Alberta Minute: Legislature Returns, Projects Announced, and a Nation Within A Nation

Alberta Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Alberta politics.

This Week In Alberta:

• The Legislature returns this week with sittings scheduled for Monday afternoon and evening, all day Tuesday and Wednesday, and Thursday morning and afternoon. The first item of business, aside from Question Period, will be the Infrastructure Accountability Act.
  
  
• Committees also return with a Tuesday meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts from 8:00 am to 10:00 am, a Thursday meeting of the Standing Committee on Alberta’s Economic Future from 8:00 am to 10:00 am and, also on Thursday., a meeting of the Select Special Child and Youth Advocate Search Committee 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm.
  
  
• Starting today, the Provincial government is toughening their vaccine passport, with them now requiring the new QR code instead of any old paper versions. They were forced to make a last-minute change to permit seven other documents for people who can't access a QR code, for example, those from other jurisdictions. Given they've spent two months telling businesses they will only be allowed to accept QR codes, and businesses have trained staff accordingly, we expect this late change will cause some problems.

Last Week In Alberta:

• In 2020, for the first time in over 50 years, Alberta received more in federal payments than it paid to Ottawa. There's a catch, of course, as this only happened because the federal government borrowed hundreds of billions of dollars to hand out across all provinces. One day, all that debt will have to be repaid, and you can bet when that happens Albertans will be paying far more than our fair share of that debt too. So, yes, we got a little extra cash last year, but we also got a whole lot of extra debt.
  
  
• In the actual good news department, retail giant Amazon announced a $4.3 billion Amazon Web Services (AWS) project in the Calgary area while, further to the north, the Northern Petrochemical Corporation announced a large $2.5 billion project in the Municipal District of Greenview to produce ammonia and ethanol.

• Finally, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe caused heart palpitations in Ontario and Quebec when he announced that he believes Saskatchewan needs to be a nation within a nation, and that "any and all options most certainly will be on the table" to ensure Saskatchewan is treated fairly by the federal government. What do you think? Is Saskatchewan a nation within a nation? If so, is Alberta too?

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