By Mike Martens, President, ICBA Alberta
The following op-ed by ICBA Alberta President Mike Martens was first published in the Calgary Herald on July 22, 2025.
It can be easy to think nothing past the Rockies really matters to Albertans, but what’s happening in British Columbia is deeply troubling on many levels.
The way an NDP Government is mismanaging B.C.’s finances, economy and natural resources should be a warning to all of us.
NDP leader and B.C. Premier David Eby has introduced economic and energy policies that are catastrophic for workers, families, and businesses across his province. The provincial deficit for 2025 is at least $11 billion – and more likely to pass $15 billion, when Eby gets around to updating the public on the real numbers in the fall.
Let that sink in: B.C.’s own self-inflicted climate scheme is two-and-a-half times more economically destructive than one of the most feared threats to Canadian trade and prosperity in generations.
That’s not a future Alberta should aspire to emulate.
Under CleanBC, British Columbia is decarbonizing too much, too fast – without a realistic path to transition for people, businesses and industries. The policy might sound virtuous from a political podium, but on the ground, it’s driving up costs, slowing construction, deterring investment, and making it nearly impossible to build the housing, infrastructure, and energy projects that people desperately need. And yet global emissions keep rising, while B.C. becomes poorer, not greener.
Could Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi – whose municipal track record was defined by ballooning spending, tax hikes, and a wariness of business voices trying to bring practical, on-the-ground insight to policy conversations – bring similar policies and thinking to Alberta? If handed the keys to Alberta’s economy, would he follow Eby’s lead: adding red tape, building massive bureaucracies, and punishing the very industries that fund our hospitals, schools, and roads? If not, let’s hear him say it: Say that Eby’s policies are dangerous and destructive.
Make no mistake: we support smart, balanced, common sense climate policy. But CleanBC isn’t that. It more effective at cleaning out taxpayer coffers than it is at cleaning the air.
Albertans should take that as a warning, not a blueprint.
The ICBA report also exposed another inconvenient truth for Eby and his allies: the B.C. NDP’s much-touted move to eliminate the consumer-facing carbon tax is a political stunt with almost no economic upside. The real economic pain comes from escalating industrial carbon taxes – the hidden costs buried deep in CleanBC. Those are taxes that Nenshi would likely support, and they are the ones hurting job creators and workers the most.
B.C.’s construction industry alone is facing tens of billions in additional costs from CleanBC. In fact, the plan’s overall economic impact is equivalent to nearly four full years of B.C.’s entire construction sector output. That’s how severe and punishing this policy has become. Heaven help us if it creeps into Alberta via Nenshi.
And most damaging of all – to Alberta’s economy as well as B.C.’s – is Eby’s carbon emissions cap, a key part of B.C.’s strategy to achieve its target of driving down emissions to levels not seen in B.C. since the mid-1980s. Spin doctors in Victoria thought this would be a lot more acceptable to voters if government just simply said “40% below 2007 levels”.
This pie-in-the-sky policy will deliver nothing more than massive budget deficits, economic decline and lower standards of living. British Columbians are realizing that you can only be as virtuous as you can afford to be. Eby’s “virtue” is sending B.C.’s economy to failure. And it’s blocking the potential of Alberta’s and B.C.’s natural resources from reaching international markets. Where is ‘Team Canada’ when you need it?
This is what happens when ideology blinds elected officials to common sense and economic reality. Where is Nenshi in this equation? Well, we don’t know, since he has been content to sit this out in silence. A simple statement disavowing the danger of CleanBC and the damage it will inflict on Alberta would suffice – unless, of course, he doesn’t think that.
Alberta’s economy is the envy of the country: a pragmatic, pro-growth approach that balances environmental goals and with the need to attract investment and create jobs. Veering into the same anti-jobs, no-growth, high-tax ditch that Eby’s NDP has put British Columbia, would be costly for all of us.