Letter from Canada: Alberta waits for a boom that may not come

The Edmonton administration assumes that there will be another oil bull cycle. It may be wrong

The Alberta government has been running large budget deficits since the middle of the last decade, with both the leftist New Democratic Party and now the rightist United Conservative Party waiting for the next oil price boom to bail out the province. Instead, Alberta got another—albeit brief—oil price war earlier this year that was followed by the coronavirus-induced global economic depression. These events have caused Alberta’s projected deficit for the fiscal year 2020-21 to skyrocket, leaving Premier Jason Kenney with a simple choice: get the province’s fiscal house in order through a combination of spending cuts and tax hikes once the worst of Covid’s economic destruction has passed, or