CCI’s 2025 Alberta Pre-Budget Recommendations

By Jess Sinclair
CCI Director of Prairie Affairs

With the temperature dropping in the evenings and Costco having had its Christmas gear out for at least a month now, Albertans don’t need Aurora Borealis displays to let us know it’s autumn. And this means politicos are also gearing up for MLAs to converge on Edmonton for the fall 2024 sitting of the Legislature.

The UCP’s Convention and its concurrent leadership review are scheduled for the first weekend in November, and new NDP leader Naheed Nenshi will be in the chamber for the first time, so I expect the first few days of #AbLeg antics will be wild, but not especially productive.

After the initial madness subsides and government gets down to brass tacks for the November mid-year fiscal update and lingering decisions in advance of the 2025 provincial budget, our team will be looking for progress on key innovation files.

Premier Smith and her cabinet have been celebrating the province’s tech wins over the past year, and this is the ideal time to parlay this momentum into a long-term strategy to build an innovation ecosystem that will create prosperity for successive generations of Albertans.
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Key Recommendations:

1. Establish the Alberta Venture Capital Innovation Investment (AVCII) Fund, a new $275 million public-private sector co-investment fund.
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2. Develop a provincial procurement strategy for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), with an explicit nod to technology companies.
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3. Expedite the development and release of key strategies related to the Intangible Economy, namely a comprehensive vision for IP Commercialization.
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4. Modernize provincial privacy regulations.
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5. Address Alberta’s skilled labour shortage to improve access to talent for domestic innovators.

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More details on these ideas can be found in CCI’s 2025 Alberta Pre-Budget Submission here.

More than any other province in Canada, Alberta has historically shown itself willing to ideate economic policies that play to its strengths. It’s time officials looked to implement bold, common-sense innovation industrial frameworks that will create stratospheric growth for the province.

‍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.