Colin Krieger

Now that Prime Minister Mark Carney has been officially sworn in, his first item of business should be to call a general election. I am extremely concerned that this cabinet includes most of same ministers responsible for the most damaging government policies levelled by Ottawa against Alberta in our over 100-year history. We are gravely concerned that plans to significantly increase the industrial carbon tax will be just as damaging to Alberta’s economy as the consumer carbon tax has been. The Prime Minister also has not yet condemned harmful policies such as: • The proposed emissions cap which continues to threaten our energy sector. • Bill C-69 which still hampers critical infrastructure projects. • Failed bail policies which continue to put our communities at risk, undermining the safety and security that Albertans deserve. • Gun bans that target law-abiding hunters and sport shooters • Open border policies which are allowing over 2 million people per year to enter Canada • The plastics ban which puts billions of dollars of investment and thousands of jobs at risk • Bill C-59 which bans businesses from communicating about their environmental goals • The Electric Vehicle mandate which calls for 100 percent of new vehicle sold to be electric by 2035 • The Sustainable Jobs Act, which aims to transition energy workers to a net zero economy as they work to shut down the energy sector • The Clean Electricity Regulations that will make our electricity grid 100 times less reliable and increase electricity prices by 35 per cent. Our province has always been a leader in innovation, economic growth, and responsible resource development. We will continue to stand up for our industries, push back against policies that unfairly target Alberta, and fight for a fair deal within Confederation. The Prime Minister must put Canada first and call an election immediately to ensure that whoever is leading this country has a four year mandate from all Canadians, especially in light of the ongoing tariff conflict with the U.S.

The Lost Decade. Why did Canada suddenly lose momentum and become so poor, indebted and unproductive compared to other advanced economies from 2015-2025? The past several years of 1970s style leftist Liberal-NDP policies have been slowly killing Canadian prosperity, security and quality of life on almost every key metric. Why has Canada declined so fast and how will we turn it around? It starts with policy: ideas have consequences. Canada moved too far to the left - on debt, taxes, drugs, crime, immigration, security and climate. As happens with leftist policies everywhere, arguments based initially on fairness ended up being used to justify a sclerotic and authoritarian bureaucracy that over-taxes, over-borrows and over-regulates its own people to achieve ‘fairness’. Poverty always follows. Here are the three things holding back an opportunity society in Canada: 1. Uncompetitive taxes kill the incentives that naturally exist in a free economy to work, build and save. High taxes drive innovators and entrepreneurs offshore. Talented young people leave Canada to build their careers in more exciting and rewarding economies. When that happens; jobs and productivity stall and the nation gets poorer. Canada now has the worst GDP productivity trend of all advanced economies in the OECD and the G7. 2. Uncontrolled debt spending - and interest losses: The government got addicted to easy debt to fund itself instead of relying on taxes from the real economy, which couldn’t keep up with govt spending. Eventually the interest losses from debt start to destroy pubic services. When this happens, the government gets desperate as its effectiveness declines noticeably and the public loses faith in the ‘fairness’ narrative. Under Finance Minister Freeland, who has no background in finance, record debt has been used to fund uneconomic pet policies and bureacratic expansion. This is now costing $54bn in interest losses this year, eating more than 12% of the tax dollars intended for public services. And it is about to get much worse. It was recently discovered that the Minister also failed to lock in long term rates on over $400bn in covid-era debt. This will spike interest losses to public services by more than 10x their initial short term rates. 3. An obese bureaucracy to administer big govt ‘fairness’ policies. The bureaucracy is 70% more expensive than 2015 but fails to come to work in person more than twice a week. It is now presiding over a steep decline in public service performance. Yet instead of reducing, digitizing and upgrading a failing and politicized bureaucracy, the Minister is borrowing even more, and raising taxes on capital investment. This means taking $18bn away from individual investors and giving it - along with $40bn more in debt - to an inept bureaucracy to invest instead. In a sign of extraordinary naïveté and hubris, the government is taking 3x the amount of money it is getting from the capital gains tax and giving it to a crack team of federal bureaucrats to make EV bets to compete against Tesla, BYD and dominant US and Chinese supply chains. Taxes, debt and bureaucratic hubris is how to kill an economy and make Canadians structurally poorer. The good news? Canada can turn this around. We’re not destined to be poor. By 2019, Alberta was similarly impoverished by NDP policies that had also borrowed more money than all previous govts combined, raised taxes and created a bloated bureaucracy. The prosperity playbook of lower/smarter taxes, less red tape, and higher performing public services we initiated in 2019 in Alberta has now created Canada’s most outperforming economy - with over 90% of all private jobs in the nation. This means real prosperity. Alberta exceeds the USA’s GDP and per capita wealth now. There’s no reason Canadians need to be poorer, less secure and more indebted than Americans. We have every advantage in the world, we just need better ideas.

Move along folks, there’s no story here…