Shifting Priorities: From Deficit Spending to Paying down the Debt and Lowering Taxes - Evidence from the Alberta Advantage Surveys: 1995-2000

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Notes

¹The Deficit Elimination Act was replaced by the Balanced Budget and Debt Retirement Act shortly after the 1994 budget was introduced. It applied the same principles of deficit elimination to debt reduction and projected paying off the "debt mortgage" by FY 2021, a 25-year "amortization."  See Budget ‘95: Building a Strong Foundation, (21 February 1995), pp. 16-23. In fact, the amortization period looks to be less than ten years.

²Of course, not everyone agrees that the province’s economic profile was determinative.  See Archer and Gibbins, 1997, p. 462.

³Of course, it is possible that these factors have important indirect effects by way of "intervening" variables, but that analysis is beyond the scope of this investigation.

⁴See, for example, the "Open Letter" to Klein, NP, 26 January, 2001, signed by Stephen Harper, Tom Flanagan, Ted Morton, Rainer Knopff, Andrew Crooks, and Ken Bossenkool, which advocated using Alberta’s constitutional powers to build a "firewall" against further encroachments on provincial jurisdiction by the federal government.

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