After bringing down its first budget last week, Alberta’s NDP government is being hammered hard by the usual suspects. But there was also a lot of quiet support for the NDP’s first attempt to steer the ship in a different direction after 44 years of Progressive Conservative rule.

Not surprisingly, The Wildrose party, the official opposition, was apoplectic about the $6.1-billion deficit and the government’s plans to run deficits until 2019-20. So were the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.

But then Premier Rachel Notley and her government knew they would never satisfy that audience when they designed this budget. They were looking further afield and so far it appears to have paid off for them.

The mayors of both Edmonton and Calgary gave it a thumbs up even though they both would have liked even more money for public transit and affordable housing. So did the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association which represents cities and towns across the province. University presidents had nothing but praise for the NDP’s first budget.

“The budget has lots of really positive news,” said University of Calgary president Elizabeth Cannon. “It moves us towards sustainability and predictability.”

Parent support groups were also happy with the increase in funding for public schools.

Plans to take $2 billion from government savings accounts and divert it to new business ventures through the government’s arm’s length and publicly accountable investment agencies was also seen as a good start for the NDP’s promise to diversify the economy.

Mac Van Wielingen, board chair for the Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMco) and a mover and shaker in the Calgary oilpatch, welcomed the additional dollars and said the government had assured him it will not interfere with investment decisions.

Even the Edmonton Journal gave the budget a strong endorsement.

“What Albertans really want conserved is quality services in a fertile environment for future investment and economic growth. If they are right, and we think they are, this budget will be a political as well as a policy success,” it stated in an editorial.

What the critics would do as the government confronts a sharp drop in resource revenues other than severely slash services Albertans rely on, is not clear.

Premier Ralph Klein tried that in the 1990s as he sought to make the province debt-free. Hospital beds were closed. In Calgary, a hospital was actually blown up. Students from primary school to university had to endure overcrowded classrooms and rising fees. Thousands of civil servants were laid off, including inspectors who had responsibilities for overseeing everything from child welfare to the environment.

At the same time the Klein government offered so many carrots to the oil and gas industry — particularly oilsands developers — that a frenzy of billion-dollar construction projects was unleashed. Thousands of people flocked here for the well-paying jobs — the population increased 50 per cent over 20 years — but the government fell further and further behind when it came to providing the necessary services and infrastructure for all those additional people.

It focused instead on eliminating the debt and keeping taxes low.

Years later even Tories admitted that Klein had gone too far too fast and it would take decades and billions of dollars in restored services and new infrastructure before Alberta was on an even keel again. And this was before the price of oil took its recent disastrous slide.

The NDP inherited a mess and now they have to figure out how to clean it up.

So like Justin Trudeau’s Liberals they decided increasing taxes for the wealthy and going into debt for a while was a better option than stressing people out with cutbacks to health care, education and social services when so many are being laid off or afraid of being laid off because of the drop in oil prices.

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Alberta is on a different track than it has been for a long, long time. And so far the train is holding steady.

Gillian Steward is a Calgary writer and journalist, and former managing editor of the Calgary Herald. Her column appears every other week. gsteward@telus.net

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