Strong, Sovereign, and Secure: Building Lasting Prosperity for Alberta in Uncertain Times.

By Jess Sinclair
CCI Director of Prairie Affairs

We’re expecting to see a provincial budget by the end of February, and Premier Danielle Smith is foreshadowing that oil price volatility could make for a difficult year ahead for Alberta’s finances.

Trump tariffs, a prospective OPEC glut release and increased production from the United States all loom large for Albertans. That said, it’s not all doom and gloom: the province is leading in terms of labour productivity metrics and Calgary has topped Vancouver in terms of venture capital attraction.

Alberta has long been at the forefront of creating marketplace frameworks and building winners across our cornerstone industries — namely, oil and gas and agriculture. We’ve enjoyed significant success and our policymakers have been historically shrewd in their approach to securing customers and navigating global supply chains for the things we produce and pull out of the ground.

But it’s not enough by a long-shot in the context of the 21st century economy, where IP, strategic procurement, and data sovereignty are everything.

Like most other Canadian jurisdictions (and I’d include the federal government here), Alberta remains behind global leaders in terms of the innovation industrial policy, and marketplace frameworks that will create an economy with the depth and breath required to weather the new types of shocks we’re likely to see within the next generation. Governments should be laser-focussed on onshoring big ideas and adding as much value to the ecosystem that supports their commercialization. This is the approach that built Silicon Valley and a thriving semiconductor industry in South Korea (to name two examples).

There’s time to right the ship. The current government has begun work on a digital marketplace. Premier Smith and Minister Nate Glubish have spoken to the importance of shoring up compute capacity in the province. Work has begun on data policy reform. To create a more resilient economy, the province should be undertaking these items with an eye to thinking globally and acting locally.

The good news is that much of this work can be done during leaner times for Alberta’s coffers. Here are CCI’s updated key recommendations for Alberta’s 2025 budget, building on our 2025 budget submission to the province made last fall.

1. The province desperately needs to reform its technology procurement practices for the 21st century. Domestic procurement is a supply-side economic tool used by every other developed jurisdiction. This is not about picking winners; it’s about building them. As first steps, Alberta needs to explore a single-window health technology procurement agency like Ontario is doing with its Health Innovation Pathway and appoint a procurement concierge focussed on Alberta-headquartered companies.
   ‍
2. Alberta needs to think about attracting and building AI data centres as more than just an opportunity to leverage our natural gas resources. International companies that establish centres in the province should be required to leverage local suppliers as they build out micro-grids, cooling systems, and other infrastructure for these centres.
   ‍
3. The province should focus on areas where we can win within the global tech supply chain. Semiconductor fabrication is a tremendous opportunity that comes to mind. Alberta can leverage existing local expertise and should pursue subsequent envelopes of federal funding to carve out our share of the market in the chips supply chain. This is one example of many, but there are significant and urgent opportunities to create the hardware that will be used in the next generation of devices across the globe.
   ‍
4. Patents and commercialization are king in the 21st century economy. We continue to call on Alberta to follow Intellectual Property Ontario’s lead by releasing a comprehensive provincial IP commercialization strategy that makes it incumbent upon government-funded post-secondary institutions and crown corporations to patent and commercialize the ideas created within their purview in Alberta.

Alberta created the first provincial R&D agency in Canada that presided over the development (and subsequent securing of patents) of the SAGD technology that unlocked the oilsands. A century on, we have a similar opportunity to seize the moment to create prosperity and certainty in a 21st century economy underpinned by intangible assets. Let’s not squander it.

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

‍

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.