There’s a baked-in analysis in every Alberta provincial budget that is impossible to ignore: Alberta relies too much on revenues from oil and gas royalties to fund the daily operations of government.
The other baked-in part of the analysis is what Albertans want: well-funded public services without having to pay more taxes for them.
From a first glance, it sure looks like that’s what Albertans got in Minister of Finance Nate Horner’s budget tabled today in the Legislature.
The budget doesn’t appear to include any big spending cuts, but it does include something Conservatives in this province used to like saying they wouldn’t do: run a deficit. This budget runs a big deficit of $9.4 billion and projects deficits for the next two budgets.
