No big changes coming to environment budget: Minister
Posted Feb 26, 2016 1:35 pm.
Last Updated Feb 26, 2016 2:19 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Budget speculation is rampant after the provincial government warned of a $10 billion deficit this spring.
Speaking at an eco-trust conference in Calgary on Friday, Environment Minister Shannon Phillips assured attendees that environmental priorities will still be addressed in the spring budget.
Phillips said programs such as flood mitigation and water shed restoration will forge ahead, along with conservation initiatives and water protection. She added, the “nuts and bolts” of the environment budget will remain unchanged, which she admitted won’t be easy.
“All of us departments with the exception of health and education have been asked to essentially keep our budgets at zero,” Phillips said. “So that’s our target. It’s no secret, and we’re finding ways to do that.”
The minister says her government is not interested in compromising public safety or public health through massive reductions to the environment budget.
The minister also used the conference to stress that an east-west connection is very important to Alberta’s energy security. However, she said the challenge is to bring down per-barrel emissions and be carbon-competitive in what she called a carbon-constrained future.
Phillips said it’s clear that for the foreseeable future, Alberta will be an energy producer. But she added, we can expect diversification to be a priority come budget time in April.
“We’ve already announced some of our petro-chemical and other diversification initiatives, but there’s a whole other world of renewable energy, clean technology, and so on,” she said. “We made an announcement [Thursday] in terms of $40 million partnership investment with the federal government on clean tech. There’s more of that to come. Because we really think that Alberta has a number of strengths there, that we can foster and use to ensure that we put people back to work.”
She would not hint on which environment initiatives might be put off in the budget.
