[iggy_oi]

Originally Posted by GGG

5 year wage freeze on all public sector postitions until wages are behind both BC and Ontario. This amounts to a 10% spending cut on 50% of government expenses.

Alberta public sector employees aren’t making 20% more than their BC and Ontario counterparts. Not sure how you arrived at the 10% savings figure as a result of waiting for parity over a 5 year term. You may have also forgotten to factor in that in any event the “savings” each year would be reduced if public workers in those other provinces see increases to their wages. I also think it will be a hard sell to our public sector workers since private sector workers in Alberta also generally earn more than their private sector counterparts in BC and Ontario, but that’s a whole other can or worms.

Eliminate “Green” funding for Carbon tax dollars and put that money where it should be in general revenue.

I don’t disagree with reallocating those funds to general revenues, although they already appear to be doing so(green line)

The city of Calgary through their efficiency programs found about 5% in process improvements so the province should be able to do the same.

The difference in the types of services offered at the provincial and municipal levels makes this a bit of an apples to oranges comparison but any government should be looking for these types of efficiencies.

So if you add that up you get about 2.5 billion in wage freezes, 1 billion in Carbon tax, 2.5 billion in efficiency you get around 6 billion without cutting services.

I think you’re double dipping in your calculations here by applying the 5% in efficiencies to the overall budget. To my knowledge when the city made changes to their processes to provide more efficient services they didn’t reduce their budgets for labour. While it is good to get more bang for your buck when it comes to public services, you wouldn’t be saving any money on labour from a budget balancing perspective without decreasing the actual spending.