Nally given hydrogen vehicles, cannabis sector and life leases in mandate letter

Morinville-St. Albert MLA Dale Nally, the minister of Service Alberta and red tape reduction, will be keeping his eye on hydrogen infrastructure while digging into the cannabis sector and continuing to reduce red tape across the province.

Nally received his mandate letter from Alberta Premier Danielle Smith this week. 

“I was very honoured with it,” Nally said.

“It was everything that I wanted.”

Nally was originally handed the portfolio in October when Smith defeated former-Premier Jason Kenney and shuffled some key seats in the UCP cabinet. The St. Albert MLA previously served as associate minister of natural gas and electricity.

Starting in October, Nally got to work dealing with a backlog in land titles, which at the time was taking six months to process. The land titles backlog has been reduced by 62 per cent, Nally said, and by October it will only take 10 days to process a land title.

The system hit a snag during COVID when many people moved, both into Alberta or to a new home in the province, which caused a surge of titles needing to be processed. Land title changes surged and doubled through the peak of the pandemic.

The system the province uses to process the titles is manual, not automatic, and some 50 new staff were hired in January to help fight to backlog.

“We still will not have the automation in place to respond to another increase in volumes so we are looking at an automated solution that will bring us scalability in case we ever encounter this problem again,” Nally said.

The minister will also be tasked with looking at the cannabis sector, which he said right now is not doing as well as it could be.

Aurora Cannabis, a cannabis producer, recently closed the door on a production facility in Alberta, which Nally said is a sign the province needs to make sure the same business environment exists in the cannabis sector that does in the rest of the province.

Alberta has more cannabis retailers than other jurisdictions, which could be the cause of struggles in the industry, but red tape and regulation could also be driving out businesses, Nally said.  

While the minister will be looking at some new files, he will also be rolling up his sleeves in some familiar territory.

Nally previously worked to help build the Alberta Hydrogen Roadmap, a plan to integrate hydrogen into the provincial energy system along with setting the province up to export hydrogen to other markets.

Now Nally will help continue to build hydrogen infrastructure, although this time it is to work with private sector investors to get hydrogen vehicle fuelling stations, along with electric vehicle fuelling stations, constructed around the province.

Electric vehicles will always be an option in Alberta, Nally said, and the province needs more infrastructure for those vehicles, but the electricity grid can’t support all vehicles going electric.

“But hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are scalable, and if we had the fuelling stations in place tomorrow, everybody could have one,” Nally said.

Typically the minister of red tape spends time cutting regulations, but Nally will also be looking at life leases in Alberta, a leasing style present in some seniors living facilities and seeing if more red tape is needed in the sector.

A life lease requires residents to put down a lump sum to live in a facility, the majority of which is returned to the resident or next of kin upon the resident's death or the property being vacated. 

“We're not going to ask all life leases to stop… but we're going to take a look at it,” Nally said.

“We're going to consult with Albertans and we're going to consult with industry. We're going to have some fulsome consultations, make some hard decisions about what those life lease protections are going to look like.”

The province has no current legislation around life leases.