A new report from Professor Kathleen Lahey shows women in Alberta have been disproportionately impacted by the 2001 shift to a flat tax in the province. As a result, women in the western province face higher income gaps, unpaid work gaps and after-tax income gaps than other women in Canada.

“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,” says Lahey. “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.”

Lahey argues that these tax changes, when combined with a lack of affordable childcare spaces, a series of tax and transfer measures that essentially encourage 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 that Lahey says the government could implement in the upcoming budget to reverse the decades-long slide in gender equality in Alberta. Those recommendations include:

• Replacing the current flat tax system with graduated corporate and personal income taxes.
• Rejecting the introduction of new sales taxes or provincial consumption taxes.
• Restructuring all joint tax and benefit measures that discourage women’s participation in the paid workforce.

“Alberta’s latest fiscal crisis is actually the perfect opportunity to correct the ill-advised policies of the past that have created the situation Alberta now finds itself in,” says Lahey. “Fortunately, many of the same policies that can finally get the province off of its overdependence on unstable resource revenues can also begin to reverse the shameful lack of economic equality between men and women in Alberta.”

Lahey presented the report, The Alberta Disadvantage: Gender, Taxation and Income Inequality, on March 4 at the University of Alberta’s Parkland Institute.

Professor Lahey and her Feminist Legal Studies Queen’s (FLSQ) co-director Professor Bita Amani are hosting the conference “Women and Tax Justice at Beijing+20: Taxing and Budgeting for Sex Equality” on March 6 and 7 in Robert Sutherland Hall, 138 Union St., Room 202. There is no registration fee, however, donations are encouraged from those who can afford to do so. Receipts will be issued for a charitable contribution tax credit. For the program and to register, visit the FLSQ website.

For more information on gender inequality in Alberta, read the articles:

“Alberta premier calls for better gender balance on boards while preserving the ‘Alberta Disadvantage’ for women,” by David J. Climenhaga, published on rabble.ca.

“Focus Alberta tax talk on income, not sales,” Professor Lahey’s op-ed, published in the Globe and Mail.