The Honourable Rachel Notley, Premier of Alberta

The Empire Club Presents

The Honourable Rachel Notley, Premier of Alberta

Welcome Address, by Kent Emerson, Associate Vice President, Municipal and Stakeholder Relations, at Municipal Property Assessment Corporation; First Vice President of the Empire Club of Canada

November 20, 2017

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. From the Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto, welcome, to the Empire Club of Canada. For those of you just joining us through either our webcast or our podcast, welcome, to the meeting.

Before our distinguished speaker is introduced today, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our Head Table Guests.

I would ask each guest to rise for a brief moment and be seated as your name is called. I would ask the audience to refrain from applauding until the Head Table Guests have been introduced.

Head Table

Distinguished Guest Speaker:

The Honourable Rachel Notley, Premier of Alberta

Guests:

Mr. Chris Benedetti, Principal, Sussex Strategy Group; 2nd Vice President, Empire Club of Canada

Mr. Pierre Cyr, Director, Board and Stakeholder Relations, Canadian Blood Services; Director, Empire Club of Canada

Mr. Patrick Dalzell, Senior Strategist, Corporate Affairs, Bruce Power

Ms. Nathalie Des Rosiers, MPP Ottawa–Vanier, Parliamentary Assistant to Ontario’s Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs

Mr. Patrick Dillon, Business Manager and Secretary Treasurer, Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario

Mr. Don Forgeron, President and Chief Executive Officer, Insurance Bureau of Canada

Mr. James Hogarth, President, Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario

Mr. Kevin Kelly, Executive Vice President, Corporate Services, Bruce Power

Mr. Nathan Rotman, Chief of Staff to the Premier of Alberta

Mr. Robin Sears, Principal, Earnscliffe Strategy Group, Past President, Empire Club of Canada

My name is Kent Emerson. I am the Associate Vice President of Municipal and Stakeholder Relations at the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation. Thank you.

Premier Notley’s first speech at the Empire Club was on October 2nd, 2015. Her visit to Toronto was shortly after her party’s phenomenal election victory. The Alberta NDP had formed government after decades of Tory rule.

The premier’s 2015 address to the Empire Club focused on many inherited challenges facing her new government as a result of the economic downturn in the energy sector prior to the election. The Alberta annual budget surplus was suddenly a substantial deficit. At the time of Premier Notley’s visit, the price of oil was $44 a barrel, down from $95 just one year prior. To emphasize the interdependence between Alberta and Ontario, she spoke in terms given an Alberta-Ontario economic partnership. The premier noted in her remarks that the economic shock resulting from this change was so significant that it created a ripple effect to other parts of Canada, including Ontario’s manufacturing and financial sectors. That very interdependence is what brings Premier Notley here again today.

On this trip, during constituency week of the Alberta legislature, Toronto is the first of several stops on tour that includes Ottawa, Vancouver and Calgary to talk to Canadians about the Trans Mountain Pipeline.

As many of you know, this pipeline received approval by Canada’s federal government in 2016, but there are opponents and legal challenges pending. What we know for sure is that Canada is one of the top ten oil-producing countries in the world. Our financial system relies upon it. Our dollar relies upon it. For Premier Notley, in particular, Albertans rely upon it. Given the fact that oil production is a certainty, it is necessary to have a discussion about the safest, most environmentally responsible and efficient way to transport the product to reach its market. I am sure, on this topic, the premier will shed light on her thinking for all of us, today.

Since forming government, the premier’s accomplishments include putting a price on carbon for the first time in Alberta’s history, implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and freezing post-secondary tuition.

Premier Notley’s passion for politics is in her blood. Her father, Grant Notley, was the leader of Alberta’s first NDP opposition. Before she was 10 years old, the premier attended protest marches with her mother, Sandy.

Born in Edmonton and raised in Fairview, Premier Notley obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science at the University of Alberta and a law degree from Osgoode. She practiced labour law and workers’ compensation advocacy. She also served as an adviser to British Columbia’s attorney general.

Premier Notley was first elected as an NDP MLA in 2008, serving the constituency of Edmonton-Strathcona, where she resides with her husband and their two teenage children.

