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

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