Alberta Referendum: What's at Stake?

All right well let's dive right in.

I just I'm gonna again just zone in on that what's keeping our members up at night and so if you maybe could both share what you're hearing from your member organizations about the impacts or potential impacts of separation.

I know you both have been doing a lot of analysis you've been putting a lot out there on your media channels and you know we at VCC really do appreciate your leadership on that Maybe do explain what are you hearing? And then we can maybe dig into how does that relate to, you know, social services and poverty? And, you know, if we talk about the nonprofit sector, there's a lot there, but there's a lot in the business sector as well to explore.

So maybe, Ruhi, we could start with you.

What are you hearing? What is keeping your members up at night?

Well, part of what we're hearing from our business community is actually really clear.

They're very concerned about separatism and concerned about the economic uncertainty that it comes with, too.

And so as the chamber, we've commissioned professional research to help us be able to unpack what exactly this means for businesses and have been talking to our businesses, both in terms of anecdotal evidence and conversations about how it's impacting them, but also have some really interesting data that unpacks exactly how they're feeling.

We ran a survey and found that three in four of our respondents see that there's no tangible benefit for Alberta separating from Canada.

And 80% already think that the discussion is impacting the Alberta economy in a negative way.

And most of those, 63%, actually say that it's impacting their own business.

Those are numbers from June.

And so really in relatively early days of this conversation, and we'll be polling our members more, But it's quite stark to see just the level of impact given that the referendum is a vote on a vote, but the businesses are already making material decisions about their future.

And we're quite concerned about what that means from a business perspective, but also in terms of hiring and growth too.

And so that has real impact for Albertans and for Canadians.

One in five are already slowing their expansion plans here.

And so that means fewer businesses are are opening up new locations, looking at opportunities more broadly.

And we're particularly concerned about what that means given the Canada-US relations and how that's going.

So for a lot of our businesses, they've been exporting to the States.

The States has been our number one customer.

And now with that market seriously changing, there's a lot of businesses that are concerned about whether their growth prospects could materialize outside of Alberta and within Canada as well.

And so their first stop, obviously, when a lot of this unfolded was to look at expanding interprovincially.

And now those opportunities are uncertain as well.

And it's not to say that we don't hear a lot about federal policy changes in terms of the separation conversation.

We've heard lots from our businesses over the last decade about the need for federal policy reform.