CALGARY—A 2015 property crime spike in Alberta’s largest city was likely linked to the start of the opioid crisis and recession in the oilpatch, a new study found. The average number of property crimes — robberies, break-and-enters and vehicle thefts — has increased by 50 per cent since 2015, found the study, released by the […]

  On the weekend, the United Conservative Party in Alberta voted to include a return to the so-called flat tax in its policy platform. Taxes, of course, garner a lot of interest in Alberta, and there has been much discussion about this proposal. The Alberta “flat tax” dates back to the 2001 tax year when […]

Alberta’s recession is now long over. The latest data from Statistics Canada, released Wednesday, shows 2017 was a year of strong economic growth. Gains in the province’s oil and gas sector were particularly high, driving half the gains for the year. But, after 18 months of economic recovery, the province remains divided between those who […]

Long before Doug Ford gets a chance as premier to wage his scrap-the-tax war against Ontario’s cap-and-trade system, and Justin Trudeau’s carbon price program; before Alberta’s Jason Kenney can win the right to combat evil Ottawa’s “tax on everything” diktat, a bespectacled, low-talking man in Regina by the name of Scott Moe will have his […]

The Abacus survey on carbon taxes, released last week for the Ecofiscal Commission, revealed that 18 per cent of Canadians considered it a “very good” idea for governments to tax carbon. Twenty-eight per cent consider it “good,” 33 per cent say “acceptable,” and 22 per cent think it’s “poor” or worse. More interestingly, almost two-thirds […]

The federal equalization program is up for review this year, and the University of Toronto Press has published a timely new book on the subject: Fiscal Federalism and Equalization Policy in Canada. While the authors defend equalization transfer payments to poorer, have-not provinces, many of the facts that they report confirm that politics and partisan […]