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OMG! We’re ruined! Alberta’s fiscal future is down the toilet! Bob Rae, Bob Rae, Bob Rae! Aaarggghhhh! Deficit! Debt! Doom! Pass the smelling salts! Our great-grandchildren who don’t even exist — what will they think of us?

That’s the chorus I’m seeing in online commentary ever since Alberta’s first NDP government brought down its budget Tuesday. Just who are these people, though, who are complaining that Premier Rachel Notley’s budget will be the ruination of us all?

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I wonder if they are the same ones who have spent the years since the Klein era lamenting equally loudly that services were cut, hospital beds eliminated, a hospital blown up, a cancer centre deferred ad infinitum, roads not built, nurses fired, teachers laid off, schools not repaired, and on and on.

Had Notley opted to cut services, these folks would be griping about that instead. She can’t win for losing. Most galling is the naysayers’ attitude toward civil servants. Lay them off! Cut their salaries! Would those clamouring for salary cuts and layoffs volunteer to give up their own jobs and take pay cuts? Not likely. They’d rather insist that others lose their jobs, as if those other people, just because they work in the public service, aren’t real people with families to support, mortgages to pay and food to put on the table.