Alberta budget Oct. 24: Premier says will have tough touches to fight deficit

As @citytara reports, they have a plan to balance the budget in four years.

EDMONTON — Premier Jason Kenney says the Alberta budget is to be delivered in just over a month.

Kenney says it will be released Oct. 24 and include tough choices to get Alberta’s multibillion-dollar budget deficit back in balance.

He says he will follow through on promises not to reduce funding for health care and education.

The premier has already said the budget will follow the lead of a recent report from a government-appointed panel that urges a rethink of spending to prevent rising debt payments.

He says the budget will not be increasing taxes, because further hikes are not the answer when Alberta has the highest per capita public spending.

“This is not a replay of 1993 when there was 18 per cent cuts. As the McKinnon panel said, if we make some difficult decisions now we can avoid much, much more challenging decisions down the road. You’ll see in this budget, a credible path to balance that does not require spending reductions in the scale of the Klein government.”

Reaction to Kenney’s comments is already bringing concerns over funding.

President of the Alberta Teachers Association, Jason Schilling says they need a committment to fund enrollment growth.

“We have not heard anything that is specific about funding for growth and even listening to Premier Kenney’s comments today, he talks about that there will be no reductions to the budget but there will be targeted investments. It’s really quite general and vague as to what that means.”

The budget is to come down three days after the federal election, but Kenney says that was not done to take a potentially controversial issue off the table for federal Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer.

Kenney, when asked if he would back down on budget cuts if there were vociferous pushback, echoed former prime minister Pierre Trudeau when he was asked in 1970 how far he would go on suspending civil liberties to deal with the October terrorist crisis.

“Just watch me,” Kenney said Monday.

 

The Canadian Press

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