Article content

The United Conservatives introduced their first Alberta provincial budget last week, and as an exercise in austerity it has a lot of interesting features. The blue-ribbon MacKinnon Report on the province’s finances turned out to be a pretty good guide to the overall fiscal direction of the UCP. Public-sector salaries and physician fees, traditionally kept high in Alberta to match the province’s tight labour markets and high incomes, have become a natural target in a time of private-sector struggle.

Higher education has been singled out for heavy budget pressure as a means of defending core obligations to children and health care. Municipalities are being urged to hit the “pause” button (now a favourite UCP metaphor) on infrastructure projects. It’s all very subtle, or devious, depending on your political predisposition.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Colby Cosh: The creeping horror Alberta never knew it was voting for Back to video

But surely nothing in the budget is as surprising and tragicomic as the choice to de-index tax bracket boundaries, tax credits, and adult welfare payments. This is something that nobody, I think, saw coming — something it would have been positively difficult to imagine the UCP government doing. And it has had the effect of uniting the New Democrats with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in what is surely history’s unlikeliest popular front.