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It’s impossible to look at Alberta’s latest budget without suffering an involuntary sinking feeling in the gut.

As expected, the dramatic decline in oil prices has torn a hole not just in resource royalties – traditionally a crucial pillar of any Alberta budget – but in everything else as well, from income tax to corporate tax revenue.

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“Revenues to government have fallen off a cliff,” said Finance Minister Joe Ceci Thursday during his budget speech. He described the province’s fiscal situation as a “once in a generation economic downturn” and said there was no plan to return to a balanced budget before 2024.

The government is expected to earn only $1.4 billion in oil and gas revenues in fiscal 2016-17 – the smallest royalty take in 40 years — and that’s not adjusted for inflation.

There was little feigned optimism around, although the government tried to spin the bad news budget into a grand “Alberta Jobs Plan” that seems impossible to reconcile with the numbers provided.