When Joe Ceci was named Alberta finance minister in May of 2015, he took on the job in an unenviable position. The world price of oil was in free fall and the bottom was falling out from under the province’s finances.
When he tabled his first budget that October, total revenue stood at $42.5 billion, down $7 billion from the year before, almost all of that due to lost royalty revenue. Despite this revenue loss, the NDP fulfilled a campaign commitment to maintain public services. The end result was a $6.4-billion deficit, the first of what will be a nearly decade-long run of budgets out of balance.
While Alberta’s economy is now leading the nation in growth, revenue still hasn’t returned to pre-recession levels. It fell again in 2016 to $42.3 billion, before rebounding to a projected $46.9 billion this past fiscal year.
Spending, on the other hand, has increased every year. In 2016, Ceci increased spending 8.5 per cent to $53.1 billion, and this year, spending has jumped another 5.4 per cent to $56 billion. Those years carried deficits of $10.8 billion and $9.1 billion. In this time, Alberta’s debt has climbed from $20 billion the year Ceci took over, to nearly $42 billion this year.
It’s important to note most of the debt has been taken on to build infrastructure, like the dozens of new schools opened over the past couple of years.
Ceci says on Thursday, Albertans will get a full view of how he intends to balance the budget by 2023, but don’t expect massive cuts to get there.
READ MORE: Edmonton economy to see further growth in 2018: expert
Watch below: On Dec. 27, 2017, Tom Vernon filed this report about Alberta being set to close out 2017 with the fastest growing economy in Canada even though many in the province were still having trouble finding work.
“We’re not cutting and slashing the expenditures that people need,” Ceci said during a pre-budget media availability on Tuesday morning.
“We are focused on constraining expenditures, costs down the road, eliminating Conservative waste where we can find it and diversifying our economy.”
Some of the examples he points to are government salaries for non-union staff and managers being frozen until 2019 and Alberta’s teachers and nurses agreeing to contracts with no wage hikes through that year as well.
READ MORE: Alberta factoring in Trans Mountain pipeline in budget forecasts
Watch below: On March 20, 2018, Tom Vernon filed this report after Alberta Finance Minister Joe Ceci said the province will rely on anticipated revenues from the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion to balance the budget within five years.
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