Wildrose’s economic diversification tour arrived in the Red Deer area on Wednesday and kicked off with a meeting with Red Deer Airport officials.
Prasad Panda, Economic Development and Trade critic for the Wildrose, said he wanted to know if there were other business opportunities that would allow the regional airport to grow.
“There is infrastructure here and it’s easy to build on that. They should definitely look at expanding this airport,” said Panda who began his tour of the province about 10 days ago.
The local tour was also going to include a visit to Nova Chemicals.
The MLA for Calgary-Foothills said Wildrose wants to encourage diversification in Red Deer where unemployment has reached an alarming rate of 10 per cent which is even higher than the rate in Calgary.
“Everyone is concerned about the state of the economy here.”
He said Wildrose also wants to build on Alberta’s strengths, for example by fighting the NDP’s cap on emissions to get more oil out of the ground.
“The intentions are good. (NDP) are trying to take carbon out of the economy, they want to de-carbonize, but without realizing economic impacts, the social impacts,” Panda said.
Innisfail-Sylvan Lake MLA Don MacIntyre said the NDP government has decided coal is evil and is determined to get rid of coal-generated electricity. But they don’t realize the 5,600 primary industry jobs that will be lost, that will eventually result in losing 15,000 more jobs in seven communities.
“Alberta is a resource economy. We use natural resources, renewable and non-renewable. To attack any one segment of that, especially when the economy is down like this, is absolutely inexcusable. We should be supporting those primary industry jobs, not trying to kill them,” MacIntyre said.
He said the NDP should be exploring carbon capture and storage rather than vilifying coal.
szielinski@www.reddeeradvocate.com