NEWS PHOTO JEREMY APPEL NDP finance critic Shannon Phillips was in the Hat Thursday, where she spoke to the News about common concerns among southern Alberta municipalities, both large and small.
jappel@medicinehatnews.com@MHNJeremyAppel
The only New Democrat elected south of Calgary visited the Hat on Thursday, with plans to make more trips in the future.
Lethbridge West MLA Shannon Phillips, who’s the NDP finance critic, spoke to the News about common concerns shared by southern Albertans, slamming the UCP government’s fiscal policies that she says have a disproportionate impact on smaller communities.
“Our education, health care and post-secondary systems really help to drive the economy. They’re part of the economic diversification of the region,” she said. “When public services are funded in a stable and predictable way, you’re going to get really good bang for your buck, in terms of how that multiplies into small businesses, your property tax base and so on.”
This is true for smaller urban centres – Lethbridge and the Hat – as well as rural ones, such as Bow Island, Taber, Cardston and Raymond, she said.
“In some of these smaller towns, the school board is the largest employer and that’s what’s helping to drive the economy. It’s not everything, but it’s a piece,” said Phillips. “Take that piece away and you really start to notice it.”
She said the long-term downturn in the natural gas sector is naturally a major concern for Hatters, but economic diversification will help lessen the burden.
“That structural change in the value of natural gas is due to a whole bunch of factors out of anyone’s control,” said Phillips. “No one in the province of Alberta is responsible for the fact the Americans have flooded the market with natural gas and depressed the price.”
Investments in renewable power across the region are “worth celebrating, nurturing and growing,” she said, citing $1 billion in recent investments in wind and solar energy, much of which came to southeastern Alberta, as well as a burgeoning cannabis industry.
“Those are good jobs and it’s also revenues back to rural landowners, which is a really important piece of the puzzle for keeping our rural communities alive.”
She criticized the government for its hyper-focus on just the oil and gas side of the equation “to the exclusion of almost everything else.”
Phillips identified the province’s downloading of costs for policing onto rural municipalities as a shared concern of communities.
“They’re stiffing rural municipalities with the bill. It’s like they went into the restaurant, ordered up a storm and then left,” she said.
Another challenge is $173 million in unpaid property taxes from oil companies in rural municipalities, which Phillips called a “tax strike.”
She says these decisions have put rural municipalities in a bind.
“They’re going to be left with one of two choices,” Phillips said. “Either the roads don’t get paved, the bridges don’t get fixed, the water treatment doesn’t get upgraded and the arena’s repairs don’t get done, or people’s residential property taxes go up.
“Those are the choices that Jason Kenney has left rural municipalities with.”
Phillips plans to be back in the Hat on Feb. 7 to continue discussions with community members about the provincial budget.
