The Business Council of Alberta has a clear message for the Government of Canada ahead of the Spring Economic Statement: ambition must become action. After a decade of declining competitiveness, business investment per worker down 11% in Canada, up 45% in the United States, the moment for incremental steps has passed.
In this moment of uncertainty, we want to see the federal government focus on what Canada can control: advancing its ambition to be an energy superpower, leading the G7 in growth, and strengthening long-term prosperity for Canadians.
That starts with creating the conditions for private sector investment including sensible and efficient regulation and a credible path to fiscal sustainability.
Over the past decade, Canada’s prosperity and resilience have been weakened by policy choices that have eroded business competitiveness and discouraged investment.
That needs to change.
The federal government has recognized the importance of improving business investment and competitiveness, and Budget 2026 took an important step forward by prioritizing trade, productivity, and innovation.
The Spring Economic Statement must now turn these priorities and ambition into action. Here is what we want to see:
Make Canada an Energy Superpower
We are pleased to see Prime Minister Carney’s focus on making Canada a global energy superpower, including the initial steps taken and the priorities outlined in the Canada-Alberta MOU. But Canada must align federal climate policy with global business competitiveness for Canada to unlock its energy potential.
Concrete action is needed, which means formally abandoning policies and regulations that reduce confidence and investment in Canadian energy while having little to no impact on global emissions. As such, BCA is looking for the federal government to:
- Repeal the Oil Tanker Moratorium Act
- Repeal the greenwashing provisions in the Competition Act
- Repeal the Clean Electricity Regulations
- Formally rescind the proposed oil and gas emissions cap
It also means going further to address the bottlenecks that cripple project development. Bill C-5 and the creation of the Major Projects Office are a good start. They signal a recognition that Canada’s review system is not meeting the needs of project proponents, investors, and the economy as a whole.
Still, deeper reform is needed to attract capital and be a reliable trading partner, let alone an energy superpower. As highlighted in its two-part report, Restoring Confidence in Major Project Reviews, BCA is looking for the federal government to:
- Establish a predictable and transparent approvals framework, beyond a project-by-project acceleration
- Expediate the approval of all oil and gas pipelines and export terminals in the federal regulatory queue
And finally, Canada’s energy potential cannot be fully realized without the skilled workforce to build the projects that will get us there. Businesses already struggle with finding the skilled workers they need. The federal government needs to take steps to ensure that critical labour supply does not end up constraining future investment in the energy sector and elsewhere.
Improve the Regulatory Environment
Canada isn’t losing investment; we’re regulating it away, with more than 130,000 requirements in the federal regulatory system as of 2021. These excessive regulatory burdens in turn reduce productivity, deter investment, and limit economic growth.
What we would like to see in the update includes:
- Reducing the overall regulatory burden by strengthening tools like the One-for-One rule, leveraging digital tools and AI to streamline compliance, and setting clear, measurable targets to lower costs over time.
- Improving the quality of new regulations through stronger cost-benefit analysis and more rigorous scrutiny before rules are introduced.
- Modernizing how regulations work by shifting toward risk-based, outcomes-focused approaches and regularly reviewing and updating outdated rules.
- Strengthening oversight of new regulations to ensure rules are necessary, effective, and do not add unnecessary burden.
These recommendations are included in our recent report, Building a Regulatory System that Supports Investment, which provides a roadmap that if implemented, would turn Canada’s regulatory system from a barrier into a competitive advantage.
Strengthen Fiscal Sustainability
The initiatives proposed in Budget 2025 required large amounts of borrowing to finance. While large short-term deficits are not necessarily a problem, they can quickly become one if Canada does not have a credible path towards fiscal sustainability.
In the long term, carrying large deficits risks crowding out private investment due to higher borrowing costs that make expansion, innovation, and investment more expensive.
It also risks diverting more government revenue toward interest payments on the public debt instead of priorities that enable Canadian prosperity in the long-term, such as infrastructure projects, skills development, or support for research and innovation.
BCA is looking for the Spring Economic Statement to outline a pathway towards a more fiscally sustainable future, including clear and credible guardrails to ensure short-term deficits do not lead to a longer-term fiscal crisis.