After a recent budgets in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and of course Ottawa things have turned upside in the west. We have budget deficits in Alberta, Saskatchewan and federally in Ottawa. But low and behold we have a close to balanced budget in Quebec. In the west tax increases, in Quebec a little bit of tax relief. This summer could prove very interesting, I was listening to some financial commentary yesterday in which they were predicting the possibility of oil prices going back down this summer possibly in the low to mid 30 dollars a barrel. Now, I don't put much faith in commodity price predictions but if this happens definitely will be more pain and more debt in Alberta.
One other interesting note, in the Alberta NDP's budget near the end they have allowed the power balancing pool to borrow up to 2.2 billion to cover losses basically caused by their steep increase in carbon taxes to industrial emitters and how this allowed companies to return their more unprofitable contracts to the balancing pool, something that could have been avoided with a more prudent approach. Think about this, over 500 dollars per Alberta resident in debt just because they couldn't forsee the problems their poorly thought legislation would cause. It is a sad day when the west has to look to Quebec for an example of responsible government budgeting.
One other interesting note, in the Alberta NDP's budget near the end they have allowed the power balancing pool to borrow up to 2.2 billion to cover losses basically caused by their steep increase in carbon taxes to industrial emitters and how this allowed companies to return their more unprofitable contracts to the balancing pool, something that could have been avoided with a more prudent approach. Think about this, over 500 dollars per Alberta resident in debt just because they couldn't forsee the problems their poorly thought legislation would cause. It is a sad day when the west has to look to Quebec for an example of responsible government budgeting.
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