Province still pegs deficit at $10.8 billion despite increased revenue

The Alberta Government says it’s seeing a bump in cash, but not a drop in the deficit.

Finance Minister Joe Ceci said Thursday in his third quarter fiscal update that the projected deficit for the fiscal year is still $10.8 billion, despite the government projected to make $1.5 billion more than expected.

“We don’t want to go back to those days where operational spending followed the oil and gas roller-coaster,” he said. “We’re flattening out our operational spending and going forward, we’ll be able to do that even more.”

The government says it used its $700 million risk adjustment to prevent the deficit from getting worse, and along with increased spending for disaster relief and the coal phase-out, the deficit would stay the same.

The Conference Board of Canada is predicting Alberta will lead the country in economic growth in 2017, with the province reporting 119 drilling rigs operating in January and for the economy to grow by 2.4 per cent this year.

Despite the positive signs, Ceci said many families still aren’t seeing recovery and the government won’t cut back on their services.

“This is not recovery and we need to see more green shoots, maybe in Alberta, there’s more little black oily shoots that need to grow throughout the province to tell us all that we’re into better times,” he said. “When we get to better times, we’ll have a budget, next month that you’ll see where we are going to budget next month and you’ll see where we’ll be going with Budget 2018 too.”

When asked when we may get a balanced budget, Ceci said the expectation is still 2023 to 2024.

Wildrose Shadow Minister of Finance Derek Fildebrandt called the update unfortunate and not surprising.

“They have zero intention whatsoever of trying to get back to a balanced budget, they’re just going to spend like drunken sailors in the meantime,” he said. “Difficult decisions are going to need to be made at some point and the NDP are not willing to make them.”

Fildebrandt points to the coal phase out as practically criminal.

“It’s a billion dollars that the NDP may as well have piled up in a nice pyramid, poured gasoline on top of, and thrown a match at, because the money is 100 per cent wasted,” he said.

Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, Paige MacPherson, said the government isn’t prioritizing well.

“Essentially what the government is doing is putting off the difficult decisions that they should be making today, on to taxpayers tomorrow, and those decisions at that time are going to be so much bigger and more pressing,” she said.

For the government’s full fiscal update, click here: https://www.alberta.ca/release.cfm?xID=463353C834F7B-DFE7-3D21-B07EF3F88C6617C7