Before I invite her to join, please, turn your attention to the screen for a short video.

[VIDEO]

I would like you to give a warm welcome to the Honourable Rachel Notley, Premier of Alberta!

The Honourable Rachel Notley

Thank you. Hello to all of you. Thank you to all for coming here today. Let me begin by thanking the Empire Club for hosting this event. Thank you, Kent for that very kind introduction.

This club, the Empire Club, has had some remarkable speakers in its history, stretching all the way back to 1903. I understand Indira Gandhi spoke here. So did the Dalai Lama, Winston Churchill, Gordon Pinsent, Vladimir Putin and many, many others. No pressure.

Nonetheless, my task is clear, I guess. I need to be wise, I suppose, like the Dalai Lama, about Alberta’s role in Canada, in our environment, and in the world’s energy economy. I need to be determined, determined to defend our province’s beaches, as Winston Churchill would have been. A neat trick, since we have no coastline, a matter about which I will probably say a few more words. I need to find a way to persuade you that Alberta is as much a national treasure as that wonderful Canadian actor, Gordon Pinsent. Then, at the end of the day, if none of that works, I suppose I could also engage with Facebook to get my own way, just like Vladimir. Okay, maybe we just will not go there. You think you know where I am going.

With as much wisdom, determination and commitment to this wonderful country of ours as I can muster, I am here to speak to you, today, about three things, which was somewhat prefaced by that video there.

First, I would like to provide you with a bit of an update on how Alberta is doing these days, given that I was here in October of 2015. Just so you know, the price of oil went well below where it was when I was last here. Second, I would like to speak to you about the need to open up new markets for energy products by building new pipelines, such as the Trans Mountain, and how those new pipelines complement and actually support the very far-reaching action that we are taking to tackle climate change in our province of Alberta. Finally, I am here to ask for your help. We will get to that.

The first question: How is Alberta doing these days? After suffering one of the toughest economic shocks that our province has faced, quite frankly, since the Great Depression in the 1930s, things in Alberta are starting to look up. Three years ago, for many reasons, including slower economic growth in Asia and the rise of new energy producers in the U.S., who made the U.S. a net energy exporter for the first time in decades, the world price of oil collapsed. That oil price, which had peaked at well over $100 per barrel, plummeted, bottoming out below $30 per barrel.

As you know, Canada is one of the world’s principal energy producers with some of the world’s largest energy reserves, an industry that supports more than 500,000 direct and indirect jobs. When you have a price shock that is that deep, the effects are felt across the country, including among the thousands of Ontario-based companies that do business in oil and gas, and back home, in my province of Alberta, where most of Canada’s resources are located. In Ontario, for you, that shock price meant lower demand, lower growth and lost opportunities. For families in Alberta, it meant terrible stress and hardship. People lost their homes, and they worried. They worried about how they would literally put food on their table. Throughout the country, tens of thousands of workers returned home from Alberta without the good pay cheque in their pockets that they needed to take care of their families in their home provinces, pay their taxes and support their local economies. For us in Alberta, the price shock also meant a sharp economic recession, one that echoed throughout homes and businesses across the province, and it meant a very severe fiscal shock. Our revenues dropped by about 20%, creating an $11 billion provincial deficit.

At the time, there were those who argued and continue to argue that the only thing that mattered in that description that I just gave to you was the story of the provincial deficit. People did not matter; economic growth did not matter. The only thing that mattered was to immediately balance the provincial budget by making everything worse, by firing the nurses that our loved ones need at their bedside when they are sick and the teachers who our kids depend on to learn and by cutting everyone’s healthcare and all our families’ educations by 20% in the middle of a sharp recession. We were fighting a fire, and these folks wanted to deal with it by building a bigger fire: Classic cut-and-slash austerity, schemes that have been tried and failed all around the world with little to show other than the highest levels of inequality seen in a century.

