“I can say that definitively,” Wilkinson said in an interview after introducing the Canadian Sustainable Jobs Act in the House of Commons.
The new legislation is designed to set some requirements for the federal government to make sure Canada has a workforce ready to jump into those opportunities. It is unlikely that more specifics will be released before 2025, when the first plan under the proposed legislation is due. She called it “an unconstitutional and existential threat to the Alberta economy and the jobs of hundreds of thousands of Albertans,” and said scrapping the jobs transition plan was a “non-negotiable condition” of Alberta investing more for carbon capture and storage in the oilsands.
If federal recommendations run contrary to the provincial plan, Smith said: “Alberta will not recognize the legitimacy of those recommendations in any manner.” The proposed law was a key part of the supply-and-confidence agreement the Liberals made with the NDP in 2022, and the NDP was part of the team that developed the legislation over the past year.