Not too surprisingly, the Wildrose party has come out swinging against the provincial budget announced Thursday.

Highwood MLA Wayne Anderson says he was disappointed with what he saw in the document.

Anderson says a $10.4-billion deficit is bad enough, but now the government is going to have to borrow for operations.

"The challenge we've got is, ya, oil prices are down, but this government has been in power for almost a whole year and we haven't seen anywhere where they are looking at any sort of cost reductions," Anderson says. "Putting Albertans into that deep of a debt is going to affect our children and our grandchildren."

He says the other troubling thing is there is no plan in the budget to get out of the financial hole that's being dug.

Anderson says it's interesting that six months ago the government put forward a jobs plan with $200-million and created zero jobs and now they're claiming to be able to created 100,000 jobs for $250-million. He doubts they can do it based on the economy that exists right now.

As for the carbon tax he calls it ludicrous and wonders how the government can call it potentially revenue neutral. He also questions the rebate program.

"If you earn over $51,000 a year you get zero dollars back, but I guarantee you're going to be paying more. And if you've got a family income of over a $100,000 you get zero dollars back," he explains. "But this is going to be almost $10-billion in taxes over the next three years that this government has imposed on people and this is a tax they did not campaign on, they didn't tell anybody about, of course they're saying we don't have a provincial sales tax but this is the next best thing."

He's also concerned that cities and municipalities are not exempt from having to pay the carbon levy which he says could be devastating for towns like High River and Okotoks.