We did not take that bad advice, advice that would have put more people out of work and made things even harder. Instead, we stabilized the public spending in our province, ending a period of runaway, volatile public spending growth, and we absorbed that fiscal shock rather than downloading it onto Alberta families. We helped families directly by doing away with a massive and regressive health levy and replacing it with fair, progressive taxes that people pay when they can afford to. We did what we reasonably could to offset the price shock by investing in the economy with a strong and carefully targeted infrastructure plan that put people to work and made up for years of neglect. We started and we are now partnering with business in and out of the energy sector to diversify our economy and to move up the value chain, adding more value to what we do in Alberta. And we acted decisively to reduce our emissions and to combat climate change while working at the same time to diversify our energy markets. I will speak more about that in a moment, except let me just say it really is working.

How is that all working out overall a little over two years later? As I said, things are looking up. Greatly helped by a slow, but encouraging recovery and commodity prices, Alberta is reclaiming its mantle, which is what I would characterize as the economic engine of Canada. A few more quarters of this, and we are going to be able to say that Alberta is back. I can cite many statistics and many studies, but here are a few that tell the story that we are enjoying right now.

According to the Conference Board of Canada and several major Canadian banks, Alberta is expected to have the strongest GDP growth in Canada in 2018. RBC recently revised their forecast for Alberta up from 2.9% to over 4% growth. Investment and activity in the energy sector is recovering. Our strong, well-capitalized and Canadian-based energy industry is investing in the future with a number of major projects announced in the last quarter.

That confidence in our future is reflected throughout the industry. For example, drilling activity is way up, more than double compared to 2016, with over 2,700 new wells being drilled since this time last year. Housing starts are up. Exports are up. Manufacturing is up. Retail sales are up. Restaurant sales are up. Business incorporations are up. My personal favourite is that, since June of 2016, Alberta has added more than 70,000 new, full-time jobs.

The bottom line is this: We have more work to do, and not all Albertans are feeling the growth that I just described, but we are clearly on the mend. We are beginning to make progress. All the credit for this goes to the smart, energetic, entrepreneurial and resilient people of Alberta. Once again, just like we always do, as we always have, we are adapting to new realities in this global market we live in.

We are used to challenges in Alberta. We still face a few additional challenges, to be sure, which, of course, brings me to what I want to focus on today, pipelines and the need for market access. I want to speak very directly and very clearly on this issue. Alberta’s energy industry helps drive our national economy. It supports hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country, including right here in Ontario—in companies like DistributionNOW, an industry-leading provider of pipes, valves and industrial tools, in Sarnia and Thunder Bay, or Dresser-Rand, which is in Mississauga and Sarnia and is one of the largest suppliers of rotating equipment. And the financial contribution that Alberta makes overall to our fellow citizens in other provinces is enormous.

And I said this on the video there, but it bears repeating: There is not a school, a hospital or road anywhere in this country that does not owe something to the strong energy industry that we have in Alberta but—and this is key—for Alberta and, therefore, for Canada, to have a more stable and secure economic future, we need to be able to sell energy to more than just one client. Right now, all of our energy infrastructure is built for export to the United States. They are a monopoly buyer, and, as a result, we often get heavily discounted at a monopoly price. The United States has also tripled its own production over the past decade and built numerous pipelines while we, in Canada, are arguing over ours. The United States is both our sole customer, and it is now emerging as our principal competitor. You do not need to have a degree from the Rotman School of Management to know that this does not make a lot of sense and that it needs to change.

To be economically safe and more secure, to be more resilient in the face of inevitable ups and downs in the energy market, we must develop new markets and new customers. To do this, we need to build a Canadian pipeline to the ocean.

That is just it, an ocean in Canada. The best option is to go west, so that we have access to the Asia-Pacific markets.

To put the point even more clearly, I would say that being smarter about how we market our energy is basic common sense. Those who argue otherwise, who somehow claim that we cannot tackle climate change and support working people, are just playing politics with hundreds of thousands of good jobs for ordinary working people in Alberta, in B.C., in Ontario, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia and across this country. Progressive-minded Canadians, like all Canadians, care about jobs and working people in this country. You do not support working people by attacking the hardworking women and men in our energy industry and by attacking good, mortgage-paying energy jobs. Getting better prices from more customers, which is what we are trying to do by building new pipelines, will also make our energy exports safer.

