Alberta Premier Jason Kenney says the Peace Region will play a big role in helping the economic recovery of the province.
We had the Premier on the Trending 55 Hot Seat and he says that’s why they’ve made a lot of capital investments in the area.
“We want to make sure you can get your products to market and more and more we want to make sure that our First Nations up in the northwest are part of the prosperity. That’s why we rolled out things like the Indigenous Opportunities Corporation. It’s a government corporation that’s helping First Nations get an ownership stake in major resource projects like pipelines and power plants and things like that.”
Another topic we discussed was health care where the Premier says they intend to do their negotiations with government unions in good faith.
Members of the United Nurses of Alberta held information pickets at several sites including High Level, Fairview and High Prairie as they work on getting a new collective agreement.
Kenney tells the Trending 55 Newsroom that they respect their front line health workers and they’re the best compensated in Canada.
“They make about 6% more than nurses in other provinces and we want to compensate them not just fairly but generously. At the same time, we’re running a $16 billion deficit and so we can’t just give them a blank check, we have to manage our taxpayers money carefully.”
We also asked him about the Province’s relationship with the federal government.
The referendum on equalization is something the Premier says is quote “a chance to say yes to a fair deal”, and he says they are moving forward with other ways to strengthen Alberta.
“We’ll be announcing the appointment of our new chief firearms officer to take greater control of the application of the federal firearms laws in hopefully common sense ways here in Alberta. We’ve created our own Alberta Provincial Parole Board. We’ve managed to get control from the feds over the management of the Woodland Caribou Habitat Protection, which if it goes the wrong way could be a big threat to jobs in the northwest.”
You can hear the full interview below.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
