A big-spending budget the Danielle Smith of old might have hated — except the parts she'd love

The new spending in Premier Danielle Smith's inaugural budget went just about everywhere. Health care. Education. Policing. Roads.

And, for good measure, the premier's office.

The $3-million hike to the budget of Smith's office and executive council — the senior-most rung of Alberta's bureaucratic machine — amounts to lint sticking to the loose change behind the cushions in the massive sofa that is Alberta's $68.3-billion spending plan.

But it amounts to a 23 per cent, one-year bump for Smith's own executive branch, including an increase to staff and … no apparent justification within the budget documents, and no explanation provided to CBC by publication time.

But enough is known about Smith's inner-circle hiring habits to appreciate how costs would have climbed. She's unusually employed a chief of staff and a premier's office executive director; put her campaign co-ordinator Kris Kinnear — the chief lobbyist behind the RStar well cleanup program — in charge of "special projects"; and her campaign manager's media company got a sole-sourced contract to produce on the taxpayers' dime the sort of videos and memes he'd made to help win Smith the UCP leadership.

It's the sort of budgetary tidbit the government's opposition might have a field day with. Smith would know.

She was in that opposition for so many years as Wildrose Party leader, in the waning days of Alberta's Progressive Conservative dynasty.

Danielle Smiths of yesteryear

From that perch, and the ones she held previously as media commentator, business advocate and Margaret Thatcher-venerating fiscal hawk, Smith constantly roasted big-spending budgets.

In 2011, she proposed a "three-step recovery program for spending-addicted governments," and decried the Tories for relying on resource revenues to bail them out of a fiscal mess. 

In 2012, she called then-premier Alison Redford's plan an "Alison in Wonderland" budget, lacking any spending discipline.

In 2013, Smith insisted on trimmed-down plans: "We can have everything. We just can't have everything all at once." And again in 2014: "This government is full of spending addicts," Smith said, months before she'd cross the floor and join that government.

You can look at the spending hike in Budget 2023 one of two ways. From one perspective, this is a four per cent increase compared to what's forecast for the fiscal year about to end in April, but that's only if you include all the spending Smith recently introduced, including the billions in affordability measures and direct payments.

But if you compare this budget to the document Finance Minister Travis Toews tabled last spring under then-premier Jason Kenney, it's a 10 per cent increase. That would be greater than this year's 8.7 per cent rate of population growth plus inflation, the benchmark Smith and Toews prefer.

"Provincial government largely spends away Alberta's 2023/2024 surplus," reads the headline from a release by the Fraser Institute, the free-market think tank where Smith cut her teeth in the 1990s.

But this isn't a budget that, in the big picture, tries to woo the low-spending hawks Smith traditionally aligns with.

Smith is facing off in an election against a hard-charging NDP bent on saying the UCP have left health, education and other public services in tatters, and done little in the face of inflation. This liberal showering of new dollars in various directions is designed to neutralize those accusations, leaving Rachel Notley's side complaining of both wayward spending and insufficient support for health care.

It would be hard to simultaneously mollify the moderates who want a reinvestment in public services after the lean Kenney years and the Fraser Institute. Smith chose a lane, even if it's not the one she has been in for most of her professional life.

Savings time

Her budget does achieve something she'd advocated for in her Wildrose days, even when Tory rivals called it irresponsible. She's shoring up the Heritage Savings Trust Fund, that long-unloved rainy day fund that Peter Lougheed set up in the 1970s, but has languished for decades.

No longer will governments scoop interest income off the top of the savings fund — that will be reinvested, which means the fund should finally surpass $20 billion next year (after having been mostly stuck around $15 billion since 2006).

In addition to letting interest accrue, Toews announced an extra $750-million topup to the Heritage Fund from last year's much larger surplus. However, that's still about $1 billion less than Kenney had pledged for the fund in his final weeks, before Smith came in with a new agenda and new plans for inflation relief for voters (er, residents).

Some of Smith's other UCP leadership campaign priorities don't show up in the spending plans, and remain ambitions unmet, otherwise mired in consultation. That includes the RStar well cleanup program, health spending accounts for uninsured services, an Alberta Pension Plan and a provincial police force.

Deep in the budget documents, however, one does find a plan for Toews' finance ministry to "Lead a pension program review, providing recommendations for an Alberta Pension Plan that will increase pension benefits for seniors and reduce premiums for workers." There's also "further examination of an Alberta Police Service" — it has a new name now! —  and an ample spending boost and new roles for Alberta's sheriffs, that team of peace officers under provincial command.

In other words, there are things for Smith to find hope in, in a budget that past Danielle Smiths would have roundly criticized. Above all, she must hope the voting public will appreciate this crowd-pleasing, service-investing version of Danielle Smith.

But that election remains three months away. In the rapid churn of politics, that's a long time to hope any warm memories of government largesse and renewed public investment remain at the forefront of people's minds.

There may be other Danielle Smiths on the public's mind come May.