Jason Kenney has a Spending Problem

Jason Kenney has a spending problem

As the old saying goes, the truth will out.

Jason Kenney’s dirty little secret hit the front page this week, as yet another ratings agency downgraded Alberta’s credit rating.

S&P Global found that Alberta’s deficits are the highest of any local or regional government in Canada, not just for this year but last year as well.

Premier Jason Kenney, elected on a platform to control spending and grow the economy, has accomplished neither.

Try as he might to use the pandemic to explain all his failings away, the data tells another story.

Budget 2020-21 projects our province’s debt to reach $116 billion by the end of this fiscal year, with interest payments costing $2.8 billion. The Kenney government’s total spending in 2021 is up to $61.9 billion, which is $5.6 billion higher than the NDP’s spending in 2018-19. Even when you strip out temporary pandemic spending, Jason Kenney is spending substantially more than Rachel Notley at her highest levels.

What’s worse, Kenney knows he has a spending problem but is doing nothing about it. His government’s own Blue Ribbon Panel of Alberta’s Finances found that if per capita spending here matched spending in BC, Ontario and Quebec (Quebec!), Alberta would eliminate a whopping $10 billion in expenses annually.

Rather than admit he has a problem, Kenney has adopted the strategy of previous administrations and decided to turn a blind eye to the growing debt spiral.

It wasn’t always this way. Progressive Conservative governments, after paying off Alberta’s $23 billion debt in 2005, promised to never again take our province into the red.

Premier Klein pledged, “Never again will this government or the people of this province have to set aside another tax dollar on debt … If need be, we will put in place legislation to make sure that we never have a debt again.”

It didn’t work out that way.

Staring in 2007, successive governments scrapped Alberta’s balanced budget legislation, ran a series of cyclical deficits, changed the way in which deficits are calculated and reported in budgets, blew through the province’s sustainability fund, and began running structural deficits just to pay for operational spending.

There have been plenty of warning signs about the provincial government’s fiscal mismanagement, with multiple credit rating downgrades. While in opposition, I regularly challenged the NDP government over this very issue. However, the situation has only grown worse since the UCP came to power in 2019. In a span of about six months in 2020, Fitch Ratings, Moody’s Investors Service, and DBRS Morningstar all issued downgrades.

Premier Kenney blames everyone but himself for the situation Alberta faces today. But the truth has come out.

Jason Kenney has a spending problem.