Yeah I was getting at the fact that they're underfunded.

I don't know if Alberta is like Ontario, but here in Ontario over the last 3 decades the province has slowly been reducing how much it transfers to cities while also offloading more expenses onto those cities.

This has resulted in:

• higher house prices as cities have needed to start adding large fees to house building in-order to help balance the books (and raising property taxes is always very unpopular)
• worse public transit as the provinces now expect cities to take on more of those expenses.

And likely other things too. But those are the ones always on my mind