Deputy Premier Thomas Lukaszuk joined the Lac La Biche-St. Paul-Two Hills Progressive Conservative Constituency Association at the St. Paul Senior Citizen’s Centre for its annual general meeting last Tuesday to speak to constituents about the current state of the province.
“This riding, I spent a lot of my childhood years here . . . particularly at Garner Lake and Spedden,” Lukaszuk said.
The deputy premiere took the opportunity to address the direction that the current provincial government is heading, and made a point to discuss the budget.
“As you know, we just passed the budget, and we’re still going through debates on the budget and it was very difficult. The reason it was difficult, as most of you have probably read and heard, is that our revenues have suddenly seen a massive, massive dip, somewhere in the order of $6 billion. It’s a dip that not only surprised us as government, but frankly surprised everybody,” he said, pointing to the petroleum bubble.
“We’ve been lucky to sell to our neighbours to the south virtually everything that we have produced. Unfortunately our neighbours to the south did not have the capacity recently to purchase everything that we’ve produced, and we have quickly realized that we don’t have many other markets, and when I talk about many other markets I’m not only talking about oil and gas, but agriculture products, lumber, everything that we produce in this province.”
Lukaszuk said in this time of economic instability, the PCs have received a considerable amount of criticism for not balancing the budget, but he pointed out his belief that balancing the budget just to have it balanced is not a viable solution.
“We made a very conscious choice to continue investing in infrastructure,” he said.
“It’s easy to balance the budget by not paving roads, by not building nursing homes and schools and hospitals, anybody can do that. But at the end of the day, the incremental cost is phenomenal, not only social cost in not having the services, but the cost in delaying the development . . . you cannot be bound by ideology at a time when the province is growing and you need to make practical decisions.”
On the topic of expanding infrastructure in the face of an unbalanced budget, the deputy premiere said he has performed exit interviews with tourists, all of whom voiced similar desires; they want to see more attractions.
“We do exit interviews with tourists that came to Alberta, both on wheels and by flying,” he said, adding that they discuss what the tourist enjoyed about their visit, what they did not like, and what they wanted to see more of.
“The theme that we are getting continuously is that we need more product . . . more attractions. So right now we’re working with Grande Prairie on a dinosaur museum, that is something very important, and different municipalities are developing their own product. To the best of our abilities we’d like to financially contribute to that, because that’s what tourists are looking for, they’re looking for an experience.”
Lukaszuk went on to say that in interviewing doctors contemplating a move to work in northern Alberta, he saw very few ask how much they would be paid.
“They were asking everything other than, ‘how much are you willing to pay me?’ because they knew we will pay them because there is a going rate for a family doctor. But they were asking questions like do you have museums, do you have gyms, recreation facilities, what is your education system like,” he said. “How would you ever attract the talent and the capital into this province to grow the economy (without providing the infrastructure).”
Lukaszuk also spoke about the current shortage of registered nurses in the Lakeland region, and the pros and cons of offering incentives to attract workers.
“I understand why municipalities provide incentives, and they have to do it. There’s no blame factor, they’re doing what they have to and that’s how they’re coping with it and that’s fine,” he said. “In the long run, the solution will be to become less reliant on doctors if we can, and allow all the allied professionals to provide some of that service, and also do outreach and either train family physicians who choose to work in rural Alberta . . . or reach out to rural Albertans, train them so that they want to come back to their home community and then provide those valuable services.”
Looking to the future, Lukaszuk noted that while oil and gas has been a phenomenal resource to the province, the government needs to be funding research and development to help pinpoint “what the next oil and gas could be,” in order to keep Alberta thriving, and pointed to a deal that premiere Alison Redford signed with Siemens last week as an example of the direction they are looking toward.
“One of the biggest innovation companies in the world, Siemens, have just moved to Alberta, and they moved to Calgary to open up their offices for innovation and for research in energy and environment,” he said, adding that the deal came about because of a trip Redford made to London during the Olympics.
“If you read the papers during the London Olympics there was pretty decent criticism against the premiere for going . . . but that’s where they made the agreement that it would be a good idea for (Siemens) to come over here and invest their dollars and know-how into our products.”
Lukaszuk said that on average Siemens files 25 new patents per day, and that he expects great things to come out of the deal.
“Imagine what they can do with the agriculture industry and our colleges and universities, what kind of research they can spin off over here, and what kind of economic growth that can happen just from this one particular deal, and we’re working on many of them to come,” said Lukaszuk.
