NDP to table 2017 provincial budget
Posted Mar 16, 2017 7:42 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s provincial budget day in Alberta.
Finance Minister Joe Ceci will table the budget at 3 p.m. Thursday.
University of Calgary economics professor Trevor Tombe doesn’t think there will be any large scale tax or spending changes.
He also believes it’s possible to start balancing the budget in a short period of time through restrained spending growth.
“If after 2019 we freeze the level of spending at the 2018/19 level then we would have a balanced budget by 2020,” he explained.
Tombe warns if spending keeps growing, it’s safe to assume the budget won’t start to be balanced until the middle of the next decade.
Rather than trying to diversify the economy, he suggests the government needs to diversify its own sources of revenue.
“We are through the crisis in the economy, the worst is over on most metrics, retail sales, wholesale, manufacturing, oil production, export, employment, everything is looking up, so we’ve turned the corner in terms of the broader economy,” he said, admitting no Alberta government has balanced the budget without oil revenue in more than 65 years.
Mount Royal University political scientist Lori Williams argues the government will have to change course eventually and maybe this is the time to do it.
“They’re going to have to start building a realistic plan for bringing themselves back into balance, we might see signs of this at this stage,” she said.
She expects the deficit will likely remain around $10.8-billion, perhaps going up slightly.
Williams believes the government will under-promise in the budget and take credit for doing better than expected down the road.
