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Photo by Jeff McIntosh/The Canadian Press Article content I’m at the everything-makes-you-feel-old age, but opinion columns about how Alberta isn’t thrifty enough have a special power to make me feel time’s icy claw. I’ve been reading these pieces for 30 or 40 years, through innumerable tergiversations of the Alberta economy, and they don’t change much. On Monday, a bright political scientist, Geoff Salomons, appeared on the CBC website to deliver yet another version of the gospel. Citing the NDP’s economic plan for the upcoming provincial election, Salomons wrote: Article content “The Hirsch report rightly notes that ‘income from natural resource royalties are not, in fact, income. They are the conversion of an asset in one form (physical molecules) into another (dollars).’ Or to put it another way, it is the conversion from natural capital to financial capital. As such, this revenue should be viewed differently than just another income stream the government relies on. In the mid-1970s, when then-premier Peter Lougheed first made the case for why the Heritage Savings Trust Fund was needed, he compared the spending of resource revenue to selling the house to pay for the groceries.” Alberta really has, of course, historically been lazy about […]
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