your meals, your family, your friends, your job, your future, your education. Put some number in a spreadsheet somewhere. It's never going to have a material effect on your life or if it does, it's down the road. There's a theoretical point at which it becomes a problem. Yeah, it's debt servicing payments. I mean, if we- Alberta's not close to that danger zone. Even if COVID were to continue for another year, we would not be in the danger zone.
00:42:55
Speaker
Alberta's debt per GDP ratio is pretty much in line with other provinces and other western nations. We're still in great shape relative to other provinces. There's really no reason to be throwing your arms up about the debt or the deficit.
00:43:15
Speaker
A lot of writers and reporters go with that because it's a very simplistic mode of analysis that a lot of readers get. They think, oh, well, if my household budget was short $1,000 every month, then I would know that I had a big problem. But your household does not have limitless access to credit like a government does. Or the ability to raise revenue through taxes.
00:43:40
Speaker
You can tell your kids to go get a part-time job, but you can't go down to the McDonald's at the corner of your street and be like, listen, you need to start chipping in more for my household. The province, on the other hand, can do that.
00:43:56
Speaker
It's lazy journalism, right? And it's just dog shit, neo-lib politics at the end of the day, too. This third last paragraph in the piece could literally be a cut and paste from a news story in the 90s. Try not to roll your eyes through your head. Here's the quote. With each passing year, the province runs a deficit. It will likely become more difficult to dig its way out. The borrowing costs the province will have to pay each year on its set are expected to keep rising. And experts warn that that expense could climb even more if interest rates begin to rise.
00:44:27
Speaker
X that out. That is not analysis. That is not anything that literally matters. Fuck you.
00:44:35
Speaker
money that's in the provincial debt or money that's in the provincial deficit, those are bills for things that we got. Those are things that we paid for. You shouldn't look at a deficit and assume that it's this like demonic, pernicious thing that no responsible government can ever run a deficit. No, that's not true at all. That's evidence that there was some need to be met and we paid for it.
00:45:02
Speaker
And some of those payments have been deferred to the future because like anyone who goes out and buys something expensive, it's easier to space it out over a while than to pay a lump sum. Exactly. And this article also brings up something that is not in the quote, but for some reason pundits really are trying to make happen and that is a sales tax.
Political Realities of Taxation and Deficit Discussions
00:45:23
Speaker
And Don Braid, scab at the Calgary Herald, took his column, his budget column, really thinks he's found something here. He writes this very same bog standard column about that very similar to Kyle Backs' thing about full of big debt and deficit numbers and about how, oh, Jason Kenney, he hates debts and deficits, but here he is having to do it.
00:45:48
Speaker
Um, but then he takes some innocuous line from Taves about some third party review of Alberta's revenue structure. And all of a sudden he's sure that Alberta is getting a sales tax. Let me just say right now, uh, under Jason Kenney, Alberta is not getting a sales tax.
00:46:02
Speaker
it seems pretty unlikely to me. And when I hear language about revenue efficiency from TAFEs, what I hear there is not a proposal to tax shift to a consumption tax, like a sales tax. What I hear there is a tax shift away from business and corporate taxes, because that's the argument that we generally get for cuts to those taxes is that, well, they're an inefficient revenue source.
00:46:31
Speaker
Yeah, or a flat tax. I could see this third party review be like, oh, you know what's great? A flat tax. We love flat taxes. We're fucking idiots. Or them saying things like income taxes or premiums, like healthcare premiums, which is essentially a flat tax. Those next two people are fucking in love. Those need to come in with healthcare premiums. Sorry, go ahead.
00:47:01
Speaker
Well, when you hear words like efficiency around revenue structures from the right, that is a code word for corporate tax cuts because they believe that corporate tax cuts are unacceptable because they are an inefficient revenue source because they put more of a drag on the economy than taxing people at the bottom, basically.
00:47:27
Speaker
The flip side though is that even though taxing wealthy folks and their corporations is sometimes not as efficient as squeezing the money out of people down at the bottom.
00:47:41
Speaker
it's morally more correct and it removes more inequality. So you could chase after efficiency as your metric for your tax structure constantly and end up with a situation where you have terrible, terrible wealth inequality in your province.
00:48:02
Speaker
Because, you know, the rich people have all successfully made this case that, oh, it's not efficient to take my money. You need to go take it from workers instead. You know, it'll be better off for you that way. Efficiency, though, is not the only concern. Equity is also a very important concern. Inequality is also a very important concern. As far as tax in Alberta,
00:48:25
Speaker
even if it did happen, would have some serious issues to it. And you could get around a lot of them by offering rebates like the federal government does, but then that cuts into the amount that you can generate from them. That being said,
00:48:41
Speaker
It's all pie in the sky, because you're absolutely right that Jason Kenney has no stomach for bringing in a sales tax. Never going to happen. He absolutely will refuse to do it. And I think what he would prefer the situation would be is that he kind of struggles to meet balance, but keeps publicly refusing to do sales tax. And so all of these columns from kind of centrist wonks convince not these people that it's a smart idea to campaign on a sales tax.
