Alberta Budget 2021 Highlights

From Alberta.ca/budget-highlights

Maintaining responsible spending

A careful approach to spending

Budget 2021’s responsible approach to spending will mean more investment in priority areas like health care, education and job creation.

Sound fiscal anchors

Budget 2021 is built on 3 fiscal anchors:

Keep net debt below 30% of GDP to help protect future generations from rising debt servicing costs.
Deliver services more cost effectively by bringing spending in line with other comparator provinces.
Re-establish a plan to balance the budget post-pandemic when a more stable level of predictability returns to the budgeting process.
Getting back on track
Operating expense
- In 2021–22, operating expense is $1 billion higher than 2020–21 forecast and begins to normalize, remaining relatively flat over the next 2 years.
Deficit
- $18.2 billion deficit is targeted for 2021–22, $2 billion less than the 2020–21 forecast.
- $11 billion and $8 billion deficits are targeted for 2022–23 and 2023–24 respectively.
Declining deficit can be attributed to decreasing expense as:
- the costs of the pandemic subside
- the government works to streamline and modernize service delivery
- revenue increases as the economy recovers
  Budget 2021 funding highlights
  
  Budget 2021 provides funding of:
  
  $23 billion for health services
  
  $8.2 billion operating expense for kindergarten to grade 12 (K to 12) education services
  
  $6.3 to $6.4 billion operating expense for social services ministries
  
  $136 million over 3 years for the Alberta Jobs Now program
  
  $166 million over 3 years for the Innovation Employment Grant
  
  $500 million in 2021–22 for additional investments in economic recovery

Investing in health care

Budget 2021 invests record funding in health care

Alberta’s government is increasing Health’s budget by over $900 million (or 4%) to $23 billion, and that’s excluding the impact of COVID-19.

$5.4 billion for physician compensation and development (including academic medicine)
$3.5 billion for community care, continuing care and home care programs, including $20 million over 4 years for palliative and end of life care
$1.9 billion for drugs and supplemental health benefits.
$34 million for children’s health supports to expand mental health and rehabilitation services for children and youth
$140 million over 4 years for mental health and addiction services
Continuing the fight against COVID-19
Budget 2021 invests in continued supports to protect Albertans as we enter the second year of the pandemic.
- $1.25 billion COVID-19 Contingency to address health-care costs for responding to the pandemic, including surgical wait times and backlogs
- This is in addition to $2.1 billion spend in 2020-21
  Getting health care back on track
  
  Budget 2021 invests $16 billion for Alberta Health Services operations. Includes:
  
  Alberta Surgical Initiative
  
  Continuing Care Capacity Plan
  
  CT and MRI Access Initiative
  
  Investing in health care capital
  
  Budget 2021 commits $3.4 billion over 3 years for health related capital projects and programs, providing:
  
  $2.2 billion for health facilities, with $143 million for 5 new projects
  
  $766 million for Alberta Health Services self-financed capital, for parkades, equipment and other capital requirements
  
  $343 million for capital maintenance and renewal of existing facilities
  
  $90 million for health department IT projects

Preparing for recovery

Paving the way for jobs and investment

Alberta’s Recovery Plan is a bold strategy to create jobs that get people back to work, build infrastructure and diversify our economy. This includes the acceleration of the Job Creation Tax Cut, which creates employment opportunities by making Alberta one of the most attractive jurisdictions in North America for new business investment. Budget 2021 will spend an additional $3.1 billion in 2021–22 to continue supporting recovery plan strategies.

Building infrastructure to create 90,000 new jobs

Budget 2021 invests $1.7 billion more in capital funding in 2021–22 than what was planned in Budget 2020.

The 3-year Capital Plan now totals $20.7 billion and will support more than 50,000 direct and 40,000 indirect jobs through to 2024.

Diversifying the economy

In 2021–24, $1.5 billion invested in Alberta’s Recovery Plan.

Budget 2021 invests in established and emerging sectors that hold the greatest potential for growth and job creation, and are fundamental to our economic recovery including: energy; agriculture and forestry; tourism; finance and fintech; aviation, aerospace and logistics; and technology and innovation.

Economic recovery spending highlights

- Innovation Employment Grant supports small and medium-sized businesses that invest in research and development
- Developing framework to protect intellectual property in Alberta
- Investment and Growth Strategy supports emerging sectors while building on our existing strengths
- Invest Alberta provides supports and services to drive up investment and showcase Alberta as the best place in the world to do business

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Temporary Alberta grid limit unlikely to dampen data centre investment, analyst says

Published on July 14, 2025

Todayville

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Cody Ciona

‘Alberta has never seen this level and volume of load connection requests’

Billions of investment in new data centres is still expected in Alberta despite the province’s electric system operator placing a temporary limit on new large-load grid connections, said Carson Kearl, lead data centre analyst for Enverus Intelligence Research.

Kearl cited NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s estimate from earlier this year that building a one-gigawatt data centre costs between US$60 billion and US$80 billion.

That implies the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO)’s 1.2 gigawatt temporary limit would still allow for up to C$130 billion of investment.

“It’s got the potential to be extremely impactful to the Alberta power sector and economy,” Kearl said.

Importantly, data centre operators can potentially get around the temporary limit by ‘bringing their own power’ rather than drawing electricity from the existing grid.

In Alberta’s deregulated electricity market – the only one in Canada – large energy consumers like data centres can build the power supply they need by entering project agreements directly with electricity producers.

According to the AESO, there are 30 proposed data centre projects across the province.

The total requested power load for these projects is more than 16 gigawatts, roughly four gigawatts more than Alberta’s demand record in January 2024 during a severe cold snap.

For comparison, Edmonton’s load is around 1.4 gigawatts, the AESO said.

“Alberta has never seen this level and volume of load connection requests,” CEO Aaron Engen said in a statement.

“Because connecting all large loads seeking access would impair grid reliability, we established a limit that preserves system integrity while enabling timely data centre development in Alberta.”

As data centre projects come to the province, so do jobs and other economic benefits.

“You have all of the construction staff associated; electricians, engineers, plumbers, and HVAC people for all the cooling tech that are continuously working on a multi-year time horizon. In the construction phase there’s a lot of spend, and that is just generally good for the ecosystem,” said Kearl.

Investment in local power infrastructure also has long-term job implications for maintenance and upgrades, he said.

“Alberta is a really exciting place when it comes to building data centers,” said Beacon AI CEO Josh Schertzer on a recent ARC Energy Ideas podcast.

“It has really great access to natural gas, it does have some excess grid capacity that can be used in the short term, it’s got a great workforce, and it’s very business-friendly.”

The unaltered reproduction of this content is free of charge with attribution to the Canadian Energy Centre.

Alberta

Alberta Next: Taxation

Published on July 14, 2025

Government of Alberta

A new video from the Alberta Next panel looks at whether Alberta should stop relying on Ottawa to collect our provincial income taxes. Quebec already does it, and Alberta already collects corporate taxes directly. Doing the same for personal income taxes could mean better tax policy, thousands of new jobs, and less federal interference. But it would take time, cost money, and require building new systems from the ground up.