‘Definitely an election budget’: Critics call out Alberta budget
Global News
“This is a budget that is appealing to everybody and only because they simply have so much money. Imagine any other province with $18 billion in resource revenue.”
With just three months until the expected provincial election, Alberta’s finance minister tabled a budget that has many calling the financial plan a bid to curry favour when voters go to the polls.
Travis Toews didn’t deny it was an election budget when asked by reporters.
“We have an election here in a few months and this is a budget just ahead of that election,” Toews said, adding this budget continues the direction set in 2019, when the United Conservative Party were voted into power.
“It’s definitely an election budget,” Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt said. “And even if you didn’t walk through the documents and the facts and the figures, just listen to the speech Travis Toews made.”
Bratt pointed to Toews claiming the previous NDP government’s economic management was harmful to the province’s finances.
“It resulted in the flight of billions of dollars in capital, tens of thousands of lost jobs, and perpetual deficits,” the finance minister told the Legislature.
“Our government brought a different approach.”
That different approach included cutting corporate taxes, cutting “red tape,” de-indexing Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH) from 2019 to 2023, cutting funding for universities and focussing on trades, ostensibly harming trust with health care workers after tearing up its contract with doctors just ahead of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, among other recent measures like affordability payments.