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Alberta projects deficit of nearly C$9.4bn, citing low oil prices (www.bbc.com)

submitted 3 days ago by NomNom@feddit.uk to c/alberta@lemmy.ca

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[–] nomecks@lemmy.wtf 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'm sure deferring maintenance and causing two $billion+ main watermain breaks in Calgary had nothing to do with it

[–] BinzyBoi@piefed.ca 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Is that really the province's fault though?

Not agreeing with Smith when she blames Nenshi, but wouldn't the watermain breaks be the collective responsibilities of all the previous sessions of city council up to the break for not doing routine inspections?

In any case it's annoying to me that she's blaming the oil glut for the deficit without announcing exactly what proper long-term plans she has to diversify the economy to prevent this issue from being a repeat one. Like, an AI data centre is not going to be a good long-term investment if you just look how much has been dropped into OpenAI to attempt to make it profitable.

[–] Nomecks@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A bunch of city funding comes from the province.

[–] BinzyBoi@piefed.ca 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

True, but isn't it the city's responsibility to properly allot that funding? Or are you saying that the cities are underfunded by the province, which I wouldn't be surprised by.

[–] Nomecks@lemmy.ca 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah I was getting at the fact that they're underfunded.

[–] Knoxvomica@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 days ago

The report from the city actually found they were underspending on risk analysis and mitigation, not that they were underfunded.

[–] joshhsoj1902@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 days ago

I don't know if Alberta is like Ontario, but here in Ontario over the last 3 decades the province has slowly been reducing how much it transfers to cities while also offloading more expenses onto those cities.

This has resulted in:

higher house prices as cities have needed to start adding large fees to house building in-order to help balance the books (and raising property taxes is always very unpopular)
worse public transit as the provinces now expect cities to take on more of those expenses.

And likely other things too. But those are the ones always on my mind