Mid-Mandate Reset: Alberta Throne Speech focuses on health care, shoring up finances, and asserting sovereignty
Press Release
Oct 24, 2025
The Alberta legislature reconvened on October 23, 2025, following a prorogation that concluded the first session of the 31st Legislature. This allows the government to reset its legislative agenda and present a renewed vision to Albertans.
Anticipation surrounds the government’s legislative agenda, with expectations of introducing at least 15 bills this fall, including plans to limit how professional regulatory bodies can police their own members, aiming to balance public trust with individual freedoms. The government will introduce Bill 2, the Back to School Act, with both the second and third readings likely taking place on the same day. Once passed, the legislation would bring an end to the teachers’ strike, which has been ongoing since the beginning of October.
5 Key Takeaways & Highlights from the Alberta Throne Speech
- Strengthening the Energy Sector: Pipelines and Indigenous partnerships
The Throne Speech emphasizes a strong, definitive commitment to expand oil and gas production, reiterating the Premier’s message that “the world needs more Alberta’s energy. Not less.”
The speech also highlighted the province’s efforts to secure new pipeline access to both coastal Asia and eastern Canadian markets, partnerships with First Nations, and Alberta’s energy independence.
The government is standing behind its natural resources strength and has been increasingly pitching natural gas to power data-centres alongside other energy exports as part of a diversification strategy. The framing also underlines a provincial strategy to reclaim “sovereignty” in resource development and federal-provincial jurisdiction, which may complicate intergovernmental relations and regulatory alignment moving forward.
- Fiscal Discipline and Building the Heritage fund
On the fiscal side, the speech signaled caution in the face of volatile energy revenues: despite past surpluses, it acknowledges that lower oil prices (Western Canadian Select is below $50 per barrel) and trade tariffs have created global headwinds, triggering a substantial budget deficit.
In response, the government laid out a plan to:
- Expand the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund to over $250 billion by 2050 and prohibit spending its returns until at least that date;
- Limit spending growth to less than inflation plus population growth; and
- Build on Alberta’s strengths in Artificial Intelligence, Agriculture, Forestry, Critical Minerals, Environmental Technologies and Health Innovation
- Review all government programs and grants
This plan is in response to Alberta’s recurring ‘boom and bust’ resource economy. The government is trying to cut spending, but some critics have noted this will risk under-investing in immediate social priorities if a tighter provincial budget is presented in spring 2026.
- Health System Overhaul
The speech outlines a move away from the centralized Alberta Health Services (AHS) Model to the four new agencies, activity-based funding for chartered surgical centers, and expanded access to private diagnostics. Prevention, addiction recovery and seniors community care are a focus for the new agencies. This creates opportunities for private and hybrid organizations and businesses to expand their services.
Clearly, this government views the restructuring of the health system through the lens that AHS was both inefficient and bureaucratic, setting the stage for redistributing funding authority and contracting power away from AHS. In the broader political context, their approach deepens the ideological divide in Alberta’s healthcare debate: modernizing the system and driving accountability versus opening the door to creeping privatization and further eroding trust in public institutions already under political strain.
This government will do so by moving away from a previous block-funding model for our public hospitals towards a more competitive and responsive activity-based funding model.
- Investment in Infrastructure
The government is planning to fund:
- $8.6 billion to create 200,000 school spaces
- Thousands of teachers and educational assistants will be hired
- Expand road networks, including the Deerfoot and Yellowhead trail expansion
- LRT and passenger rail
- Hire hundreds of new police officers
- Invest hundreds of millions into municipal infrastructure
- Alberta Sovereignty, Intergovernmental Friction, and the International Agreements Act
Premier Smith doubled down on Alberta’s sovereignty agenda and immediately after tabled Bill 1, The International Agreements Act. The legislation draws out a constitutional line that states any international agreement that touches provincial jurisdiction must be debated and passed within Alberta’s legislature before it applies to the province. This is an indication that Alberta is drawing a line in the sand that says the province, not Ottawa, will decide how environmental, trade, or social policy frameworks take effect within its borders.
Overall, the fall session is an ambitious one that aims to get the “grand bargain for Alberta.” The government intends to move quickly on structural reform within the healthcare system and bring in legislation that aligns with its ideological framework of smaller government, competitive and more efficient public-service delivery, resource-led growth, and strengthen provincial autonomy over several areas, including energy, immigration, and interprovincial migration.
ILR4
