Budget under scrutiny Yes Tim Kalinowski In Aesop’s parable the “Birds, The Bats and The Beasts” a bat first flies up into the air to seek friendship with the birds who reject him because he is not a bird. He then flies to the beasts of the earth who reject him because he has wings, and is not like other beasts. The moral of the fable, according to Aesop, is ’he who is not one thing, or the other, has no friends.’ The UCP government may have been feeling a bit like that the day after releasing their 2021 budget with opponents like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation assailing them for running huge deficit budgets for the next three years and big spending, and groups like the Alberta Federation of Labour and the Opposition NDP pummeling them for cutting 15,000 more public sector jobs, and cutting spending to support post-secondary institutions while “blowing,” in their words, upward of $2 billion on gambles like the Keystone XL pipeline.