The government of Alberta’s multi-billion dollar deficit is a prime example of why provinces should invest resource revenue over the long-term instead of spending it at budget time, Macdonald-Laurier Institute author Greg Poelzer said in an interview with BNN.
Alberta on Thursday announced a plethora of tax increases to help slay a projected deficit created in part by dropping oil prices.
Poelzer says the impact wouldn’t have been so pronounced if Alberta had followed Norway’s lead in paying into a sovereign wealth fund.
“Now you see what’s happened by not making those savings in the fiscal crisis that the province faces today”, he says.
Poelzer is the author of a recent MLI report, titled “What Crisis?”, that details the advantages of placing resource revenues into a sovereign wealth fund rather than using them on short-term spending programs.
