ICBA C&C #14: Mike Martens on the Alberta Boom

Nearly $318 billion of work. 1,030 projects. That's Alberta's Major Projects registry — this morning. The question isn't whether the work is there. It's who's going to build it.

Episode 14 of ICBA Coffee & Construction — the news that matters to the people who build British Columbia and Alberta, with ICBA's Jordan Bateman. A special edition: our FIRST-EVER guest, ICBA Alberta President Mike Martens.

☕ THE BIG PICTURE: $317.9 BILLION across 1,030 projects on the province's own registry — petrochemical, oil and gas, data centres, schools, Calgary office conversions, a fire hall in Lacombe. Is it a boom, or a pipeline that looks like a boom until you check the start dates?

🖥️ TWO WAVES, ONE REGION: Meta's $13-billion data centre in Sturgeon County (3,000 workers at peak) and Dow's Path2Zero restart in Fort Saskatchewan ($10.1 billion, 4,500–5,500 at peak) — same trades, same corner of the province, overlapping windows

🛢️ OIL AND GAS: Alberta, Ottawa and five oilsands producers sign the Pathways carbon capture memorandum. Is the confidence actually back — or is this still paper and not steel?

🏙️ CALGARY'S CASE STUDY: 21 downtown office conversions, 2.68 million square feet of empty office becoming roughly 2,700 homes — while provincial housing starts cool from 55,800 to 46,000

🔧 WHO BUILDS IT: The building trades unions are about 12% of Alberta's construction workforce. Open shop is everybody else. So why does federal trades money keep landing in the same 12%?

🏗️ ICBA Meet the Generals & Owners — Edmonton, Tuesday, September 29, Edmonton Convention Centre. Western Canada's best day of business development. Register: https://events.icba.ca/edmonton