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The government will axe a city charters deal with Edmonton and Calgary and delay funding for LRT projects in those cities. A new hospital for south Edmonton will also be pushed back four years, with a revised opening date of 2030.

Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson called it a significant step backwards, a disappointment and a broken campaign promise.

As the Alberta government dispenses with the former government’s Climate Leadership Plan and carbon tax, the environment ministry’s climate change office will no longer exist. The budget projects a nearly 10 per cent reduction in environment ministry spending over four years, including less money for parks, emissions management, and fish and wildlife.

Raising the ire of many critics is a temporary pause on indexing income tax brackets, tax credits and benefits like Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH). It’s a broken election promise, as the UCP campaigned on keeping AISH and seniors’ benefits tied to inflation.

“I think a big part of what this budget does is focus on the most vulnerable and ask them to pay more in order to balance the budget,” said Joel French, executive director of Public Interest Alberta, on Thursday. “At the same time, the largest corporations, the wealthiest corporations are getting a big tax cut.”

Careful assumptions

Although the former NDP government had been on track for a $97-billion debt by 2023, Toews said that calculation should have been $104 billion. He also said his government’s plan to eliminate a yearly deficit is tenable, where the NDP’s was not.

Despite the service cuts, spending in 2019-20 will go up 4.2 per cent to $58.7 billion, largely resulting from an estimated $1.5-billion cost of getting out of oil-by-rail contracts signed by the previous NDP government, Toews said.

It leaves Alberta with a projected $8.7-billion deficit this year. The province will continue to borrow $15 billion a year for the next two years to pay the bills.

Provincial bean counters expect $50 billion in revenue both this year and next, eventually rising to nearly $58 billion by 2022-23.

The government’s cut to the corporate tax rate is expected to give up around $100 million in revenue this year, and could be a $2.4-billion hit to the treasury over the next four years.

By then, in theory, the cut will have stimulated increased investment in the province and private-sector job creation, officials said at a budget technical briefing.

The predictions also rely on Enbridge’s Line 3 pipeline moving more oil to the U.S. by 2021 and either Keystone XL or the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion pushing out more bitumen by 2023.

No new pipelines could shave $3 billion off revenue projections by 2023.