David Legg: Alberta's independence debate is no deterrent to investors
'They don't fundamentally believe that the investment they've made in Alberta is at risk at all,' Legg said on Thursday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show.
On Thursday's episode of The Ezra Levant Show, David Legg, chief executive of Invest Alberta, told Ezra Levant that companies weighing billion-dollar bets on Alberta are not deterred by the province's coming independence referendum debate — they're deterred by Ottawa's track record of mismanaging major assets.
Legg pointed to the federal government's purchase and expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline as the prime example investors cite.
"TMX is a global disaster in terms of somebody that's an investor looking at a country saying I'd like to build that," Legg said, adding that the project has made it "totally impossible to imagine ever privately funding a pipeline" in Canada again.
Legg said Invest Alberta, the agency he built modelled on Ireland's globally admired development strategy, has drawn more foreign capital into the province than Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia combined over the past three years. He credited that success not to marketing, but to a deliberate strategy of asking major global players what it would take to win their business.
He recounted a conversation with Sanjeev Lamba, chairman and CEO of Linde Corporation, whose company has invested more than $2 billion in Alberta over four years. When Legg raised the looming referendum question directly with Lamba, the response was measured curiosity rather than alarm.
"They don't fundamentally believe that the investment they've made in Alberta is at risk at all," Legg said of major investors generally. "They just think that whatever the structure of the kind of constitutional arrangements will be, will be what it will be."
Legg argued that jurisdictions willing to have hard internal debates about their own future — citing Ireland, Singapore and Abu Dhabi as examples of small, resource-poor places that built world-class economies through deliberate policy — actually signal strength to investors, not risk.
"When you work with them like that, they actually think these guys have their act together," he said.
Legg said Alberta recently landed a spot on the shortlist for 20 major industrial projects, a direct result of momentum generated by the Dow and Meta announcements, and suggested a further cut to Alberta's corporate tax rate could accelerate that trend even more.
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