DougB
Senior Member
All that shows that the higher the taxes, the poorer the province
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Alberta Provincial Politics
- Thread starter Surrealplaces
- Start date
DougB
Senior Member
"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome"
Kids likely are over-coded for complexity simply because coding attracts resources. I'm unsure that educational assistants provide much value. My kids only attended school in Washington state, Utah, Texas, Hong Kong and Australia, places where there is no such thing as education assistants and where teacher compensation is generally much lower than in Alberta so I can only go on anecdotes. I have friends in AB who question whether classroom integration has gone too far and that some special needs kids (not all) need to be in separate classrooms guided by specialized teachers. Besides leading to better outcomes, it might actually be cheaper to have a classroom with one teacher covering 8 special needs kids than trying to integrate them in a regular classroom but require 4 education assistants. All of my AB friends with kids in private schools did so because they felt their special needs kids were being served by a public system that often seems motivated to chase more resources instead of better outcomes.
darwink
Senior Member
To some extent yes, but as others point out, Alberta suffers from deficits while investing less in many services.
trtcttc
Senior Member
I don’t think it necessarily works in that direction. Probably more like, the wealthier resource per capita provinces can tax there citizens less and still achieve fiscal balance. In general, I support AB taxation stance.
I can assure you teachers in Hong Kong are paid more than in Canada. You can argue housing expense is higher but that varys a lot between individuals. Classroom composition and demands have changed a lot. I think I’m on the younger side of this forum, and I went to high school in the early 2010s, and we had a teacher for each class, and only someone with severe needs had extra help, like a couple per grade. ESL just had a separate English class instead of French/second language. This is at a high school in Vancouver. I don’t have kids in school so can’t speak to the situation, but anecdotally it seems like far more kids have “special needs” today. Have we had a lot of school integration in Calgary?
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
And that is why there is equalization. Even with high taxes some of those Provinces still require a top-up. It is hard for PEI to create any of other sources of revenue, they're so small and you can only get so much out of tourism. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia probably also suffer from their size making it difficult to grow their economy. Nova Scotia was my favourite place to live; there was just so few job prospects I had to leave so if they could ever figure that out, it could really boom. Interestingly, Nova Scotia has some well-regarded universities for its size, they probably struggle to get those people to stay after graduation.
Integration depends on the board, if someone is severe in Calgary, they're not in the classroom with others. However, in Rockyview and other rural schools, they're integrated. One issue with resourcing is in order to get support a student needs to be assessed. In poorer communities or communities where there's a stigma behind needing more support assessments do not happen, the parents are required to pay for an assessment. Without the documented requirement for support the teacher still gives that student extra support without the additional resources, taking time away from every other student. Issues in classrooms are also not constant; these are children who have good and bad days and if a student is manageable 90% of the time there is still 10% of the time where they're disrupting every other student learning.
This might be controversial, and it is just my opinion, but children have continuously gotten worse. Why? I think it has a lot to do with both parents working now more than they ever have, especially in poorer communities. Parents are parenting less and relying on childcare providers and teachers to parent their children. At the same time, when a parent is not working, they are having to parent more than ever before because children are a lot less independent and don't go out and play like they used to.
trtcttc
Senior Member
Most complaints about equalization is not with PEI, New Brunswick, etc. It's with Quebec, and how they subsidize their province's electricity costs, which lowers their "resource revenue", then take our equalization money, then wag their finger at us like we're the environmental boogeyman.
darwink
Senior Member
Which changing that would not reduce equalization payments (just shuffle it around differently), nor would it result in Alberta having more money.
Equalization exists for a particular reason: to stop high service need individuals from moving away from poor places to rich places, where providing services costs more money. It is cheaper to provide those services in the originating jurisdiction--much cheaper for Alberta to subsidize cancer treatment in New Brunswick than to pay and provide cancer treatment to a bunch of people who arrive in Alberta from New Brunswick. It is an economically efficient solution to a decentralized government.
If we want to get rid of it and be efficient, the best way to do that is to get rid of provinces, or a lot of responsibilities of provinces, and make those federal responsibilities.
trtcttc
Senior Member
Yes they're funded out of federal revenues. There's lots of different transfers between feds/provinces, it's more the unfairness of the formula that annoys me. A more fair formula would reduce our federal debt, at constant spend levels because QC and BC will need to pay their fair share.
Has that really been studied? Option 1 is to pay for cancer treatment in New Brunswick. Option 2 is to pay for cancer treatment in Calgary, but also gain that worker that pays into tax revenue and other economic activity in Alberta. I think you'd simply see these smaller provinces get hollowed out the same way they are in the US. That quality of life, despite what people like to say online, is far superior in California than Mississippi.
CalgaryTiger
Senior Member
You absolutely cannot gut the services of one Province because you feel like as an Albertan you're getting a bad deal. The US' system is not one to aspire to.
Alberta could also very easily choose to do something similar to Quebec. Take revenue from a sales tax and subsidize home heating and electricity. You know the equalization formula, so lean into it. It could also be a big cost-of-living subsidy for people. I think it would be pretty easy to sell a sales tax if you say, you will pay much less to heat and power your home, but you'll pay a little more when you buy things. You don't even need to make anything public, pay part of people's bills to the current distributors. I'm sure distributors wouldn't mind a consistent stream of money.
darwink
Senior Member
Yes, federal provincial relations from the mid 30s to the late 50s were all about this and it generated a lot of studies to figure it out.
