In her report on B.C.'s 2013 budget CCPA-BC economist Iglika Ivanova concluded that the province's financial statement focused on balancing the budget at the expense of British Columbians' present and future wellbeing. The following are a few examples of this.

Last Tuesday's budget continues a 12-year record of systematically undermining the province's social infrastructure.

-  Block funding for school districts was frozen for the next three years despite the fact that enrolment has started to rise again. Inflation and other costs imposed on school boards will mean a hit this year of $134 million in school funding cuts. 

Food Banks Canada released its latest statistics on national food bank usage this week. The data are assembled in a document titled HungerCount 2012. Not only has food bank usage continued to increase, more and more users are working and more are families with children. According to the report's authors, "In March of this year, 882,188 people received food from a food bank in Canada. This is an increase of 2.4 per cent over 2011, and is 31 per cent higher than in 2008, before the recession began."

A new paper by Jack Mintz (with Duanjie Chen) argues that "corporate tax reductions of more than 30 per cent since 2000 have, contrary to the critics' cries, failed to make an appreciable dent in tax revenues thanks to multinationals' habit of shifting profits to Canada to take advantage of lower rates."

This is the subject of a report in ipolitics, contrasting the argument of Mintz and Chen report to last year's "Corporate Tax Freedom Day" report by the Canadian Labour Congress.

Is it normal that Albertans pay the much too generous social programs to which the people of Quebec are treating themselves through equalization, especially when they are being patronized regarding the environment by people that refuse to exploit their own gas and oil resources?

That would summarize Danielle Smith's view, the very libertarian leader of the Wildrose. In last April's elections, this party to the right of the right seriously threatened the Conservatives, who have been in power in Alberta for the last 41 years. Are her claims well founded?