What's in it for Calgary? Alberta government drops new budget

New funding for some major projects in Calgary was announced on Thursday as Alberta's UCP government released its 2025 budget.

This fiscal year, the province is cutting a $30 million cheque to redevelop the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology's campus centre, $12 million to advance planning and regulatory approval processes to mitigate flood and drought hazards in the Bow River basin, and $16 million in new funding over three years for the Contemporary Calgary transformation project at the former Centennial Planetarium.

There is also $61 million over three years for the new Central Drug Production and Distribution Centre, in order to support timely access and preparation of prescription medications.

Tabled by Finance Minister Nate Horner on Thursday afternoon, the Alberta government's 2025-26 fiscal plan includes other commitments for the city that had already been announced, such as money to extend the Blue Line LRT in the northeast, and various investments in Calgary health-care facilities. 

"It's a budget that's stable," Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek told reporters on Thursday. 

Yet Gondek also said there are still many things the city doesn't know in terms of specifics of the budget and its impact on Calgary. 

"At this point, I'm choosing to remain cautiously optimistic. I will say that there was a strong theme, and that was the theme of growth and its challenges," she said.

"It's interesting that the … budget speech was so focused on growth and challenges and opportunity within the province, yet there's not really much that addresses the growth that Calgary has seen in the past couple of years, with the fastest growing city in this nation. And there really wasn't a nod to that."

One of the budget's most notable feature's is the fulfilment of the UCP's long-promised lower, eight per cent personal tax rate on income under $60,000, which was a significant part of Premier Danielle Smith's campaign in the 2023 election.

The tax cut is expected to cost the province $1.2 billion in the 2025-26 fiscal year.

However, while the province is offering a lower tax bracket, education property taxes will go up over the next two years in order to cover one-third of the education budget.

The education property tax is levied alongside municipal property taxes based on assessed property values. The province collects this money by requisitioning it from municipalities, who then must collect it from home, business and farm owners alongside their own municipal property taxes.

The province plans to increase its total requisition to $3.1 billion for this fiscal year, up from $2.7 billion last fiscal year, and the bulk of that near $400 million increase will come from Calgary.

The annual requisition from Calgary is expected to increase to $1.037 billion, up 17.6 per cent from the previous year.