Tough times are continuing for Alberta’s oil and gas country, with the amount of unpaid property taxes that oil and gas companies owe to Alberta towns has more than doubled over the course of just a year. The total tax debt outstanding? $173 million—a 114% increase from this time last year as the industry comes up short thanks to patches of huge gaps between the price of West Texas Intermediate and Western Canadian Select oil benchmarks, and production curtailments to producers in an attempt to keep that gap in check. And now, oil and gas producers are—whether out of a sheer inability to pay or by design–passing on their pain to the governments they are beholden to. This, even as municipal tax rates on shallow gas wells and pipelines were recently reduced by as much as 35 % in an effort to “prevent further company failures and job losses” […]