Western Standard - December 11, 2023


Alberta's $31M Funding For Nine New Emission Reducing Projects


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

182.73866

Word count

758

Sentence count

43


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Learn English with Alberta s Premier Rachel Notley. In this episode, Rachel talks about the province's surplus and how she plans to use the surplus to pay down $26B of debt. She also talks about Alberta's diversification strategy and the challenges facing the energy sector.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.240 Let's start with the good news. Alberta is expecting to see a larger surplus than expected.
00:00:06.660 What is driving that growth?
00:00:09.160 Well, there's a couple of factors driving that growth.
00:00:11.200 Of course, we've had a relatively strong bitumen royalty continue throughout the year.
00:00:16.680 But I think the more significant factor is really strong income tax from both the corporate and the personal income tax realms,
00:00:24.680 which just shows that Alberta is not just attracting people, but we're attracting businesses and jobs.
00:00:30.780 And it's really helping us develop and it's creating that very stable base for our finances right now.
00:00:36.340 Look, I know you've got a lot of plans for what you want to do with the surplus.
00:00:40.300 And being fiscally responsible is top of the list.
00:00:43.300 We've heard the premier speak about it several times.
00:00:46.220 Why is paying down debt such a focus for you?
00:00:49.560 Well, paying down debt is really, really important because if you don't, it comes back for refinancing.
00:00:56.660 And what we're seeing now is some of the financing by the government between 2015-2019 is due for renewal right now.
00:01:03.840 And in the next three years, I think we have $26 billion of refinancing.
00:01:09.020 And just the cost on that is going to be over $300 million annually of debt servicing payments.
00:01:15.720 Like, that's a lot of schools, that's a lot of hospitals, that's a lot of work that we cannot invest in because we've got to pay that debt back.
00:01:23.620 So, you just have to manage it.
00:01:25.660 It's really important.
00:01:27.160 I'm sure Albertans can relate.
00:01:28.920 As you well know, mortgages coming due and with the interest rates as spiking as they have been, thanks to inflation from the federal government, everything is getting more expensive.
00:01:37.920 Look, we always hear about the boom and bust cycle of the oil and gas sector.
00:01:41.580 I know your government has been focusing on diversification.
00:01:44.460 How are we doing on that front?
00:01:46.740 We're doing amazing on that front.
00:01:48.740 I think it's three years in a row we've led venture capital investment, setting records for Alberta and amongst the top in Canada.
00:01:56.360 I think this last year we've had over $534 million in venture capital invested in our tech sector.
00:02:03.700 But as you were talking about with Minister Jean, we've seen the petrochemical industry with Dow just continue to grow.
00:02:10.840 We've got film and television, like the series The Last of Us happening in Alberta, one of the largest in history.
00:02:18.260 We've got finance and financial tech also in there and agriculture and food processing.
00:02:24.120 We're seeing growth on all kinds of new regions that we haven't in the past, just providing that stability.
00:02:30.960 So we're not just a one-trick pony, but we've got industry growth across the board.
00:02:36.400 Look, I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about utilities before I let you go.
00:02:41.100 You're the minister responsible for utilities, of course.
00:02:43.420 You know very well what it's been like dealing with Ottawa and the unrealistic demands on our power grid.
00:02:50.920 Any update on those challenges and anything that Albertans need to know?
00:02:55.200 Absolutely.
00:02:55.840 We need Albertans to know that as a government, we're standing up to Ottawa and we're standing on behalf of Albertans.
00:03:01.880 We understand the grid, we understand their electricity needs, and we understand the challenges of where we want to go.
00:03:09.140 I believe that we agree with the federal government and the majority of Albertans that we want to get to a more carbon neutral future.
00:03:17.540 We want to do that in an affordable way, which means we've got to make strategic and careful investments over a time frame that allows us to do that
00:03:25.200 without seeing a doubling or tripling or even a quadrupling of people's utility bills each month.
00:03:31.160 They're high now.
00:03:32.220 They are coming down.
00:03:33.240 We've got more and more natural gas coming online.
00:03:36.300 So we expect to see us getting back to that historic less than 10 cents a kilowatt hour.
00:03:42.020 But we also want to make sure they're making good investments in our transmission, good decisions in our distribution,
00:03:48.060 and allowing the system to work to serve the needs of Albertans.
00:03:50.740 That's one of the reasons why we stood up with the Alberta within a United Canada with Sovereignty Act,
00:03:56.880 so that we can stand up for Albertans and say, this is what's best for Albertans.
00:04:01.880 We're going to stand here and we're going to make sure that we fill the gap
00:04:04.760 and we do what's required to get there in a way that we can all afford it.