EDMONTON—Two leading visions for Alberta are on the table as voters decide who will lead the province come April 16, offering a day of judgment after what has already been a hotly contested election campaign.

Alberta’s incumbent New Democrat government and the United Conservatives have released their full election platforms detailing plans for the environment, jobs, the economy, health care, education and more.

While numerous other provincial parties have rolled out interesting platforms — ranging from separatist referendums to bringing in a provincial sales tax — the UCP and the NDP are expected to lead the race.

Rachel Notley and the NDP released their platform on Sunday just one day after UCP Leader Jason Kenney presented his to Albertans in Calgary.

Below is a side-by-side comparison of Kenney and Notley’s differing visions and flagship proposals for the next four years should either form government.

Economy

Both parties aim to balance the budget over the next four years, with the NDP looking to do it by 2023-2024 and the United Conservatives banking on a small surplus by 2023.

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University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe says that the NDP’s budget plan is partly relying on royalty revenues, previously estimated by the government to be $12.3 billion by 2023, which Tombe warned is “a highly volatile source of revenue.”

The NDP’s path to balance could face a few bumps in the road if royalties aren’t as high as anticipated, said Tombe.

The UCP is more willing to restrain spending and therefore isn’t as affected by volatile royalty revenues, Tombe said.

He noted that neither party has provided details around its spending commitments.

“Neither provides, for example, a ministry breakdown or even a functional breakdown by type,” he said. “They just look at a very high-level total revenues and operating expenses.”

The UCP, if they’re to form government, pledge a 4 per cent tax cut for businesses over four years, dropping to 8 per cent from the current 12 per cent down. The party anticipates this will spur the creation of 55,000 full-time jobs and a $12.7 billion boost in GDP.

Tombe said estimates vary, but there is evidence to suggest that there is a “0.6 per cent increase in employment for each point reduction in the corporate income tax rate, and that does translate into somewhere around 50,000 (jobs) for Alberta.”

However, this calculation only works out in an economic recession scenario, Tombe added.

On the flip side, the NDP says its economic diversification plan will attract $75 billion of investment to Alberta and produce about 70,000 jobs over the next 10 years. Tombe questions those numbers, saying they don’t appear to be backed up by any published research.

“How they arrive at that number and what analysis was used is certainly a question for them,” said Tombe.

The NDP is also promising a cap on Alberta’s child-care costs at $25 per day, per child. Over five years, they plan to spend $1.5 billion creating 13,000 new daycare spaces while handing out subsidies to providers to lower child-care costs.

The move is intended to help parents, especially women, return to work, increasing economic activity. When it was first announced by Notley last week, she said “it will ultimately pay for itself.”

Tombe said there’s a lot of research that shows making daycare more accessible has a positive effect on people being able to enter the workforce.

“The potential increase in labour force participation, among women in particular with young children — it could be meaningful,” he said.

Environment

The province’s carbon levy has been a wedge issue throughout Alberta’s election campaign with the UCP promising to “scrap the carbon tax.”

On Saturday, Albertans got their first chance to look at the UCP’s alternative plan for addressing climate change in the province.

The United Conservatives propose a plan which essentially returns to the system used in Alberta from 2007 to 2016. Large industrial emitters would pay for their emissions, while the carbon levy on taxpayers would be lifted.

If the UCP forms government and repeals it, the federal government could impose their carbon tax plan. However, Kenney has said he will take Ottawa to court over the move.

Critics have said it’s likely the court fight would not be successful.

A UCP government would scrap the carbon levy and replace the current large emitter system with the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction fund (TIER). Under the initiative, large emitters would have to slash their emissions by 10 per cent in year one and then the rate would increase by 1 per cent each following year.

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Large emitters would have a $20 per tonne levy placed on them, whereas the levy under the NDP currently sits at $30 per tonne.

Tombe says the UCP proposal is different from the previous system only in how “implicit subsidies are being allocated across large emitters.”

“Currently, different facilities producing the same thing receive the same subsidy to help offset the competitiveness implications in carbon pricing. They’re proposing to provide larger subsidies to dirtier facilities and lower subsidies to clean facilities.”

By 2020, the UCP anticipates a 17 megatonne reduction in carbon emissions, getting to 43 megatonnes by 2030. The NDP’s reduction target is 50 megatonnes over the same amount of time.

Health Care

The United Conservatives aim to reduce wait times for surgical procedures to four months in four years.

They’ve also pledged to maintain or increase current levels of government spending on provincial health care, and hope to conduct a review to identify “inefficiencies” in Alberta Health Services (AHS). The UCP hopes to free up money for front-line services by reducing administrative costs; however, according to data from the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Alberta’s spending on health-care administration is the lowest in Canada.

The NDP also vowed to tackle wait times for cancer, cataract and heart surgeries as part of their election platform.

On top of that, the NDP plan to focus resources on senior care in the province. They aim to add 2,000 long-term-care and dementia-care beds while removing prescription drug co-payments for seniors earning under $75,000 per year.

Additionally, they’ve promised increased health-care spending to maintain services for a growing population, and they’ll seek to regulate private clinics operating in the province so there’s no queue jumping and “reckless privatization experiments.”

Education

Finally, the two parties present two very different plans for education in the province. The UCP has pledged to ditch the current curriculum review being carried out by the NDP government and do their own.

They’ve also pledged to scrap the current School Act and introduce the Education Act from 2012, which was never acclaimed.

At the heart of the difference between the two pieces of legislation is Bill 24, which prohibits teachers from telling parents if their child joins a Gay-Straight Alliance. The GSAs provide a support group for LGBTQ students and their allies to meet and build connections.

The UCP’s plan to bring in the Education Act would remove the privacy protections offered by Bill 24, and the plan has received some pushback in the province with protests taking place last week in Edmonton and Calgary, drawing hundreds.

The UCP said they would increase or maintain funding for education and have committed to building more schools in the province as well.

But their plan for testing kids and teachers has received significant backlash, particularly from the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), a union which represents around 43,000 teachers and principals.

The United Conservatives would introduce “regular assessment of teacher performance” where they’d be assessed on their knowledge of a subject. But the ATA took issue with that for its narrow focus, which they say ignores other important aspects of teaching, as well as the UCP’s plan to implement standardized testing for children in grades 1, 2, and 3.

For the NDP’s part, they plan to continue spending on education to keep up with population growth and expand language options in Filipino, Somali, Punjabi, and Cantonese courses.

They also promise to hire 1,000 new teachers and spend over $1 billion on 70 new schools across the province.

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