Very few people want a government that’s fiscally conservative. Most people actually want a government that’s fiscally responsible. Yes, even in Alberta! Those two things aren’t the same.
It took me a while to figure out how to best articulate this but a conversation with a new acquaintance sparked these thoughts. He described himself as “socially progressive and fiscally conservative.” By that he means he believes our elected officials should more or less pay their own way. They shouldn’t be expensing office supplies, coffees, meals, travel costs or basically anything a politician might spend their publicly funded constituency budget to do their work on a day to day basis. He called this nickel and diming the taxpayer, reimbursing little things that someone should be willing to pay out of their pocket with the salary they earn.
He had a point and I agree with him to an extent. But I wouldn’t call that being fiscally conservative. That’s being fiscally responsible. Or even simpler, just being a good steward of the budget you’re given.
Otherwise, he supports the spending of public dollars on things like education, healthcare, environmental protection and transit. All these things would be considered progressive spending. It’s why I describe myself as fiscally progressive on my Blue Sky profile. So my point is he’s not really a fiscal conservative and I’m willing to bet a good three-quarters of Albertans wouldn’t be either.
That’s because, on the other hand, fiscal conservatives don’t want to spend public dollars on those things.
When they do, they do it begrudgingly. Take a look at Premier Danielle Smith’s announcement about building schools. That’s something totally normal for a provincial government to do but she made an address on television to justify it because in her mind, it was a special moment.
Conservatives like Smith believe the government should get out of the business of providing public services beyond the basics and its role is to mostly enable private citizens and companies to do everything else they feel fulfills the needs of their communities.
Fiscal conservative budgeting gives money to those private companies to do the heavy lifting that the public sector should do under the notion that they’ll be more cost-effective at it while providing better services. We have decades of evidence showing that’s not the case. Just in the past five years in Alberta, we can look at the delivery of diagnostic services, importing of children’s medicine, recovery services, or the ongoing privatization in healthcare to see that none of those things have improved. Some have definitely gotten worse.
It’s money straight down the drain. Those are the actions of a fiscal conservative government. Are any of them fiscally responsible? There’s a strong argument they are not.
This matters, especially for progressives, because when it comes time to campaign we need to clearly make that distinction and argue that most voters want a government that’s fiscally responsible and no party has a monopoly on that. And it’s certainly not the conservative parties who are automatically the responsible ones. They’ve shown time and time again that they aren’t. Progressive governments can do wasteful spending too but they don’t preach about being the best at caring for your tax dollars. What’s that saying? The louder someone says something, the less true it is.
So you’re probably not a fiscal conservative. You just don’t want wasteful spending. I also don’t want wasteful spending.
What we’ve gotten in Alberta with the UCP government is billions of dollars of it: sole-sourced contracts to UCP-friendly businesses, lawsuits everyone knew they would lose, tax cuts and corporate handouts that haven’t created jobs, and a huge reorganization of Alberta Health Services that hasn’t improved healthcare.
Albertans voted for Danielle Smith believing they were going to be responsible with their tax dollars. Fiscally responsible they are not.
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