EDMONTON – Premier Rachel Notley said entrepreneurism is the key to Alberta’s economic revival, adding that one never knows where another Silicon Valley will spring up.
Notley made the comments Thursday in a State of the Province speech to almost 2,000 people at an Edmonton Chamber of Commerce event.
Notley told the audience that paradigm-altering innovations can come from unexpected places.
She said tech giants like Apple and Google got their start in garages, and that oilsands technology unlocked billions of dollars in wealth for Alberta.
Her government is undertaking numerous initiatives to diversify Alberta’s oil-based economy.
But opposition critics have said Notley is ignoring economic fundamentals to recovery by hiking corporate and personal income taxes and looking at boosting oil royalties.
Notley presented a fiscal update and discussed upcoming provincial initiatives at the Northlands Edmonton EXPO Centre, where Mayor Don Iveson was among the hundreds of people in attendance.
One of the big questions floating around the local business community is how a regime change will impact long-standing government policies.
It’s been exactly six months since the historic provincial election that saw Rachel Notley’s NDP win a decisive majority government, ending the Progressive Conservatives’ 44-year reign over the province.
Following the spring provincial election, Colin Cieszynski, chief market strategist at CMC Markets Canada, said investors were reacting to uncertainty after Albertans elected a government that campaigned on corporate tax hikes and a review of oil and gas royalties. At that time is was too early to know what the ultimate effect of the NDP’s election would be on the economy and business community.
READ MORE: How the economy is reacting to the Alberta NDP win
During last year’s address in early December, then-Premier Jim Prentice addressed the plummeting price of oil, and how it would affect the province’s bottom line. Prentice said fixing the problem would not be as simple as making deep across-the-board cuts in government spending.
At the time the price of West Texas Intermediate crude $63 a barrel, down from a summer 2014 high of above $100. On Thursday morning the price was hovering around $45 a barrel.
With files from Vinesh Pratap and Karen Bartko, Global News
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