Sunday we went to the Earth Day festival at Edmonton's Hawrelak Park. We decided not to drive, it being Earth Day and all, so we chose to walk along the river valley, up Keillor Road, and along the bike trail to Hawrelak.
But we didn't quite get there. Apparently there has been some settling on Keillor Road. The first we saw of it was a big sign that said "Steep Dropoff Ahead," but we figured that was probably aimed at bicyclists more than pedestrians like us. A bicyclist passed us as we went up Keillor Road, and then he came back down past us. We asked him why he'd turned around, and he said, "There's a steep dropoff."
He wasn't kidding:
Here's a view from the broken road edge. The tiny white tent in the distance is the auditorium at Hawrelak.
We took the detour.
I often use this space to complain about Alberta's treatment in Canada. Perhaps this seems excessive to some of y'all. Please check out this graph:
This is a graphical representation of the current "equalization" regime whereby Alberta (and to a much lesser extent Ontario) is taxed to fund social services in the other provinces.
Note that the diagram excludes "floor provisions" -- this a rule that a province's equalization payment cannot decline by more than 1.6% in any given year, even if large fluctuations in that province's "fiscal capacity" would justify such a decrease. For example, if there is a sudden sharp increase in the price of natural gas, Newfoundland and Saskatchewan do not suffer a compensating drop in their equalization transfer payment. It is an accounting identity, therefore, that Alberta does not see a compensating drop in its outgoing transfer payments.
There are additional provisions. For example, two special agreements with Newfoundland and Nova Scotia on the handling of offshore petroleum exploitation (15-year phaseout of equalization payments to "protect" the province from sudden drops). There is a "generic solution" to the concentration of a specific asset in a specific province (thus creating an incentive for a province receiving equalization to eliminate tax on that asset, knowing that equalization would make up the difference). The "generic solution" actually seems designed to protect Alberta.... I mean, the "have" provinces.
But my very favorite part in the whole site comes on this page:
The standard measures the average fiscal capacity of the five ‘middle income’ provinces – Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia.Alberta is not listed, and since it's certainly not a "low income" province, I can only assume that we are a "high income" province. The only one, in fact.
You can read all about it.
Dalton McGuinty is continuing to lead Ontario down the path California followed ten years ago -- first ignoring the warning rumbles following the first failed energy deregulation, now reducing K-3 class sizes to a limit of 20 pupils per teacher. From a distance it looks like a slow-motion reenactment of California's crash; the crucial difference is that Ontario may not have the high growth necessary to truly suffer from these decisions. Low growth is good, see? Low growth makes it possible for the consequences to be dragged out over ten years -- long enough for Dalton McGuinty to have moved on.
The other crucial difference is that California suffered its worst under a Democratic governor with a Republican president. There was no federal bailout: why should a Republican government reward a consistently Democratic state? And California is objectively rich, anyway -- who would the federal government steal from to bail out? Happily, both Ontario and the Canadian federal government are run by Liberals, and there is already a tradition of soaking Alberta for the greater benefit of greater Canada.