Community Update to Town Council from MLA Martin Long

MLA Martin Long attended the June 13 Whitecourt Town Council meeting to provide elected officials with an update from the provincial government. “There’s a lot of things going on that are impacting our entire province and specifically this region,” he began. “I love talking about the economy. It has been a bit of a ride. Since 2014, our economy has seen stagnation and decline, and in the last number of months, we have seen rapid increases. I think most of us know that Alberta’s projected to lead the country in economic growth for at least two years. Some of us are starting to see on the horizon a little bit longer term than that is likely.”

MLA Long spoke of the unemployment rate falling to 5.3 percent in May, “which is the lowest since January 2015, with over 60 thousand additional full-time jobs in our province.” Putting that number into perspective, Long said, “that’s a total of 69 percent of the jobs created in the entire country. Pretty big bang for our buck for leading our country, especially right now.”

Long said that with those unemployment numbers, there had been a little bit of an uptick in oil and gas. “That predated the rapid increase that we’ve seen in oil and, therefore, fuel prices. We expect it to sustain for a lot longer based on more pipeline capacity and global demand continuing to increase. Hopefully, for consumers, we do see a bit of a drop in oil prices obviously, but we expect the level to be maintained and that producers will still be enticed to keep doing their jobs.”

Long said that the recovery wasn’t just tied to oil and gas and that there is an uptick in hydrogen projects being announced province-wide, including some close to the region, which he hopes will impact the region for jobs and housing. “We’ve also seen a large increase in tech and innovation. Our government allocated 73 million dollars as part of the 2022 budget, over the next three years, for new funding, for tech and innovation.” Long said that in 2017, Alberta’s total investment in venture capital was 37 million dollars and that in the first quarter of 2022, the investment was 466 million. “Tech and innovation have been very quietly increasing in our province in particular since 2019.”

On tech, Long said that prominent names had announced tech-related jobs in the province, including Amazon and RBC. “One thing we’ve talked about in our meeting rooms is that once you become a tech destination, everyone wants to be here, and that’s what we are already seeing. A lot of the downtown core in Calgary has actually been starting to fill up for office space for tech positions in particular.” He said that he would keep opportunities on his radar where global partners could set up shop in rural Alberta, as opposed to setting up in urban centres and having “field offices.”

Long added that film and television have also exploded provincially. “The largest year that we’ve ever seen for film and television was last year and the largest production in Canadian history, I believe it’s called The Last of Us, an HBO production, with over one billion of investment expected from that production. When we came into government, we had a lot of discussions and moved ahead with a tax credit system for film and television which has paid large dividends. The discussion now is if we continue with that tax credit in its current format or should you regionalize it to force more of those investments into different areas in the province.”

“Another exciting one for me is the dual credit grants in education. The whole goal of that is to give high school students access to more career-based programming and learning experiences so they can earn both high school credits and credits that count towards a post-secondary certificate, diploma, or degree, including journeyman certificates, at the same time,” explained Long.

From there, Long moved on to addiction and recovery, an area his government has added support to since the election. “We had campaigned on a commitment to open 4000 treatment spaces and make Alberta a province where you would not have to have a visa to enter treatment from addiction. Based on a desperate need across the province, we have since increased that number to 8000 treatment spaces.”

Long explained that they are also trying to combat the “unprecedented levels” of opioid deaths and that an app might help. “We’ve had a number of initiatives going forward as well, and the most recent once is an opioid app where an addict can have the app downloaded and when they are using, basically if they don’t check into the app within a certain period of time, EMS will be dispatched to go attend the situation.”

He said Alberta had seen a downturn in opioid-related deaths in the past month. “I believe the number is around 40 percent downturn. I hope to report back in the near future that we continue to see that trend. When I saw that trend down, I also noted that BC was continuing to trend up. So, whatever the distinction is there, I don’t know, but I hope that we as a province and across our country start to see improvement on that front, and hopefully, we are moving in that direction right now.”

The final topic that MLA Long touched on was tourism. “We have seen a somewhat rapid recovery on the tourism front. We are only second in Canada to British Columbia in recovery, which gives room for optimism. I’m a bit competitive, though, so that’s still second place to BC. But we will continue to push there,” he said with a chuckle. “Also, recently, we found out that Calgary International Airport is now the third busiest international airport in the country, behind Vancouver and Pearson. So, we actually leapfrogged over Montreal’s airport, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Anytime we can get ahead of Quebec is a good day in my books,” he said, sharing a laugh with those in attendance.