The UCP government’s 2019 budget has been met with mixed reviews after the numbers were released last week.
Funds for local municipalities and provincial programs were some of the areas to receive cuts, while schools boards were left to crunch the numbers to see how they would be impacted after Minister of Finance Travis Toews tabled the budget on Oct. 24.
One of the decreases was to the funding for the Municipal Sustainability Initiative (MSI), which will be cut by $236-million over the next three years.
The MSI grant is a provincially-funded program that provides municipalities money for infrastructure projects. In 2020/21, it will be reduced by $94-million, with an additional decrease of $142-million scheduled for 2021/22.
“What that will mean is less capital dollars to fix your community up,” noted City of Cold Lake Mayor Craig Copeland. “The biggest impact will be less projects that we can do and just less money on the capital side.”
Town of Bonnyville Mayor Gene Sobolewski described it as “doom and gloom for municipalities.”
“It’s basically going to mean that we’re going to need to figure out how to do more with less, defer projects, and possibly defer or slow down in some of our services. But, we’ll let council decide that once we start digesting the numbers. Administration is crunching the numbers for what the meaning is going to be, but I’m not overly optimistic,” stated Sobolewski.
He added, “A lot of folks coming to the municipality for support may not get it this time around. There’s likely going to be some organizations that are hurt as a result of that.”
Overall, the 2019 provincial budget has an estimated revenue of $50-billion, with an anticipated deficit of $8.7-billion. In order to pay the bills, the anticipated amount the Alberta government will need to borrow is $15.1-billion. By the end of the year, the province is forecasting $71.8-billion worth of debt.
The government will reduce operating expenses by roughly $1.3-billion over the next four years, which will include shrinking the public sector by 7.7 per cent. That move alone is expected to save $552-million.
A forecasted surplus of $584-million is expected by 2022/23 as a result of these cuts.
Bonnyville-Cold Lake-St. Paul MLA David Hanson described the budget as “a realistic step in the right direction.”
“Albertans spoke quite loudly that they wanted change, that escalating debt wasn’t the way to go and it’s not the Alberta way,” he continued. “We want to get back to a balanced budget, and just proper spending.”
The overall budget for healthcare will increase by $200-million to $20.6-billion per year.
A highlight in the numbers for Hanson was the $100-million allocated for the mental health and addictions strategy. Chantelle Vallee, nurse practitioner with the Bonnyville Medical Clinic, believes any enhancements to the field are welcome.
“We’re seeing more with this prolonged economic downturn, and a lot of people don’t have the benefits or access to private psychological services or family counselling. Even access to medications can be problematic,” she explained.
When it comes to education, funding levels will be maintained for kindergarten to Grade 12 at $8.2-billion, which the provincial government believes will support the 2.2 per cent projected increase in enrolment.
Local school boards are still in the process of determining how the budget will affect their divisions, though both Lakeland Catholic School Division (LCSD) and Northern Lights Public Schools (NLPS) don’t expect major differences as a result.
“Our preliminary look at budget 2019 is that our funding will increase slightly due to rising enrolment within LCSD, and we don’t foresee a cut in any of our existing programs,” said LCSD superintendent Joe Arruda.
According to NLPS communications officer Nicole Garner, the district prepared for grants to change, such as the Classroom Improvement Fund (CIF), and made modifications to their spring budget to reflect that.
“We’re not anticipating we’ll need to make any significant changes to what we already had in place for this school year, because we had already made some changes based on the conversations we were having, some of the information we were hearing, and we had gone ahead and adjusted for that already.”
Along with the CIF monies, the classroom size initiative and school fee grants, a total of $428-million is anticipated to go toward instructional costs to keep operating funds maintained.
In terms of seniors and housing, $639-million is dedicated to continuing to support seniors by maintaining funding for benefits, and developing new program delivery mechanisms to address growth. The funds will also be used to pursue partnerships between housing management bodies and the private sector to reduce the public costs of affordable housing.
According to Ray Prevost, vice-chair of the Lakeland Lodge and Housing Foundation, the rental assistance program is going to take a 24 per cent cut in 2020. The project assists low income families that rent through a private landlord, and covers a portion of their rent.
“We’ve been advised not to take any more applications right now, and not to replace them either,” he detailed. “In other words, if we have 65 people on the program, and that’s pretty close, then that means if somebody leaves, we’re down to 64 and we can’t go back to 65.”
The reduction is expected to save the province $44-million over three years.
Even though some tough decisions were made, Hanson believes the budget was better than Albertans were anticipating.
“Everybody’s been waiting quite patiently for it, and we’ve heard a lot of horror stories about how terrible it was going to be. I was pleasantly surprised at how we pretty much stuck to our talking points, and the campaign promises that we made… Overall, I think it wasn’t as severe as people thought it was going to be.”