00:49:11
Speaker
which is one of the ways that Kenny could actually get reelected in the next election, despite his great unpopularity, is if he tricks Rachel Notley and the NDP into campaigning on a sales tax. They absolutely should not do that. What they should campaign on is bringing back the corporate tax levels that we had before the UCP came in.
00:49:29
Speaker
I mean, hold on. We would almost have no deficit issue if corporate taxes were back up to those levels. I mean, this podcast does not make a habit of providing political advice to the NDP for two big reasons. One, we're like dummies and I don't read any books and whatever. My political analysis and advice isn't worth very much. But two, it's also done by better and smarter people than us. But two, they also don't listen.
00:49:54
Speaker
The NDP does not listen to what we say. They don't give a shit to what they say. In fact, the fact that we have suggested these things today probably makes them less likely to happen. Yes. The fact that we have suggested that Rachel Notley should not be tricked into campaigning on a sales tax means we're absolutely going to get flyers from the NDP about a sales tax in a few months.
00:50:14
Speaker
But I am breaking this self-imposed rule we have about not giving political advice to the NDP on the matter of messaging around this budget, specifically messaging around debt and deficits.
00:50:28
Speaker
Just like how Jason Kenney is not credible when he talks about how much he loves funding healthcare, the NDP is just never going to be credible talking about debt and deficits. Don't talk about debt and debt. Like I don't care. The hypocrisy shit does not matter. Hypocrisy does not matter to their base, but there's this tweet from Kathleen Ganley. It had like 1800 likes. It's like, what did it say? Here's what it said.
00:50:54
Speaker
Quote, in the 2019 election, Kenny threat number, if you vote NDP, you'll have $96 billion in debt by 2023. Instead, he delivered 100 billion in debt already. Huge cuts of services and a corporate handout that created no jobs. Scare quotes, fiscal conservatism. They need to stop it. They need to stop mentioning the debt. They need to stop mentioning the deficit. Just like the problem that they ran into, if you will remember back in the pipeline theater days,
00:51:22
Speaker
when NDP comms basically trapped them and then they had to become pipeline crusaders, they're locking themselves into the enemy's frame here. And by continuing to harp on about debt and deficit, they are amplifying those frames too, which is going to just give cover to the Conservatives to inflict more austerity on us. The NDP need to stick to talking about
00:51:52
Speaker
like non-obfuscated, not nebulous things. They need to talk about the real material conditions that are affecting working people here in the province. Exactly. And I think that's a good place to leave it. I don't think we need to belabor the point. NDP, you're not the party of debt and deficits. Stop talking about debt and deficits. Talk about healthcare. Talk about jobs. That's
Podcast Contributions and Community Engagement
00:52:14
Speaker
it. That's our hour on the budget.
00:52:16
Speaker
There's a lot in there. We produced a couple of pieces on it. Uh, if, if there's more out there that we've missed, um, we definitely want to know about it. So please get ahold of us on Twitter via email. I'm very easy to reach at Duncan Kinney on Twitter. I'm, uh, reachable by email at at Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. Jim.
00:52:34
Speaker
How can people get ahold of you? You could DM me on Twitter, I suppose. I'm not quite as responsive as Duncan is, but sometimes I'm up for a chat. I'm Jim Story on Twitter, the ketchup bottle icon, so you can follow me there. Ketchup, man. I was actually just going through our monthly donors.
00:52:52
Speaker
We ran a campaign in December. We ran a campaign in January. We asked people to help us out. A lot of you responded. We have 444 current monthly donors. I know that's a little different from what's on the Progress Report patrons page, but there are legacy donors from Progress Alberta site that are also monthly donors. I won't get into the details.
00:53:15
Speaker
Latest data, 444 people decided that we are worth it, that we are worth 5, 10, 15, sometimes 20 or $50 a month. And we are incredibly grateful for the people who do give us those contributions. They are incredibly important for Jim and I, for our continued existence.
00:53:32
Speaker
And I just want to thank all of the people who do that. And if you listen to this pod, you made it all the way to the end and you're making it to this pitch. I think if you get value out of this podcast, if you get value out of the content that we produce on the progressreport.ca, go to the progressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and become a monthly donor. If that doesn't work for you, if you can't donate, we get it. At times are tough. But if you have the means, we would really appreciate the help.
00:54:03
Speaker
Absolutely. We'd be super grateful. It's not just for me and Duncan, too. We do have quite a few freelance contributors to the report these days. It's really important to us that we compensate people fairly. We don't want to be one of those nonprofits that ignores its principles and screws people. And we want to give a leg up to people who don't have an easy in to Canada's media landscape. There are a lot of outlets out there that are
00:54:32
Speaker
not very into supporting people who are speaking from the left or people who are speaking from like an anti-colonial or anti-capitalist perspective. We would like to give people a leg up so that they can also get their voice out there so that they can have a platform so that they can start building a portfolio, getting their career underway. So please help us help our folks. And pitch us. If there's a story that needs to be told, please get ahold of Jim or I. Give us a pitch. We'll see if it works.
00:55:01
Speaker
Absolutely. Duncan's very receptive to pitches. Send him an email. Thanks so much to Jim for coming on. Thanks to Cosmic FamU Communist for our theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.