Premier Danielle Smith spoke to Albertans in a TV address aired on Feb. 21, 2024. Do not publish before air date. See attached note.
Premier Danielle Smith is shelving a promised tax cut and reining in program spending. In exchange, she's thinking big about saving in Alberta's Heritage Fund.attention. The latter has become quite an Albertan habit.
The devilish details will be in the Feb. 29 budget, but Smith insisted there are enough of those oil-royalty billions to still spend massively on present-day needs, rather than impose spending cuts. We're a few quantum leaps away from there. Alberta's long-term savings fund stood at $17.1 billion just two years ago. When inflation-adjusted, that's much weaker than the $12.7 billion that the fund's creator, former premier Peter Lougheed, left it at way back in 1985.
But she did lay hints to at least part of that path in her speech, by arguing that if Alberta had reinvested all the income earned on Lougheed's provincial nest egg since its 1970s inception, the province would have north of $250 billion in the Heritage Fund.Instead, Alberta has routinely transferred the interest earnings into general revenue, usually more than one billion bucks a year — until the UCP government began plowing that money back into savings, starting in 2022.
In Lougheed's days, Alberta devoted a set portion of its oil royalties to the Heritage Fund, but that practice ended in the 1980s and hasn't been revived since. The UCP this year will devote a portion of budget surpluses to the fund, but that's just a plan to spend any money that happens to be leftover at year end.
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