Alberta’s “fossil fools” squandered taxpayer dollars

“You’ve got me singing, even though the news is bad.” This line from a Leonard Cohen song is how I feel about Alberta right now. While it’s true the province just spent $1.5 billion dollars on nothing, and an undisclosed piece of $6 billion more, the spectacular failures of fossil fools like Jason Kenney are required to highlight for the rest of us the direction the 21st century economy is going.

Investments around the world in electric cars, batteries, gigafactories for making them and components and resources for building them have reached astonishing heights while Alberta was distracted by trying to resurrect the bitumen industry. Tesla has suddenly become the fifth largest company in the world, after Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet.

Ontario has jumped on this trend, investing $295 million in a $1.8 billion electric vehicle production plant by Ford, triggering an equal investment from available federal programs.

The Alberta government investment debacle is getting people to look at where companies are really investing and what business are doing well. Alberta’s solar boom is suddenly getting noticed, with a startling 5,000 MW of solar power in the queue to get built.

To give you an idea of the size of this investment, even after the large projects of last year we currently only have 20 MW of solar power generation in Alberta from bigger installations. Yes, the industry is about to expand by 250 times. The new projects will include the largest ever built in Canada.

In Alberta’s wake up and smell the coffee moment, let’s all sit back with a cup of Joe and think about the future.

Tom Moffat