It was a tough week for Rachel Notley and her provincial government.
The government faced arguably its toughest test since May as Notley revealed the NDP’s first budget.
It wasn’t pretty.
The budget was a tough test for the party that inherited a 43-year-old mess from the Progressive Conservatives. But to come out and announce the province will run a $6.1 billion deficit in the next fiscal year and $37 billion over the course of the next four years is staggering, to say the least.
And to say the province needs to borrow money for the first time in over two decades is, well, embarrassing.
To be fair to the NDPs, it’s not as if the province has been practicing any fiscal conservatism for some time, and if Jim Prentice had survived the election he would likely have made the same announcement.
What other choice was there to make?
The provincial coffers ran dry some time ago, even when the economic times were good and the oil money was flowing in.
Now that it’s been a year since oil process collapsed, we can’t keep hoping prices will rebound. The government needs to stop hemorrhaging money, find efficiencies and learn how to survive during hardships.
Barrhead-Morinville-Westlock MLA Glenn van Dijken said it best this week when addressing the budget, drawing on his agricultural experience.
“At the end of the day, it was all about making sure you were effective and efficient at the bottom of the cycle that you could stay in business and when you went to the top of the cycle you stayed effective and efficient so that you could pad your pocket to be ready for the next downslide,” van Dijken said.
“We haven’t done that in this province in the last 10 years.”
When times are good it’s spend, spend, spend with not enough saving for a rainy day … or some rainy years.
Could Notley have done it better? Probably.
Instead of sitting around and hoping for oil prices to improve to make ends meet, the government needs to look at how to make ends meet here and now.