The pre-equalization way to solve it was that the federal government collected all taxes with the same rates nation wide, and then remitted revenue back to the provinces on a per-capita basis. It was called tax-leasing, and it bailed out Alberta from the depression and dust-bowl.
O-tac
Senior Member
I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt due to your age and lack of children. There were many things I was unaware of before having kids.
Alberta was managing with integration under the NDP and maintaining aides at the national average. The UCP has clawed funding to the bone. My son is coded level 2 AUDHD and entitled to a teaching aide but does not receive an EA. He went half the school year without help or supervision which meant most days he would not eat his lunch, would not go to the bathroom (he either wouldn’t drink or just held it) and would even go outside on cold days without mittens. When I asked his teacher about it she laughed it off and talked about how some girls in his class were helping him get dressed for recess.
After multiple other incidents and discovering that his file was never even read, we have managed to get him some accommodations and weekly meetings with the OT and SLP.
If anything, kids are not being overdiagnosed. They are being buried and ignored by a system that only recognizes the most severely disabled as requiring help.
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O-tac
Senior Member
I’m sorry but are you educated on neurodivergence or have any personal experience with kids with special needs? Or is this just another example of know it all, Rick Bell, “common sense” vibes?
Please spare us your anecdotes of friends’ opinions as well as comparisons to your kids international school experiences from decades in the past.
Since you don’t even live here anymore please STFU.
trtcttc
Senior Member
I'm not suggesting we gut the service of other provinces, as I mentioned previously, personally I have no issue with equalization outside of the unfair treatment of government owned resources (primarily Hydro). We can't do the same with gas because we have commercial ownership, and gas and oil are globally traded commodites where our royalty system actually wants high prices. I know there's a Canada together sentiment going around, but that doesn't change the fundamental unfairness of equalization. The equalization formula looks at fiscal capacity as the theoretical tax a province could levy. Alberta levies less, but our fiscal capacity is measured in "potential". Yet for natural resources, where we collect a lot an QC under collects, it's measured in actual revenue. If we want to measure in actual revenue, fine, if we want to measure in potential revenue, fine. But it's asinine we measure in potential for taxes, but actual in natural resources, which disadvantages Alberta (low taxes, high natural resources revenue) at the benefit of Quebec (high taxes and lower natural resource revenue through indirect subsidy of Hydro Quebec).
But what was the study about? I agree equalization makes the country better off. But without it, the rich would get richer and the poor gets poorer. I'm not saying that's an ideal outcome or one we should strive for, but there's a difference between it benefits Alberta but we shouldn't do it because it's bad versus it is bad for AB to attract all these people in search of better living standards. A wealthy person can understand progressive taxation is good for society, while also acknowledging it is worse for their own financial situation personally.
I can't speak to first hand information and I don't mean to diminish your experiences. In general complexity has risen a lot. It could be like others have mentioned that parents are offloading more parenting responsibilities to school because of the need for dual income. But there should be an explanation to why complexity is so much higher than it used to be, and tackling that, rather than just being ok with it and spending ever more on education. A lot of that is EAL for CBE. I don't think the solution is to give them tutoring services for free because that's just not sustainable.
darwink
Senior Member
You can look up the report from the:
the Rowell-Sirois Commission. The main report runs about 800 pages. (or you can accept that by not blowing up the system, our various governments since then have accepted that the recommendations were sound, even if implemented in an incomplete way (the report recommended an Australian style system, but that was unacceptable to Ontario and Quebec as the rich provinces of the day)).
16 separate studies were commissioned for the commission (or rather, 16 have been digitized and are searchable). 427 briefs were submitted according to the list of exhibits, not including those from individuals.
Once every province was taxing again in 1962 (there was an interim period when Quebec was collecting taxes before that to try to force the federal government to stop), the federal government commissioned another royal commission to reset the federal taxation system which ran another 4 years, the Carter Commission. 31 studies were commissioned by it that are searchable. The report is so in-depth the press releases summarizing the conclusions are 187 pages alone.
the Rowell-Sirois Commission. The main report runs about 800 pages. (or you can accept that by not blowing up the system, our various governments since then have accepted that the recommendations were sound, even if implemented in an incomplete way (the report recommended an Australian style system, but that was unacceptable to Ontario and Quebec as the rich provinces of the day)).
16 separate studies were commissioned for the commission (or rather, 16 have been digitized and are searchable). 427 briefs were submitted according to the list of exhibits, not including those from individuals.
Once every province was taxing again in 1962 (there was an interim period when Quebec was collecting taxes before that to try to force the federal government to stop), the federal government commissioned another royal commission to reset the federal taxation system which ran another 4 years, the Carter Commission. 31 studies were commissioned by it that are searchable. The report is so in-depth the press releases summarizing the conclusions are 187 pages alone.
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O-tac
Senior Member
While there are certainly more new language learners, the province has done their utmost to ignore recommendations of teachers and has not kept budgets on par with growth. Instead of shovelling hundreds of millions into private academy schools they could have chosen to invest in supports for educators in the public system. As usual the wealthy are the biggest recipients of conservative government welfare.
As for increased diagnoses of neurodivergent children (those with autism, ADHD or other conditions) that is simply a matter of increasing knowledge and ability to identify those impacted. When I was in school in the 80’s and 90’s kids were simply labeled as lazy, unintelligent or problematic. Many have come to realize they have the same conditions as their children once they get diagnosed.