MP for Battle River-Crowfoot Kevin Sorenson, along with his Alberta colleagues have presented a report to the Liberal government to find solutions for high unemployment.
Sorenson explains the Alberta Conservative Caucus completed the report after consulting with their communities to come up with recommendations.
“We have been very frustrated. We have seen both the Liberal government and provincially, there is not a lot of job creation,” said Sorenson.
“In fact, in my constituency, the unemployment numbers have increased, and when you see that you are hoping there is a plan, there is some sort of a strategy to get people back to work,” he said.
He said this could be done through incentivization through lowering taxes or other means.
He said each member of the task force consulted widely to get ideas on what could be done during this slowdown in the economy and completed the report.
“That is one of the initiatives we proceeded with. We wanted to do this before the budget was released and to make it public so the government and finance minister would be able to look at it and see how dire the circumstances are here,” said Sorenson.
He is hopeful their messages got through.
“They have made some big announcements on some infrastructure projects. I think their number one strategy for creating jobs is spending, and they are doing this with releasing different projects into Alberta. There has been some into my riding, but there is no overall plan,” he said. “Maybe they will create some jobs but in the meantime, they are going ahead with the carbon tax and payroll taxes. They are not going to do anything that is going to give job creators a real confidence there is some sort of plan behind it.”
He adds that in their report one of the highlights was that small and medium businesses did not want to shoulder more taxes, as it is not an incentive to hire people.
In January 2016, the unemployment rate in the Camrose-Drumheller region was 6.2 per cent. In January 2017, it was 8.9 per cent.
