Spending time with family

By Leela Sharon Aheer Chestermere-Strathmore MLA

Hello Strathmore! I hope you have been enjoying the beautiful weather this past week, and a big shout out to all the dads. I hope your family spoiled you, and that you were able to carve out some family time.
In connection with our platform commitments, I and some of my fellow MLAs met with many folks from the film industry as we are hoping to attract this incredible and viable industry to our province. We met with some amazing people from Netflix, Bell TV, Telus and APTN, all of whom are creating content on various platforms, from broadcasting to the internet. We in Alberta consume a ton of content from platforms such as Crave, HBO, Netflix and others. We also tend to enjoy documentaries. The industry is taking notice of our province and sees us as an amazing opportunity for their companies to flourish here whether that is in actual movie making, production, lighting, technical work and other jobs to post-production which is where the long-term jobs are. Our amazing folks from the oil and gas industry have skills that are transferable into this industry, making it a real possibility to see jobs created if we can attract the companies here. I don’t know if you know this, but Calgary has a beautiful sound stage (where they create sets and do scenes inside buildings) called the Calgary Film Centre that houses some amazing productions such as Fargo, Jann (based on Jann Arden’s life) and Heartland. In order to attract more investment, we are looking at changing the funding model to a tax credit system that will hopefully make the system more flexible and bring in some more great productions that have longevity and will help to build up the industry and create jobs. We are very excited to sell Alberta, and we are even more excited to see what the industry will do in helping us to continue to build our province and our prosperity. B.C, Manitoba and Ontario have very viable and competitive markets. In B.C, 90,000 jobs have been created and moreover they are scooping up the fine talent that is being created in Alberta at our institutions, from production to management to logistics. With low corporate taxes, repealing the carbon tax, our work ethic, our beautiful vistas, the sheer talent and the low Canadian dollar we have a lot to offer.
On to the federal government; I wish I had good news to share. As you have probably read, Bill C-69, aka the “no more pipelines bill,” was rammed through by the federal Liberals. This is an attack on our prosperity and our First Nations, and it does nothing to help the environment. In fact, not selling our natural resources that are recovered responsibly and with the best regulations in the world is an attack on every nation that is in energy poverty, and it is especially despicable because many other suppliers have a horrible human rights record, and no environmental regulations when you compare to Canadian products. It seems the federal Liberals prefer Saudi oil (where women are the property of their male relatives) to Canadian oil. Does this make sense? We cannot stand down on this issue. No more apologies.
The Prime Minister is doing his level best to lose his election coming up on Oct. 21, 2019. Many Liberals are getting nervous as seen in the June 13 Financial Post article by Diane Francis (https://business.financialpost.com/diane-francis/liberal-mps-are-jumping-ship-in-droves-as-trudeau-continues-to-hobble-the-economy). Fleeing capital, the lack of pipeline infrastructure, the lack of competitiveness, and the real lack of a plan short of virtue signaling and my favourite, the water bottle, I mean the water boxes, you know, those disposable things that we carry water in – you get the picture.
Happy Philippine Independence Month, 121 years in celebration this year. We are honoured to know and work with the incredible Philippine families in Alberta, over 75,000 strong. Also, we celebrated world refugee day this past week. Please join us in giving a warm welcome to the refugees in our community. World Refugee Day offers an opportunity for everyone to show support for people forced to flee.
I would like to give a special shout out to the Go Girls team in Strathmore and especially to the Wheatland Crisis Shelter which held its Under The Big Top Gala and Fundraiser this past Saturday. Go Girls teaches girls the sky is limit to what they can accomplish, and the Wheatland Crisis Society with their Strathmore Shelter offers refuge to victims of abuse.
Our Strathmore Office is just about fully open, and our Langdon office should be opening soon. As always, we love to hear from you at 403-207-9889 or Chestermere.Strathmore@assembly.ab.ca.
(Leela Sharon Aheer is the MLA Elect for Chestermere-Strathmore, Minister of Status of Women and Minister of Culture and Multiculturalism)