Wildrose: Prentice PCs are the ones playing games with savings and spending claims

The Prentice PCs are desperate to fool Albertans into thinking the Wildrose plan to balance the budget without raising taxes doesn’t work.

They’re desperate because Wildrose has put forward a detailed plan that reverses the Prentice tax hikes and targets cuts at the cronyism and entitlements a 44-year old government holds dear.

Meanwhile, the fiscal announcement Prentice released Wednesday didn’t contain a single dollar sign.

Here are the FACTS:

• Prentice claims the budget will be balanced in 2017 – the major contracts with public sector are not expiring until then, so this could mean zero years of zero percent increases
• Unless Prentice is vowing to remove arbitration again as Horner and Redford proposed under Bill 46, he cannot promise any outcome from negotiation
• Budget 2015 actually allows for an additional $2.6 billion of wage increases over the next three years – is this still happening?
• Prentice listed a number of potential savings measures, but does not attach a single dollar sign to a number anywhere in the release. Wildrose provides subtotals and totals by year for its savings
• Prentice’s claim to balance the budget in 2017 does not include “Capital Investments” despite his vow to provide a balanced number that does. That’s why the PCs are once again claiming a balanced budget while taking on $5 billion in new debt in 2017
• Prentice is claiming that Wildrose will slash services, despite our measured list of savings that do not affect the front lines, only managers, cronies, and bad practices
• Our infrastructure plan extends the current capital plan from 5 years to 6, so some lower priority projects will be slightly delayed
• Wildrose has front-loaded its capital plan and proposed tendering changes to ensure we can build schools at least as quickly as the PCs, who have failed miserably in this regard.