Budget Talks with Scott Cyr

“We are going to be shouldering a massive deficit, an astronomical amount of money, which will affect our children’s futures,” states MLA for Bonnyville-Cold Lake, Scott Cyr in response to the recently released Federal Budget. “We’re looking at 10 billion dollar deficit in the Provincial Budget and now 30 billion dollar deficit in the Federal Budget this is unacceptable. The fact is when we see the Alberta Government looking at the Federal Government for support.”

MLA Cyr says the Federal Government’s solution to our local regions’ unemployment was to increase the length of unemployment insurance, “we didn’t see anything other than the increase in the number of weeks [people who are unemployed] are able to collect EI. And shortening the number of weeks to apply. This is a very small band-aid on a very big problem. If the Prime Minister was serious about helping Alberta, it would be moving forward with the approval of pipelines not creating tanker bans on west coast and creating more environmental restrictions on the pipelines that are being approved to be moved forward.”

“I think it was a mistake that Prime Minister Trudeau had made by excluding Edmonton from the Budget, and I hope that he reconsiders, so that we can at least see some extra unemployment; which is the only thing that the Federal Government has made available to us.”

Cyr says he has yet to have an in-depth study of the Budget and the new child tax structure, but gave some opinion, “the Government is expecting that middle class families are going to be able to gather more money out of this. Until I get a better look at this, it’s going to be hard to determine if [people in our region] will actually benefit. In Alberta, we have higher incomes and when you start looking at these programs, Albertans get singled out as having too high of incomes to be able to qualify for them. I don’t want to be a skeptic, but in the end we’re going to be considered the seven percent and we’re not going to be seeing a lot from that program.”