Pete Townshend was 20 when he wrote the anthem “My Generation” in 1965. “I hope I die before I get old,” he said then—but maybe he’s changed his mind now that he’s retirement age. The first wave of post-war baby boomers has started to turn 65. With the mass retirement of this generation, the workforce will undergo a significant demographic shift, further transforming an already much-altered society.

To explore the changes, Alberta Views has a new department called Work Shift. Each month’s dual profile will feature one retiree and one new graduate in the same field. A comparison of their backgrounds, education, career aspirations and achievements will show how much Alberta has changed in a single generation. Whether we’re in our 20s or our 60s, the changes in school and work over our lifetime have been dramatic: personal computers, the Internet and social media; the rapid development of the oil sands and exponential growth of the province’s population.

This year we celebrate the 15th anniversary of the founding of Alberta Views. Local Perspectives Publishing was incorporated on July 25, 1997, and the first issue of the magazine went to press in December of that year. Alberta Views was born, so to speak, into a different world: Conrad Black owned most of the major newspapers in Canada, including the Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald. The ultra-right Alberta Report was still the most widely circulated magazine in the province. Enthusiasm for free trade and free market Thatcher/Reaganomics was in full swing. Public infrastructure was being dismantled. It was the height of the Klein era (1993–2006) of deregulation, privatization and severe cuts to education, healthcare and welfare. Klein diminished the role of government, slashing the civil service, introducing a flat tax, widening the gap between rich and poor and increasing inequality, which was bad for everyone.

The lead story in that first issue was “The Perils of Privatization: When Government Goes Wrong,” by Larry Pratt, who used  CKUA as a case study. We wanted our readers to think of themselves not just as individuals, but as citizens with the power to change things for the better. I wrote in 1997:

“The purpose of Alberta Views is to provide thoughtful commentary on the culture, politics and economy of our province. We present diverse viewpoints in order to give expression to a wide range of opinion and to encourage discussion and debate. We believe independent media are essential to a democratic society. In Canada the control of newspapers, television, radio and magazines is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The media feed us entertainment and celebrity news; they treat us as consumers. Alberta Views addresses its readers as citizens who want to be informed and active, who take responsibility for the kind of society we live in.”

In this first issue of 2012, we critique the peculiarities of Alberta’s tax regime, expose the deception of political language and examine the role of Albertans in the creation of the world’s newest country, South Sudan. Our mission hasn’t changed.

But the world has changed. Access to information on the Internet has lessened the concern about media ownership, although making sense of it all is still a challenge. The September 11, 2001, attacks on the US led to the “war on terror,” undermining social trust everywhere. The development of our controversial oil sands is now a significant engine of Canada’s economy under international scrutiny. Klein retired in 2006. In 2011 Conservatives chose their first woman leader to be our premier. But perhaps the biggest change has been the collapse of the global economy.

The 2008 economic meltdown has made many question the ability of free trade and an unregulated free market to deliver what most people need to live decent lives. People need homes and jobs, yes. And they also need education, roads, parks and healthcare. Only government can provide the regulation, tax framework and services to shape society positively for the benefit of the many rather than only the few.

This is a watershed year. If an election is called, it will be the most interesting contest Alberta has seen in decades. With the change in the old guard of the Conservatives and the rise of new political parties, organizations such as Public Interest Alberta and a more active electorate, we have a new political culture.

As it goes in the broader society, so it goes here at Alberta Views. In 2012 I arrive at retirement age. I am passing the baton. The day-to-day operation of the magazine will be taken up by a new generation: the capable team listed in our masthead led by publisher Beth Ed and editor Evan Osenton. Evan will be writing the editorial from now on, and I will write a note from time to time. My role here will be different, but I will not be uninvolved.

To celebrate our 15th year, Alberta Views is offering a free gift subscription to any Alberta resident retiring in 2012 or graduating from an Alberta post-secondary institution. Just write or phone us, or visit albertaviews.ab.ca and click on Work Shift in the top menu.

Against all odds, this small publication has survived and made a difference. In 2009 Alberta Views was named Canada’s Magazine of the Year. May it continue to grow and thrive with the energy and vision of this new generation.

Going It Alone

Alberta’s 10-year flat-tax experiment

An editorial by Evan Osenton

Alberta has had a lot of “funny” ideas about revenue over the years—even printing its own currency during the Aberhart era. (Merchants wouldn’t take “prosperity certificates”; even MLAs refused to be paid in them.) But this province has never fled from good sense so fast as when it adopted a flat tax in 2001.

With a flat income tax, every Albertan pays the same rate: 10 per cent. If this sounds like the height of fairness—waitresses and millionaires contributing at the same rate—ask yourself two questions: Why have no other provinces and no Western countries adopted a flat tax? And why are such wobbly democracies as Estonia, Russia and Mongolia the kind of countries that have?

The truth of the flat tax is that everyone doesn’t pay the same rate. Low- and middle-income earners (i.e., most of us) end up with the bigger tax burden, while the wealthiest citizens get the lighter load. The craziness of a system in which those who benefit most invest the least to keep up said system is why Western countries opt for progressive taxes. It’s hardly Bolshevism: No less than the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, wrote in The Wealth of Nations: “The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor.… It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

Consider the owner of a thriving company. His success owes in part to his hard work, of course. But he didn’t teach his hundreds of employees to read; doesn’t pay their basic healthcare costs; doesn’t build the roads they use to get to work. All told, he’s getting a bargain. It stands to reason he’d want to keep education, healthcare and roads as good as possible, even at the cost of a few more tax dollars, even if only to stay wealthy himself.

But the flat tax does more than defy good sense: the Parkland Institute estimates it costs Alberta $5-billion annually in forgone revenue. Truth is, the only reason we can afford this giveaway is by offsetting it with black gold, a.k.a. non-renewable resource revenue (NRR). Sheila Pratt in “Taboo No More” (p 30) shows how oil royalties pay for 30 per cent of our services. As with a flat tax, relying on NRR might even sound great at first: “We get services without having to pay taxes for them!” But Pratt speaks to a number of influential Albertans who argue that NRR will drop off faster than we realize, and may already be declining per capita. They’d like to see more of it invested in the Heritage Fund and to see taxes tweaked. And these champions of saving and new taxes…? Not who you might expect.

The flat tax is also one more reason for the gulf between rich and poor in Alberta—the fastest-growing gap in Canada, according to a 2011 study by sociologist John Myles. This province’s richest 1 per cent now have as much wealth as the poorest 53 per cent combined. According to Public Interest Alberta, 73,000 local children live in poverty, 40 per cent more than in 2008. And this inequity affects us all. “The vast majority of the population is harmed by greater inequity,” write Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in The Spirit Level. This includes the well-off, since no one is immune from the health outcomes (e.g., more mental illness) and social outcomes (e.g., more violence) associated with less equal societies. The authors argue compellingly that the broken societies and economies we see in Europe and the US today have everything to do with rising inequity.

But Alberta will sometimes get it right. Prosperity certificates, for example, were cancelled after a few months. Our flat tax has now been around for a decade and has quietly done nothing but cost you and me some $50-billion, helped squander a one-time oil bonanza and made our province a smaller, meaner place. In a new year, nothing says we can’t come back to our senses.