Kenney takes to the airwaves to manage budget expectations

When deep budget cuts and mass protests begin, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming

It was the airline safety pamphlet you are supposed to read before takeoff.

The height warning before the roller-coaster.

The waiver you have to sign prior to skydiving.

Jason Kenney’s televised address to the province Wednesday night was an unusual and aggressive step for a premier the day before releasing a new budget.

But then, this will be an unusual and aggressive budget, not seen since the early days of Ralph Klein.

And that was the central message of Kenney’s highly partisan speech to a public still plummeting from this week’s federal election result.

Albertans must brace themselves for another shock, he said, a new fiscal reality punctuated by a nearly three per cent reduction in overall program spending — the first such cut of any significance in a quarter century.

In other words, here’s hoping you have a strong stomach, because this ride will experience some turbulence before the province can again get its finances on solid ground.

As the premier is well aware, when it comes to the art of delivering bad news, setting up expectations is crucial.

Of course, almost everything Kenney has done since arriving on the provincial politics scene has been to lay the groundwork for this moment.

From his rhetoric as an opposition leader, to the UCP’S election messaging, to the Mackinnon panel’s report released last month, Kenney hasn’t wavered from his signalling that a major spending correction lay ahead.

As such, some may wonder why he bothered at all to go on television Wednesday to essentially replay his greatest hits from the past three years.

The answer is that the premier is not the only one trying to manage Albertans’ expectations.

As the theory goes, if you can condition people to look for something ahead of time, whether it be benefit or blight, that’s what they will tend to find.

In just the last couple of days, the NDP opposition has ramped up its warnings of insult and injury the budget will inflict on families, communities and public services, contending how none of it would be necessary if only the UCP hadn’t given away all that revenue to a corporate tax cut.

The Alberta Federation of Labour released its own research Wednesday suggesting that cuts recommended by the Mackinnon panel would “devastate” the Alberta economy and lead to massive job losses.

And the left-leaning Parkland Institute also got into the game, releasing its own report suggesting that the size of our public sector workforce and what we pay those employees is in alignment with other provinces.

You can expect others, including various union leaders, advocacy groups and student associations, to chime in with their own voices of concern in the days ahead, pushing the idea that the UCP fiscal plan is more poison than antidote.

Though he didn’t mention any of these voices by name, Kenney’s television appearance Wednesday was in part designed to head off just this kind of opposition.

His strategy was a familiar and divisive one, to imply such arguments only come from “interest groups” who either don’t understand the suffering of most Albertans, or created the fiscal mess in the first place.

Either way, the implication was that Albertans should get ready their earplugs.

“No number of protests or political attacks are going to push us off course,” he vowed.

Regardless, beyond all this posturing, it’s fair to ask how much Kenney can really prepare a province for a fiscal reality an entire generation of Albertans has never seen, and others may barely remember.

Kenney has insisted the effect on Albertans will be modest, especially compared with the Klein years, but there is room to quibble here.

Remember that a 2.8-per-cent cut — which goes beyond the funding freeze the UCP promised during the election — plays out as a reduction of something like $1.3 billion.

That’s significant on its own, but the effect is actually greater, since there is also no extra money to account for inflation or population growth over the next four years.

And given that the UCP is adamant health and education operations will be spared, that means the cuts will be shared disproportionately among other ministries, which are likely to include municipal affairs, advanced education and environment.

Details of how that will be done won’t be revealed until Thursday afternoon, but Kenney did hint at the outright removal of some programs, job losses (mostly through attrition), and delays or reductions to infrastructure projects.

What will this mean, for example, to plans for Edmonton’s new southwest hospital, new schools, or improvements to Yellowhead Trail?

Demands for wage rollbacks may also be on the table, though Kenney’s speech didn’t mention that, nor did it mention the bitter labour action certain to accompany it.

The premier can try to plant whatever seeds he wants now, but it may not help much when Albertans actually begin to feel the effects of those cuts.

And should his government crash and burn in its efforts to manage those effects, it won’t matter to the public to tell them they were warned beforehand.