Quote:
Originally Posted by MalcolmTucker
Who cares about cross Canada numbers. We have Alberta numbers, and this is an Alberta road.
Motor vehicle licenses more than cover any difference at $525m, then there is the 4% sales tax on auto insurance.
Would you dismiss a future toll as "something that hasn't happened yet. It's a bit bold to fix an assertion around something that hasn't happened yet and backward project it."?
The government is pretty good at projecting tax revenues, you might say it is one of their core functions. Plus the tax has been at that level for 7 months now, if you want to see the revenue flows from it go into the first quarterly report issued at the end of August.
The PCs decided (partly because this project is so expensive!) to line up spending with revenue. The NDs are continuing this.
How is it so hard to support good policy? You can argue against building this project without using a factually incorrect subsidy argument.
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Unsubstantiated road building isn't necessarily good policy even if it can be directly paid for. That hasn't yet shown a cost benefit of greater than 1, especially, again, accounting for externalities. Or opportunity cost of better projects, or none...
I do agree that gas taxes should be raised so I'm happy about that ND policy and it's great that their revenue projections are on target. That doesn't mean it should then be used to fund this project.
You have shown no convincing accounting that this is being fully paid for directly through user fees. Is the P3 nature hiding upfront costs.. as they usually do? The capital plan conveniently left out debt servicing with regards to transportation.
I did a quick relatively random selection of two Alberta county capital plans. Seeing as how your link only covered the Provincial Highway network it conveniently leaves out the cost of roads under county responsibility. Seems at least those two counties pretty explicitly state that they use property tax to pay for their roadway maintenance. Here is one of
them.
If you can show me a full life-cycle accounting of how the SWRR is being financed without neglecting current responsibilities/assets/liabilities then I'll be convinced. Moving numbers around doesn't quite do it. Being able to say a given project is being fully user financed while disregarding the ones and their maintenance that aren't doesn't mean it isn't being subsidized. Robbing Peter to pay Paul, no? A second look at the fiscal tables also brings to light that the total spending on transportation seems to be considerably more than 1.3 billion... amortization, operations and capital spending.. but I admit to accounting not being a forte of mine, and find it a tad confusing, because I'm seeing at least one number at 2.1 billion for Capital alone..
Because the accounting can hide these things, I will continue to care about Canada, because the clearest fact is that roads are subsidized.. Did not the feds commit money toward it too.... they are Canada no?
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