Alberta needs to carefully consider who will have influence over our future.
I have had the privilege to work with a team of outstanding Albertans building a Mountain View County-based ag tech (agricultural technology) company that will relieve ranchers from regulatory burden and lay the foundation for their sustainability response.
Our team includes a lifetime rancher, and an outstanding young woman, both from multi-generational Mountain View County ranching families. We have received investment and excellent counsel from Albertans with extensive experience, and decades of history, in agriculture and business.
In 2022 the Government of Alberta (GOA) commissioned the report Realizing the Potential for AgTech in Alberta.
We were excited. The report clearly demonstrated our company’s work was a GOA priority. Our company aligned with every action item identified in the report. We saw opportunity to collaborate with GOA to achieve multiple objectives to our mutual benefit.
We prepared a detailed response to the report. We wrote a positive and engaging email. We circulated it broadly, including the minister of Agriculture and Forestry, as the ministry was named at the time, and the minister of Jobs, Economy and Innovation.
We received a polite email from the minister of Agriculture and Forestry referring us to three institutions that we were already working with.
We thanked the minister. We have received outstanding support from the institutions we were referred to, and continue to have productive relationships with all of them.
But we received no personal engagement with a GOA minister or senior administrator. And while disappointing, I can appreciate that senior leaders have full agendas and can provide personal attention to only important Albertans.
So who in Alberta is important enough get personal attention and advocacy from a senior government leader? Artur Pawlowski.
Mr. Pawlowski was born in Poland and became a Canadian citizen in 2004 at the age of 30.
I give unconditional appreciation to every new Canadian who chooses Alberta to make their constructive contribution to our collective benefit.
But if Mr. Pawlowski has made any contribution to Alberta’s vitality beyond founding multiple street churches, I can find no reference to it.
This cannot be a business as usual Alberta election. We have eight weeks to secure leadership that will determine Alberta's response to the challenges of global food insecurity and energy transition. Critical and difficult decisions will be required to sustain Alberta’s prosperity.
I ask every Albertan to carefully reflect on the remarkable circumstances that have brought us to this place. And then to actively engage with sourcing and selecting leadership that will effectively guide Alberta through the generational change before us.
Mark Olson,
Carstairs
