EDMONTON—Alberta is scheduled to introduce its budget Tuesday — the last before a spring provincial election — with political observers wondering what the province will do with all its billions of extra petrodollars.
“Any budget that’s leading into an election is always one that contains quite a few goodies,” said University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe.
“Combine that with a government with significantly higher resource royalties than planned, and you have a lot of scope for big announcements.”
Finance Minister Travis Toews, in his four years in the post, has tabled budgets that began with multibillion−dollar deficits and recently spotlighted multibillion−dollar surpluses due to rebounding oil and gas revenues….