Alberta was handed the worst credit delinquency number in the country this week, and a good share of the debt behind it was run up somewhere else first.
Equifax released its second quarter figures on Monday. Alberta’s 90 day delinquency rate on non-mortgage debt sits at 2.45%, against a national rate of 1.76%. Average non-mortgage debt per Albertan now stands at $25,082. In Fort McMurray it is $38,074, the highest of any city measured.
The number nobody printed next to it
Read past the ranking and the picture changes. Alberta’s delinquency rate has actually fallen from a year ago. The province keeps taking in people from provinces that priced them out of housing and everything else, and those households arrive with balances that were written somewhere else. Kathy Catsiliras of Equifax put it without any decoration at all. They are bringing their financial baggage with them.
That single sentence is the whole story. The statistic counts an arriving population as much as it counts anything Alberta itself did, and the national version of this ranking went out without that distinction attached. That is how a province absorbing the country’s interprovincial migrants ends up with its growth published as a failure.
The pressure underneath is still real
None of that context erases the second half of the problem. Isaiah Chan of the Credit Counselling Society named the plain cause behind the rest of it, that income levels have not kept pace with the cost of living. A province can post a strong revenue year on the back of its energy sector and still carry the country’s highest odds of a household falling three months behind on a card payment. Both of those things are true in the same province, in the same quarter.
Only one number makes the budget speech
Government revenue projections get a headline every spring. Household delinquency data gets a Monday afternoon Equifax release that most people never see unless a ranking makes it sting. A province can be genuinely growing and genuinely straining its own households at the same time, and the fact that only one of those numbers regularly reaches a budget document does not make the other one less true.
Half the country will read this week’s ranking as Albertans living beyond their means. A good share of those balances arrived in a moving truck.
Should a province’s credit ranking be adjusted for how much of its population moved there in the last two years?
