Edmonton must watch for three things in the provincial budget

Sometimes I get asked about why city councillors spend so much energy advocating towards the province. You can’t operate a healthy city in an unhealthy province: Edmonton depends on the provincial government.

With a quarter of the provincial population and growing, Edmonton deserves a new deal, and a fair deal.

Three things to watch for in this Provincial Budget

Will the Premier pay her property taxes? $96 million is owed to Edmonton since they stopped paying in 2019 (Read More: www.michaeljanz.ca/threepillars2024)

Will the Premier take poverty, safety, social disorder seriously? Edmonton Centre MLA David Shepherd has compiled an excellent toolkit of promises made, kept, and waiting since the UCP took office in 2019: Read More: www.michaeljanz.ca/safety)

Will the Premier slash– or invest in – the low-income riders program? (The hand up to help in hard times: https://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/low-income-transit-passes-the-hand-up-to-help-in-hard-times

When the province does their job, all of our property taxes go down. This is not just a matter of paying the outstanding property taxes: Edmontonians are spending more on fire rescue (doing the job of EMS), policing (doing the job of Alberta Health, downstream effects of provincial cuts) and social support for the low-income and unemployed (doing the job of the province).

If Premier Smith is looking for a good news story in the midst of her government’s massive health care scandal, what better way than paying her property taxes?

Latest posts

A five point plan for budget...

The proposed Edmonton City Budget will be released on Monday (November 2nd, 2026) via edmonton.ca/budget

As City Council heads towards our budget debates later this fall, we get another opportunity to show how serious we are about our economic resilience and our commitment to keeping taxes reasonable while we serve Edmontonians. I’ve thought long and hard about this and I’m happy to share my plan to keep Edmonton on a sound fiscal path.

UCP Must require shelters outside of Edmonton: The Premier must tell regional mayors to stop sending their residents to Edmonton and start welcoming them back home.

New data from the City administration highlights that there are almost no shelters and an incredibly limited amount of affordable housing in the region outside of Edmonton. While the capital region has a combined population of close to 1.5 million, the 1.1 million Edmonton taxpayers are covering the region's costs.

City Hall Protocol Item: Nakba Day (May 2027)

I have put in a request to have Nakba Day recognized as a protocol item under Council Recognition this coming May:

Nakba Day is commemorated annually on May 15. It marks the beginning of the destruction of the Palestinian homeland, and the mass displacement in 1948 of the majority of the Palestinian population. Nakba means ‘catastrophe’ in Arabic and is the word used by Palestinians and others to refer to this historic moment.