"If there was ever a Northern Alberta budget, this is it." Rona Ambrose

Symbolically, Parliament has already moved to Suncor's plant
 in Fort McMurray.

"The West wants in"! Substitute "West" by "Conservative Alberta" and this budget illustrates just how far "in" they are and how they've thrown everyone else out.

As Rona Ambrose expresses quite clearly, there is very little relief for much of the country but the region that is benefiting from the resource boom the most is being handed a sugary sweet budget. Alison at Creekside breaks it down for us:

The budget features "streamlining" environmental review processes, plus gives $8 million to the Canadian Revenue Agency to target registered charities that are "too overtly political", translation : "opposition from environmental groups to the massive Northern Gateway oil sands pipeline." New RevCan money will investigate "the extent to which these are funded by foreign sources."

But foreign tarsands-to-tanker funding from China is still a-ok, even at the cost of Canadian jobs...  

PetroChina bids to help build $5.5-billion Northern Gateway pipeline 

In Conservative Canada, we can't have environmental groups express dissent towards the Harper Government's policies, can we? But is that as far as we can go to push the tar sands on a reluctant public? How about we put restriction on the time it takes to review industrial projects? That's now part of the budget too!

What does the rest of Canada get?

British Columbia gets the middle finger as the Enbridge pipeline is pushed through before the population can vote-in an NDP government to boot-out Christie Clark.

Ontario gets a huge wave of public sector layoffs.

Quebec, in which Radio-Canada (CBC) is a highly valued commodity where its news division has maintained high standards as well as focus on international news and investigative reporting, the 10% budget slash will hurt a great deal.

Oh, and everyone in my generation gets to work 2 more years before retirement which every analysis says was unnecessary...

Of course, a great many pundits in the conservative media love the budget. No strategy to boost the manufacturing base, no strategy for value-added industries for our natural resources and a step in the wrong direction for sustainable development.

In Conservative Canada, the punditry nods favourably as the government devotes the bulk of its budget initiatives to blatantly reward conservative Albertans (certainly not the progressive ones) while the NDP is criticized for sending out regional press releases about the same budget to its constituency despite them being nearly identical in content.