Kudos to Alberta's Tories for starting a new fiscal stability fund. Putting all of Alberta's sometimes-high and sometimes-low royalties from oil and gas into one fund, and then taking out a steady, predictable $3.5 billion per year, is eminent good sense. Kudos also to the Liberals and NDP for having promoted this idea for many years.

As the Financial Management Commission pointed out last year, nobody benefits from the "roller-coaster" budgeting which has plagued Alberta for decades. Sudden bursts of infrastructure spending drive up the cost of construction materials and labour. Unpredictable (but inevitable) spending cuts make prudent planning difficult if not impossible. Economics aside, nobody enjoys the psychological roller-coaster of hearing that a new road, hospital or school will, and will not, and will after all, and still might not, be built.

This fund is a new chapter in Alberta's history of successful fiscal legislation which protects taxpayers by limiting the spending discretion of politicians. Since 1993, Alberta's balanced budget legislation and our legislated schedule for debt retirement have ended many debates before they even began, because politicians could point to the law and say "we can't spend money we don't have."

Thanks to fiscal legislation, Albertans now see 97.3 cents of every tax dollar going to programs, with only 2.7 cents lost to debt servicing. Contrast this with Ottawa, where debt servicing costs are the largest item in the federal budget, eating up 21% of it.

Balanced budget legislation, debt repayment legislation and a fiscal stability fund form a solid foundation for Alberta. What's missing is legislation to protect taxpayers and control spending, which is 58% higher today than it was six years ago.

From 1996 to 2002 Alberta's population grew 12%, but program spending increased from $12.8 billion to $20.2 billion. This 58% spending increase is the result of politicians saying "yes" to the insatiable and voracious appetites of various interest groups, all of whom have a knack for dramatic claims and emotional appeals. Whether the pitch is for more spending on health care or education or social services or infrastructure, lobbyists of all stripes know how to use words like "crisis" and "chronic underfunding."

To pay for this spending increase, Premier Klein broke his pre-election promise and raised taxes by $641 million last year, including raising the health care premium tax to $1,056 per year. For an Alberta family getting by on $35,000 per year, this $1,056 tax bill is not easy to pay - even in $88 monthly installments.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, taxpayers in Washington faced a similar problem, as their state government grew more rapidly than inflation and population growth. The door was always open to politicians to raise taxes, and they did. Using their right to initiate and vote in referendums, citizens put a proposal on the ballot to limit growth in government spending to inflation plus population growth. Voters approved this spending control law in 1993, and it came into effect in 1995. Since that time, politicians have been forced to choose priorities rather than taking more earnings away from taxpayers. Tax reductions have been slow but permanent, without reversals like those seen in Alberta's 2002-03 budget. A non-partisan study of how Washington's law has succeeded in controlling spending, conducted by the Institute for Public Policy and Management, is available from www.ofm.wa.gov.

Also missing in Alberta is taxpayer protection legislation. Switzerland, Manitoba, and numerous jurisdictions around the world have laws requiring that tax increases - as well as new taxes - cannot go into effect without the approval of citizens in a referendum.

Taxpayer protection legislation puts the onus on politicians to explain and justify why they want more money; taxpayers do not bear the burden of explaining why they should be allowed to keep their own earnings. Not so in Alberta, where politicians can increase any tax at any time for any reason, even if this breaks an unequivocal pre-election promise that "the only way taxes are going is down." A November 2002 province-wide poll revealed that 83% of Albertans want taxpayer protection legislation. Only 16 per cent are opposed.

The fiscal stability fund is good news for taxpayers. But it should not be the final chapter of Alberta's success with fiscal legislation.