Alberta voted for affordability.
The receipt is on your bill.

The cap was allowed to expire in October 2019. Within two months, CBC reported individual Albertan drivers seeing premiums jump 25 to 30 per cent on renewal. Edmonton driver Danny Parker, with a clean record, went from $1,350 to $1,885. Tofield driver Kim Zook went from $445 to $790.

The NDP finance critic at the time noted that Alberta auto insurance rose by as much as 30 per cent during the 2020-21 pandemic period — a time when Albertans were driving and working less.

The 7.5 per cent cap applies only to drivers with no minor traffic convictions in the past three years. For everyone else, the Automobile Insurance Rate Board can approve average rate hikes of up to 12.5 per cent. Of the 67 auto insurers operating in Alberta in 2023, the Superintendent of Insurance estimated one-third lost money. Two private insurers exited the province citing margins.

MNP, in a published actuarial report cited in the legislature, projects auto insurance premiums in Alberta will increase by 87.6 per cent over the next decade if the current rate cap structure remains in place.

Bill 47 strips Albertans of the right to sue at-fault drivers in most collision injury cases. Instead, accident victims will receive compensation at rates set by the government.

The same government-commissioned reports project the loss of 650 to 800 jobs in legal services in Alberta as a result.

At the UCP's own 2024 annual convention, personal injury lawyer Steve Assiff told Premier Smith and Finance Minister Horner directly that the move would be "political suicide" for the party because "you're taking rights away from Albertans. That is un-conservative."

The government rejected a publicly-delivered alternative (as in Saskatchewan) on the grounds that startup costs would approach $3 billion. Independent estimates suggest a public option would deliver larger consumer savings than the private no-fault model.

An analysis published in 2024 found that since 2001, Alberta's residential electricity consumer price index has risen 1.8 percentage points per year faster than the Canadian national average.

The cumulative result, on the consumer side: Albertans have collectively paid an estimated $24 billion more for electricity than they would have under prices comparable to other Canadian jurisdictions. Residential consumers alone account for approximately $7 billion of that amount — an average of $690 per household per year for each of the 24 years since deregulation.

Industrial, commercial, and farm customers absorbed the remaining $17 billion. As of Q1 2024, five companies control 54 per cent of Alberta's electricity generation market.

The RRO had reached peaks of 32 cents per kWh during the 2022–2024 spike, with monthly bills described in mainstream coverage as "massive." But the new 12-cent RoLR is itself higher than what most competitive fixed-rate plans were offering at the time of its introduction. The Alberta Utilities Commission's own data shows wholesale pool prices in late 2025 averaging around 2.9 cents per kWh.

University of Calgary economist Blake Shaffer told CBC the rebranded "Rate of Last Resort" is, in practical terms, more expensive than fixed-rate alternatives available in the market. Approximately 413,000 Alberta households were on the default rate as of June 2024.

Meanwhile, in 2024, Alberta accounted for 86 per cent of all Level 3 grid emergency alerts in North America — the most severe category, indicating that rolling blackouts are likely or already in progress — on the same grid the deregulated market is supposed to be optimising.

Budget 2024 (Finance Minister Horner's first): the cut was deferred. The promised 8 per cent bracket was pushed to a future date contingent on "sufficient fiscal capacity to introduce the cut while maintaining a balanced budget."

Budget 2025: a 9 per cent bracket arrived for 2026. The promised 8 per cent rate was delayed to 2027, again contingent on fiscal capacity.

Premier Smith, in a December 2024 year-end interview with The Canadian Press, addressed the deferral directly:

A detailed analysis published by the law firm Borden Ladner Gervais (BLG) in March 2025 demonstrated that the Escalator's effect erodes most or all of the savings the government's $760 tax cut is supposed to deliver.

BLG's modelling, run on an Albertan earning $60,000 with 2.9 per cent annual income growth: without the Escalator, the new bracket cuts effective tax meaningfully. With the Escalator, the same taxpayer pays more under the new bracket structure than they would have without it — the effective rate climbs to 5.20 per cent by 2029.

The same BLG analysis observed that the Escalator "appears to operate contrary to the recently amended Alberta Taxpayer Protection Act" — the legislation that prohibits reducing personal income tax bracket thresholds and basic personal amounts without a referendum.

