Over the past several years, being the Minister of Finance of Alberta was about as challenging as being the nanny in charge of the household budget for the Sultan of Brunei. No matter what the little sultots or sulteens wanted, you could find it in the budget because there was just so much money coming in, even a sultan couldn’t spend it all. Ah, those were the days. As in, last year. Welcome to a new world, Iris Evans.

The cash spigot hasn’t exactly been turned off, but the flow has reduced from a geyser of cash to a mere gusher. Poor Nanny Iris is forced to run the provincial household on a mere $36,000,000,000.

For the first time in 16 years, the Alberta government is running a deficit. Not much, mind you. Just $4.7 billion, and we’re not really going into the hole to make up for it. The money is just sitting there in various government piggybanks.

Listening to the budget and trying to analyze the reams of information that followed, I get the impression that it is almost business as usual in Alberta. The numbers just kept coming  — millions for this, millions for that, millions for anything. And for the most part, that’s a good thing.

When Ralph Klein was on his crusade  to slay the deficit dragon, the business of building Alberta came to a near-complete halt as all of our revenue went into the provincial debt. We’re still paying the price for that strategy, in the form of inadequate hospitals and generally decaying infrastructure. We paid off the house, but the roof had a hole in it. I think it was a smart move by Ed Stelmach to continue to pour money into the bricks and mortar of Alberta.

It was a good move, but it was one that was forced upon the Tories. They only had two choices: don’t go into deficit by cutting billions from the budget by ending infrastructure projects and firing civil servants; or go into deficit, but use savings to pay for it. It’s so simple even Ed Stelmach couldn’t screw it up.

Still, the old Klein habits die hard. Watching the budget on TV (which gave me horrifying flashbacks to my MLA days, when I was obligated to sit through similar claptrap), I was struck by just how disingenuous the whole exercise was. Nowhere was the term “deficit” used. The only indication that the Tories were in deficit for the first time in 16 years came was Evans’ use of the term “revenue shortfall.” After years of anti-deficit indoctrination, a lot of Tories can’t even bring themselves to say the “D” word. (Here’s an economic question for you: why do we go into deficit when oil is at about $50 a barrel, but didn’t go into deficit in the early 2000s when oil sold for way less than it does today?)

But the devil is always in the details, and the details can be found in hundreds of pages of often-impenetrable budget documents, where you’ll find the real guts of the budget, the stuff that matters to typical Alberta Joes and Josephines. Beer will cost Albertans another $1.30 per dozen, wine another 75 cents and hard liquor a rather shocking $2.85 a bottle, plus another $4 a carton for their smokes. Any Joes who want to become Josephines won’t be able to, because the government will no longer fund sex change operations. And of course they didn’t mention the delisting (a nice way of saying “no longer paying”) of chiropractic services. Minor tweaks, really. The bottom line of Budget 2009 is suck it up and wait till things improve.

We’re in a deficit because oil and natural gas aren’t bringing in enough revenue to cover the bills. The Tories have made a few small cuts, raised a few “sin” taxes, and dug into the piggybank to cover the shortfall. That will work well for this year, and maybe next. But if the prices of the commodities that foot the bill for Alberta’s lavish lifestyle continue to stay at what they are now, hard decisions will have to be made.

This budget was a gimme. Just wait till next year.

mauricetougas@live.com