Finance Minister Travis Toews is scheduled to release Alberta’s first-quarter fiscal update on Tuesday.
The update will reflect revenue and spending for April through June 2019.
“The reality is, we have great revenue volatility in this province,” Toews told CBC News. “And that’s a factor for us to consider going forward with the budget. (It’s) certainly a factor to consider as we’re working our way to balance.”
The Alberta government ended the last fiscal year with a deficit of $6.7 billion, which was $2.1 billion lower than had been projected in the budget tabled last spring by the NDP government.
An increase in royalty revenue from higher oil prices and more than $800 million in additional tax revenue was credited for shrinking the deficit.
Resource revenue was up $1.6 billion from budget projections, according to the fourth-quarter update released at the end of June.
Premier Jason Kenney, whose party took power after the April 16 election, said he was given less than rosy picture when he was briefed by financial officials while transitioning to government after the election.
Decline in revenue
Earlier this month,
“I was presented with a very serious decline in revenues from what the NDP had projected in their third-quarter update, their last fiscal update,” Kenney told an August 7 news conference in Edmonton.
“I think this is one of the reasons the NDP did not come forward with a budget, because they knew there’d been a serious deterioration in the province’s finances.”
The government has since received a report from a panel headed by former Saskatchewan NDP finance minister Janice MacKinnon.
Kenney said the panel’s advice will contribute to forming his government’s first budget, to be released in late October.
The report itself, said Kenney, will be revealed to the public shortly after Labour Day.
“We will have to go through a period of fiscal responsibility,” Kenney said during his Aug. 7 news conference. “That’s what we were elected to do. And that means we’d need to take the time to get the numbers right,” the premier said.