This budget has three major problems:

1. it ignores the reality that there's only one taxpayer to direct taxpayer anger away from provincial politicians and toward others - particularly the municipal, school board, and University officials who normally don't support the PC party anyway.
   

   
   For example: cutting University funding shifts the burden to students by encouraging tuition hikes; asking school boards to cut back or use savings shifts direct responsibility for cutbacks to school boards; increasing funding to the solicitor general/attorney general joint operation treats speeding as a sin tax; and reducing the municipal infrastructure support program shifts responsibility, and thus anger, to municipal government.
   

   
   Fundamentally this budget was written to sell to the party in power by protecting the party in power, not to protect the province, and not to serve the taxpayer.
   

   
   

2. revenue predictions are based on $78+ oil. If it doesn't happen, or if pending royalty system changes eat into the implied tax margin, the deficit will balloon - and not only are there no controls against this, but this budget abandons the usual Alberta practice of deliberately low balling future energy price estimates to protect against precisely this kind of risk.
   

   
   

3. The budget represents a complete cave in to the forces driving health care expenditures. Not only does government acceptance of its massive 1.3 billion cash deficit reward irresponsibility on the part of the civil service in charge of the system, but the guaranteed 6% annual increases through 2013 enshrined both their continuing control and continuing cost escalation in the system.