Alberta women hardest hit by the Alberta ‘tax advantage,’ says new Parkland report

Women in Alberta have been disproportionately impacted by the shift to a single rate flat tax, and now face higher income gaps, unpaid work gaps, and after-tax income gaps than women in the rest of Canada, according to the findings of a new report released today by the University of Alberta-based Parkland Institute.

The report, The Alberta Disadvantage: Gender, Taxation, and Income Inequality, written by Queen’s University Law Professor Kathleen A. Lahey, argues that Alberta’s policy of “detaxation” has both created the current revenue crisis in the province and shifted a greater share of the tax burden onto those Albertans who are least able to afford it.

“From the perspective of both fiscal stability and equity, the changes made 15 years ago to how the Alberta government collects revenues have proven disastrous,” Lahey said in a Parkland Institute press release. “In moving to a single corporate and personal income tax regime, the government has walked away from at least $6 billion in annual revenues   roughly the size of the forecasted deficit for next year – and actually increased the tax burden for those income-earners at the bottom end of the scale, who are predominantly women.”

These tax changes, when combined with a lack of affordable childcare spaces, a series of tax and transfer measures that essentially encourage and subsidize women’s unpaid work, and the lack of effective mechanisms at the provincial level to implement gender equity commitments have resulted in a troubling slide in women’s economic equality in Alberta since its peak in the mid-1990s. 

The report concludes with a series of 14 recommendations the government could implement in the upcoming budget and beyond to reverse the decades-long slide in gender equality in Alberta, restore stability to provincial revenues, and create a more equitable provincial taxation system.

Read the full report and the recommendations at ParklandInstitute.ca.