Alberta's Economic Outlook: Innovation, Surplus, and the Road Ahead in Fall 2024

By Jess Sinclair
CCI Director of Prairie Affairs

For those of us who are passionate about economic policy, the real kickoff to the fall political season started with some frank discussions about Canada’s lagging economic performance and the importance of innovation industrial policy at Alberta's Productivity Summit in Calgary last week.

Premier Danielle Smith and Finance Minister Nate Horner shared some important messages in terms of innovation and economic planning at the Productivity Summit.  But the rubber will hit the road when the Alberta fall fiscal update is delivered — likely in November.

Today, Alberta MLAs returned to the legislature for the fall 2024 sitting. The pre-session news release teases two or three prospective bills that will almost certainly impact the province’s tech community — amendments to the Protection of Privacy and the Access to Information Acts and the Service Alberta Statutes Amendment Act, 2024.

The province is sitting on a $2.9B surplus, thanks to stable oil prices, and Minister Horner and his department officials have been in budget planning mode for months now.

Here are a few things we’ll be watching in the months ahead, as we track the fall fiscal update and other policy announcements out of the Alberta government leading up to the spring 2025 budget:

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1. We are looking to Alberta Tech & Innovation to finalize provincial data privacy and intellectual property commercialization strategies. Data and IP are the lifeblood of the innovation economy, and the most important driver of value in the modern economy. Future-oriented strategies for data privacy and IP will set the stage for important work on government procurement. We hope to see this strategic lens applied to the prospective fall legislation noted above.
   
   
2. Speaking of procurement, it's been nearly a year since Alberta Health announced the province would be creating a Health Procurement Secretariat as part of overall reforms to the healthcare delivery system. We've yet to see this secretariat materialize, but given both Premier Smith and Health Minister Adriana Lagrange have said that technology will play an important role in frontline care and back-office administration, the province would do well to consider appointing someone to lead on developing and implementing a health tech procurement strategy.
   
   
3. Finally, we would like to see the province begin the work of establishing the Alberta Venture Capital Innovation Investment (AVCII) Fund, a new $275 million public-private sector co-investment fund.

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We’ve fleshed out these ideas, and a few more, in our 2025 Pre-Budget Submission to the province.

With a bit of careful planning, Alberta has a real shot at harnessing stable commodity prices, record venture capital, and a young and entrepreneurial population. Government should use these advantages to provide better services to Albertans and establish the province as a North American innovation ecosystem to be reckoned with.

Jess Sinclair leads CCI’s advocacy efforts in the prairies, and can be reached at jsinclair@canadianinnovators.org.

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About the Council of Canadian Innovators

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national member-based organization reshaping how governments across Canada think about innovation policy, and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. Established in 2015, CCI represents and works with over 150 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. Our members are the CEOs, founders, and top senior executives behind some of Canada’s most successful ‘scale-up’ companies. All our members are job and wealth creators, investors, philanthropists, and experts in their fields of health tech, cleantech, fintech, cybersecurity, AI and digital transformation. Companies in our portfolio are market leaders in their verticals, commercialize their technologies in over 190 countries, and generate between $10M-$750M in annual recurring revenue. We advocate on their behalf for government strategies that increase their access to skilled talent, strategic capital, and new customers, as well as expanded freedom to operate for their global pursuits of scale.