Calgary Chamber of Commerce hoping for a ‘new chapter’ with Alberta-Ottawa agreement

Ruhee Ismail-Teja on Alberta Primetime Nov 25, 2025

Ruhee Ismail-Teja with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce joins Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins to discuss plans to host Prime Minister Mark Carney this Thursday, the same day he is expected to outline a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Alberta and the federal government.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: What’s the tie between the expected MOU and the event hosted by the chamber?

Ruhee Ismail-Teja: We’re hoping to see a new chapter for collaboration between Ottawa and Alberta. There’s several shared priorities, and Prime Minister Carney has been talking about Canada being an energy superpower for quite some time. Part of what we have yet to see is a full scale change that addresses a lot of the regulatory concerns and the lack of infrastructure that has prevented us from being able to get to our full potential as an energy superpower.

We’re hoping we will see progress and an announcement between the provincial and federal governments addressing some of those key barriers. That talks about a pipeline to the West Coast, a Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage project to reduce emissions even further, some regulatory changes to the clean electricity regulations, as well as confirmation and full clarity that the emissions cap Is in fact off the table.

MH: Safe to say, the agreement will factor into the PM’s address to your membership?

RI: I have no doubt provincial-federal relations and the future of Canada and our energy sector will be one of the things discussed at our event on Thursday. We’re really eager to have the prime minister address the Calgary business community. It’s been quite some time since we’ve had this level of federal presence in Calgary, and being able to see it followed up with some serious policy decisions that impact the trajectory of Canada’s energy sector would be quite significant.

MH: On the point of policy decisions, who do you see carrying the weight of the MOU – the Alberta government, or the federal government?

RI: We’ve seen a Team Canada approach on a whole bunch of different files, and part of what will make this successful is a shared responsibility between the Alberta government and the federal government. That there is compromise on both sides, that there might be progress on industrial carbon pricing insofar as what the provincial government has previously done, and that it will take both parties, as well as collaboration from industry, to be able to actually execute on these pieces and move them forward.

MH: The Calgary Chamber has representation in Ottawa at the moment, releasing a new report on advancing infrastructure projects – but not necessarily to the scope of multi-billion dollar pipelines.

What are you pushing for?

RI: We’ve been very encouraged to see progress on some of the major infrastructure projects through the Major Projects Office and are encouraged by many of the national interest projects the federal government has indicated they’ll prioritize.

At the same time, we know it’s smaller, local, regional projects that will ultimately mean Canada’s economic potential is achieved, and we have several regulatory barriers. We have competitiveness hurdles, we have challenges related to labor, all of which impede our ability to build several small things across the country, and those shouldn’t need the Major Projects Office. That’s not what it’s designed to do.

For us to fully advance a Build Canada agenda, we need a framework that allows for projects of all natures to be built. The report we’re tabling today called “Infrastructure and Waiting” is about how we move many of those projects to be infrastructure in action, and have them fully executed. So regardless of whether there’s a major project in in the backyard of any province or any region, we have the ability to move forward on infrastructure that matters.

MH: How do you see that relating to the Alberta context, especially given the degree of focus on a pipeline?

RI: We’re optimistic many of our recommendations might be realized as early as Thursday, but we also know that there are several long-standing challenges we’ve continued to face as a country. This report works to address some of those, ensuring that Canada has a competitive taxation framework, our regulatory process broadly can move forward, and not just for major projects like pipelines, but for those smaller regional projects. We talk about Indigenous participation in business, which has come a very long way in the last few years, but obviously has further ways to go at this point. What equity partnerships could look like, and what the federal government’s role specifically is in establishing those. We talk a lot about trade enabling infrastructure as well.

If we are going to build things, and we do want to export to new markets beyond the U.S., what infrastructure we need to have in place? And the last piece we’re focused on is about labor. If we have this Build Canada agenda, we know we already have a trades labor shortage. Our capacity to build in this country is going to be limited by our labor supply. We provide concrete recommendations to the federal government about how to address some of those barriers.

MH: Given those recommendations, how big of a policy shift would you consider that to represent for the federal government?

RI: We’ve seen a significant change in tone in the last year from the federal government. Policy change takes time, and so it would be a significant shift from where we’ve been over the last five year horizon. These recommendations would help follow the changing tone that we’ve seen from Ottawa with some real, concrete action.