There are those who argue that these pipeline projects are going to make us all less safe and more prone to spills and accidents. That is false. Getting Canadian energy exports off the railroads and into modern, well-regulated, well-designed, closely supervised pipelines will be safer, will be more secure and will avoid future accidents like we have seen in the recent past.
Finally, there are those who argue that building a new pipeline to open the door to more markets and better prices will make it impossible for Canada to meet its climate change targets. The opposite is true. Alberta has taken a very strong leadership position on these issues. Quite frankly, I will argue no one in Canada holds a candle to Alberta on climate change prevention action. Our plan is the most comprehensive anywhere in North America. We have introduced an economy-wide price on carbon to promote lower emissions. We are eliminating coal production that is bad for our air, our health and our productivity. Take note: 60% of our electricity is generated by coal right now, so that is no small thing to get off of coal. We are introducing an industrial and domestic energy efficiency program to reduce waste and pollution. And let me emphasize this—because it is really, really very important—we have placed a hard cap on emissions from the oilsands. This is very important for Canadians to understand because we have capped oilsands emissions. A new pipeline to tidewater does not, does not, increase carbon emissions. The only thing that the pipeline contributes to is more economic prosperity for working Canadians in a stronger, more resilient, national economy.

The measures that I have just outlined are at the core of Canada’s national climate leadership plan and, therefore, will help Canada reduce carbon emissions in every province and territory across the country. They enable us, collectively, to act on climate change while building a more prosperous, generous and equal Canada for all of our citizens.

As the Premier of Alberta, a province that I would argue contributes mightily to the economic well-being of our country and leads Canada on climate change prevention action, I carry this message to you and to every Canadian: If you care about the climate; if you care about jobs and working people; if you care about building a society where everybody matters; if you care about building a national economy that can compete and win in the global marketplace; if you care about these things like I do, and you still want to keep Alberta landlocked and stop us from diversifying our markets, then, please, give your head a shake. You cannot pick and choose. Without Alberta, there is no national climate plan, period. With Alberta, we can build a nation where we tackle climate change without leaving working people behind. To be crystal clear, any climate plan that ignores working people is not a plan. In Alberta parlance, it is all hat and no cattle.

Stand with Alberta and help build a nation that can tackle climate change and support working people, or harm any hope we have of reducing emissions and meeting our climate targets. Friends, it is a stark choice, but those are the stakes.

Demand for oil will continue to rise. The world can either buy its oil from Alberta, where we can take climate change seriously, or it can buy it from places with runaway emissions like Venezuela and Russia. We can act as one country that thinks strategically and competes internationally, or we can be a bunch of economic fiefdoms competing with each other for economic advantage.

Let me reiterate: Building the new pipeline, such as Trans Mountain, will be good for the Canadian economy. Getting better prices from more buyers will be good for the jobs of hundreds of thousands of ordinary, working Canadians. Getting pipelines built will give Canada a safer, less risky energy infrastructure. Pipelines are safer than what we are doing now. Getting better prices from more buyers will not come at the expense of increased emissions, thanks to our climate leadership plan, the strongest plan of its kind in Canada.

Most Canadians, I believe, support these goals. Most Canadians in each and every province of this country, including British Columbia, support the moderate progressive approach that I am outlining today, but we, the moderate progressive majority in Canada, risk being a little outshouted. We risk being outshouted by people who have chosen to stick to their same old divisive approach, regardless of their failures and the economic consequences for ordinary working people. We also risk being outshouted by their peculiar allies, the people who choose to ignore the overwhelming evidence and deny climate change altogether, people who want Canada and Alberta to fail, so they can take us backwards, putting our climate and our economy at risk.

I am hoping you, you listening to me at this event today, are part of the moderate majority in Canada who want to see a progressive plan. If you are, now is the time to speak up. It is time to tell governments across Canada that we have the right climate leadership plan and that it should be implemented. It is time to tell governments across Canada that we have made the right decisions about energy infrastructure, and it is time to implement them, too. It is time to respect those decisions and to get the safe, modern energy infrastructure we need built and built now.