In other words: the government promised a $760 tax cut, deferred it twice, then introduced legislation that quietly rolls back most of the savings — via a mechanism the law firm reviewing it suggests may itself be illegal.

The increase added $239 to the median Calgary homeowner's annual property tax bill and $92 to the median Edmonton bill, calculated against assessed value. More than half of Alberta's population lives in those two cities.

Tyler Gandam, head of the umbrella organisation representing Alberta's towns and cities, told reporters the property tax increase took municipal leaders by surprise and that better options had been available.

Calculated against the deferred $760 personal income tax cut: the median Calgary homeowner is paying roughly $239 more in education property tax in the year before the partial 9% bracket arrives. The household-level affordability arithmetic, in other words, is approximately neutral or negative for many Albertans — before considering insurance and utilities.

Alberta's provincial fuel tax of 13 cents per litre remained at full strength through 2025 and into 2026. The province operates an "oil price-based fuel tax relief program" tied to the price of West Texas Intermediate — the tax suspends only above $90/barrel WTI; with oil trading well below that level, the full 13¢ remains.

When the Canadian Taxpayers Federation called for an extension of the fuel tax holiday in mid-2024, citing the province's then-$5.5 billion surplus, Finance Minister Horner declined. He described the fuel tax as "a stable component of Alberta's revenue mix."

The CTF's Alberta director Kris Sims publicly noted: "Manitoba's NDP Premier Wab Kinew is fully suspending his fuel tax on Jan. 1, so do we want Albertans paying higher fuel taxes than in Manitoba?" When even the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling out a UCP government for refusing to cut a tax, the political case for the cut has been made by the friendliest possible witness. The tax was kept anyway.

Alberta's minimum wage has been frozen at $15.00 per hour since October 2018 — eight years and counting. In 2018 it was the highest minimum wage in Canada. As of late 2025, with other provinces having raised theirs repeatedly, Alberta now has the lowest minimum wage in Canada.

In November 2025, the UCP voted down NDP MLA Kathleen Ganley's Bill 201, which would have raised the minimum wage by $1 per year for three years and scrapped the lower wage for under-18 workers. Premier Smith argued previous wage increases hurt rural youth employment.

The arithmetic: a minimum wage worker earning $15/hour for a 40-hour week earns approximately $31,200 per year. The 2.2 per cent MLA salary increase is approximately $2,660 per year — more than 8 per cent of a minimum wage worker's entire annual income. NDP MLA Marie Renaud called it "foul" that the government was raising its own pay while "capping benefits for the poorest people in the province."

In December 2023, NDP MLA Janis Irwin introduced Bill 205, the Housing Statutes (Housing Security) Amendment Act, which would have temporarily capped rent increases at 2 per cent for two years, then tied subsequent increases to CPI to a maximum of 5 per cent. The bill was voted down by the UCP majority.

The province's own affordable housing program fell short of its target in fiscal 2024, delivering 798 combined units and rent supplements against a target of 1,500 — with the year ending in an $8.2 billion provincial surplus.

The contradiction the page is asking the reader to consider: The same UCP government that re-imposed an auto insurance rate cap in 2023 (after letting the NDP's expire in 2019), and that imposed a 7.5 per cent good-driver cap in 2025, refuses on principle to cap residential rent increases. "Caps don't work" is, evidently, a context-dependent objection. They work for insurance companies. They do not work for landlords.

Premier Smith was not in the chamber to respond. Finance Minister Nate Horner stood up to answer the question in her place. His response, on the public record:

Horner's full response then pivoted to the income tax cut as the government's affordability answer. But the four words that survived — "the member is not wrong" — are the receipt. The Finance Minister of Alberta, in question period, openly acknowledged that the spending priorities were misaligned. He did not dispute the framing. He conceded it.

For context: $280,000 is approximately the annual gross income of nine minimum-wage workers combined, calculated against the wage that has been frozen since October 2018 (see Entry 10). It is roughly the entire LPRT compensation paid to the Finance Minister's own ranching business since 2021, three times over (see Receipt 13 on the front page).