Say what you will about the big strategic brains behind Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government, at least they didn’t repeat their midsummer “energy rebate” bungle.
Mind you, they’re bringing in so much money thanks to U.S. President Donald Trump’s war of choice on Iran, which was only supposed to last a week or two, that they don’t need to.
So, starting on Oct. 1, the Alberta government said on Tuesday with a great deal of fanfare, it’ll stop collecting its 13-cent-per-litre fuel tax on gasoline and diesel until the end of the year, trotting out several of the usual suspects to crow about how this is going to make a meaningful difference in Alberta families’ budgets in a press release.
Well, fair dinkum as they say Down Under, gas will cost 13 cents a litre less at the pump, so it will only cost you about $140 to fill up your Ford F-150 or Dodge Ram pickup truck instead of about $153 – assuming you were running on fumes and you have the model with the small 87-litre tank, that is.
So you might save about $183 between now and New Year’s Day if you gas up every week, less if you drive a more efficient vehicle or can squeeze two weeks out of a fill-up. Challenge my arithmetic if you like – math is hard, after all – but readers will get the idea.
That’s still a lot to pay every week or two just to get around, and $13.05 less per fill-up is insignificant enough to make some of you dream of driving a nice EV from China no matter what the premier and her finance minister think about that.
“This will save hard-working Albertans hundreds of dollars over the next few months and save millions for people and businesses across the province,” Premier Danielle Smith said in the government’s news release. This is pretty hyperbolic, but we’re used to hyperbole, not to mention outright balderdash, from her now.
“This is the right move by Finance Minister Jason Nixon – lowering the cost of fuel makes things more affordable and that’s exactly what people need right now,” the premier’s canned quote piously concluded.
As a general rule, performative tax cuts are a bad idea no matter what the taxpayers’ federation or even the Opposition have to say about them, but in this case the government’s bringing in so much extra dough thanks how long it’s taking President Trump to admit he’s lost his illegal war that it’s hardly worth an argument.
“If the 13 cents fuel tax was lifted today, Albertans would see average pump prices in the province drop to around 162.5 cents/litre, almost 20 cents less than the next-lowest province,” the news release said Tuesday. (Go figure, I paid 1.6 cents less than that in Stony Plain yesterday.)
Anyway, this takes us back to last June when the same Alberta government announced that under its fuel-tax quarterly review program, which is supposed to take into account North American benchmark oil prices over the previous three months, instead of cutting taxes at the pump as they were supposed to they’d give everyone 18 and older who’d filed a tax return the in 2025 and had household income under $225,000 a measly $100 payment.
Alas, the intensively bureaucratic application process was so complex that many eligible Albertans simply threw up their hands and didn’t bother to ask for the insignificant payment.
Quite a few also didn’t trust putting more their personal information in the hands of a government that they’d learned just the month before had allowed the entire provincial voters list with the personal information of 2.9 million voters to leak to ne’er-do-well operators associated with the Alberta separatist movement.
The “Alberta Energy Rebate” was almost universally reviled, even by the government’s closest allies. Right-wing columnists dumped all over it. Cynics suspected the government was making it hard to get the money in order to shave a few dollars off the $9.4-billion deficit the UCP was expecting at the time. Phone lines to UCP MLAs’ constituency offices were burning up with angry calls. No doubt UCP MLAs who have been stoking the grievance fires literally for years were shocked, just shocked by what was being said to them.
Only about 40 per cent of the eligible taxpayers applied for the rebate – although there are still seven more days to apply.
Well that was then. With its war lotto winnings, the UCP now expects to post a $2-billion surplus – an $11.4-billion turnaround since last April that, unfortunately, is unlikely to do much to improve the lives of working Albertans.
Officials may also have warned the Smith Government that oil prices could rise fast enough that the savings would never appear at the pumps, so they’d never get the credit for the revenue sacrifice. And that was before The Peace President’s Pearl Harbor negotiating strategy was revealed.
That’s basically what happened to the federal government decision in April to suspend its 10-cent-per-litre fuel tax until Labour Day. Ottawa announced the day after the Sept. 7 national holiday that it was extending its fuel-tax holiday to Jan. 31, 2027, and only applying half that rate from Feb. 1 to March 31, 2027.
When the 5-per-cent rate cuts in, if the Carney Government doesn’t delay it again, the Smith Government can distract us from its own incompetence by screaming about Ottawa’s perfidy.