I am here, today, to ask your support as engaged Canadian citizens and as members of Canada’s balanced, moderate, progressive majority. We can do this. We can act on climate change. We can build a prosperous economy with good jobs for working families. We can have a functional, national economy that is capable of making decisions. We can step back from extreme positions and reach solutions together, like the ones that I am talking about today. You can make it happen. You can help make it happen. Please, do. The time to speak up is now. Thank you very much for taking the time to listen to me.

Note of Appreciation, by Patrick Dillon, Business Manager and Secretary Treasurer, Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario

Good afternoon, everyone. Premier Notley, thank you very much. On behalf of the Ontario Building Trades as well as our co-sponsors, Bruce Power, the sponsors of this afternoon’s lunch, I would like to thank Premier Notley for her inspirational and thoughtful remarks.

Premier, your presence here, today, reinforces the unity that we, as Canadians, feel and strive for as we go about our daily responsibilities, whether we work in business, government, academia or in labour.

We know that Alberta has gone through some difficult times. The global oil price shocks of late, the 2016 wildfires in Fort McMurray, the recent decision by TransCanada PipeLines not to proceed with energies is just a couple of examples of that. However, as Canadians, we have rallied to support each other in good times and bad, and your remarks here, today, especially highlight the need for us to stand together amid the challenges that we all face.

The Building Trades in Ontario, as well as the Alberta and British Columbia Building Trades, fully support initiatives like the Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion Project. We are fully aware of the economic and social impact that such projects bring to communities, including jobs and opportunities for training Canada’s future workforce, in addition to the strategic importance of being able to export Canadian oil and gas products to new and growing markets.

Premier, you spoke about Alberta’s traditional energy sources, such as oil and gas, being codependent with your government’s initiatives to address climate change. You emphasized the fact that a strong economy is not mutually exclusive with a clean environment and that innovation is at the heart of that linkage. I wholeheartedly agree with you, and I believe that the majority of business, government and labour leaders in Ontario share that view as we strive to pursue new ways of achieving energy security and shared prosperity.

Ontario and Alberta’s economies are inextricably linked. We share common ties in the financial, manufacturing and construction sectors, and we want to see those ties strengthened even more to promote within Canada as a matter of nation building. We can learn from each other’s experiences through dialogue, so your presence here, today, is much appreciated.

Lastly, I would like to point out that the type of economic development that is unfolding in Alberta and in Ontario, thanks to private sector growth, truly depends on collaboration between business and organized labour with government setting the table, so to speak, for that relationship to unfold fairly in the interest of growing the middle class.

Our partnership here, in Ontario, between the Building Trades and Bruce Power is a good example of collaboration. That is not to say that we do not have issues between us from time to time, but we maturely discuss those issues and work them out. I think that can happen at the national level.

Strong relationships and common end goals really do produce results, and the remarkable pursuit of technological innovation that is going on in Alberta’s oil and gas sector, I think, is a great example of that.

Premier, on behalf of Bruce Power, represented here at the Head Table by Kevin Kelly and Patrick Dalzell, the Ontario Building Trades, the Empire Club of Canada, and everyone present here today, we thank you for joining us, and we wish you, together with all Albertans, continued success in everything that you do. Thank you for being with us.

Concluding Remarks, by Kent Emerson

Thanks, Pat. A sincere thank you to our generous sponsors, Bruce Power, the Provincial Building and Construction Trades Council of Ontario and the Insurance Bureau of Canada for making this event possible. Without sponsors like these great companies, the Empire Club lunches would not be possible. Thank you, once again, for your generous support.

We would like to thank mediaevents.ca, Canada’s online event space, for webcasting today’s event for thousands of viewers around the world.

Although our club has been around since 1903, we have moved into the 21st century and are active on social media. Please, follow us on Twitter @Empire_Club and visit us online at www.empireclub.org. You can also follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Finally, please, join us again at our next event, November 21st, with Dr. Mike Apkon, President and CEO of SickKids. On November 22nd, Andrea Horwath, Leader of the NDP, will be speaking at the Royal York Hotel. Thank you for your attendance, today.

This meeting is now adjourned