Alberta Power

Allan Gregg (“The True West, Strong and Free,” September) is worried about how to tap Alberta’s wealth for the advantage of other provinces. It’s a sign of progress that Gregg doesn’t propose to steal it, as the Liberals did in the early 1980s, but he’s still not asking the right question. The right question for other provinces to ask is not, “How can we get our hands on Alberta’s wealth? ” but rather, “How can we become as wealthy as Alberta? ”

Natural resources do not create human wealth. If they did, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong would be poor while Nigeria and North Korea would be rich. Alberta’s oil and gas are not intrinsically more valuable than Quebec’s hydro power or Ontario’s proximity to major American markets. Wealth grows from institutions and public policies that foster its creation. Below are the Ten Commandments of the “Alberta Model.” They were not revealed on tablets of stone but worked out by trial and error under sixty years of enlightened conservative government, in which Ernest Manning, Peter Lougheed, and Ralph Klein were the main figures.

1. Avoidance of public debt and investment of fiscal surpluses to help pay for the needs of government.

2. Low taxes. No provincial sales tax and the lowest personal and corporate taxes in Canada.

3. Private-sector development of natural resources. The provincial Crown owns most of the oil and gas, but exploration, production, refining, transportation, and marketing are done entirely by private enterprise. Thank God we never created a “PetroAlberta” to run our major industry.

4. No monopolistic Crown corporations in other areas. Treasury Branches have to compete with other financial institutions. Power generation, automobile insurance, and liquor marketing are dominated by tax-paying, profit-making private enterprise, not bloated, debt-ridden public corporations. We flirted with public ownership in the Lougheed years (Pacific Western Airlines) but got over that failed romance.

5. No subsidies to business (apart from farmers — no one’s perfectly consistent). Again, we wasted a lot of money on corporate welfare in the Lougheed-Getty years but learned from the experience.

6. The best education results in Canada, aided by frequent testing of both student and school performance as well as by a more or less level playing field for Catholic, other religious, and secular private schools to compete with public education.

7. Reliance on market prices. No rent controls, underpriced hydro, or ridiculously cheap daycare, which subsidizes two-income families at the expense of one-income families.