Want a tax cut Need more cash to pay for your daughter's braces or your son's tuition Sorry, you'll have to wait-and wait-and wait. That's the message Albertans have received as the province gets set to break its own debt retirement law and spend this year's surplus.

None of this year's projected $2 billion provincial surplus will go to tax relief. Instead, Klein and associates have ordered up another $860 in new spending. Most of that is for "infrastructure" -- $600 million to be precise - above and beyond the $1.3 billion already budgeted for in 1999-2000.

In order to get at this "infrastructure" money, however, the province must first amend something called the Fiscal Responsibility Act which forces the government to dedicate 75% of any surplus to our $12.5 billion debt. In effect, the province will break its own law in order to steal money away from debt repayment.

So there you have it. Less money for debt repayment, no immediate tax cuts, and more public sector spending. Is this the Klein government that was elected in 1993 on a platform of fiscal conservatism You certainly wouldn't think so.

It's not as if the government couldn't cut taxes right now. Had Mr. Klein been willing, he could have eliminated both the provincial surtax and the flat tax this year. In fact he had, and still has, a moral obligation to get rid of these taxes immediately - they were introduced to eliminate something that no longer exists - the provincial deficit. Using less than half of the $2 billion surplus to eliminate these two taxes would result in a tax cut of about $300 for every Alberta taxpayer. And it could be done without altering debt payments, and still leave money available for new spending.

So what's the problem Why abandon debt repayment and tax relief in favor of a spending spree

It certainly doesn't have anything to do with the wishes of Albertans. According to the province's own survey of 80,000 Albertans conducted earlier this year, paying down the debt had the highest importance rating* at 75 percent. Reducing taxes received the second highest rating at 61.4 percent, and increasing spending was third at 56.1 percent. It must be that Mr. Klein was reading the survey results upside-down.

Or perhaps the premier and his cabinet have simply come to the conclusion that the debt dragon has been slain and that Albertans are satisfied with the level of taxes they pay. Well, Mr. Klein, the dragon is alive and breathing fire and it's Albertans who are being scorched. Interest payments on the debt continue to cost us well over $1 billion a year (approximately $1,000 a year per taxpayer) and we continue to pay more in taxes than we do for food, clothing and shelter combined. It's time to return to the original game plan of fiscal responsibility. It's what Albertans need and what they demand.

* The importance rating is the average of all responses (on the 1 to 5 scale) converted to a 100 point index, with 100 being the most important, equivalent to a 5.