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Alberta’s first NDP budget will hike booze and cigarette taxes, jack up spending across the board and includes the province’s biggest deficit in nearly two decades.

Plunging oil prices and declining corporate income tax revenues will take a $7.3 billion-sized bite out of the provincial treasury.

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But rather than scale back spending, the province will take on more debt and table a $6.1-billion deficit this year.

Total debt is set to hit $18.9 billion this year. That figure will swell $36.6 billion by 2018 but could grow as high as $47 billion by the end of 2019-20.

And beginning in 2016 – for the first time since 1993 – the province will borrow not just for infrastructure but also for operations – meaning Alberta will take on debt to pay for both schools and the teachers working in them. Debt for operational spending will grow to more than $3.1 billion by 2017-18.

“We believe Albertans want their services, their hospitals, their schools, their human services protected. To do that … it’s going to take some borrowing at the back half of this plan,” Finance Minister Joe Ceci said in a press briefing. “We are going to be as rigorous with the operational spending as we can possibly be to bend the curve.”