Making Our Own Luck: Alberta’s Path to 21st-Century Prosperity

By Jess Sinclair
CCI Director of Prairie Affairs

As I write this, I’m listening to a recent interview with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, where she acknowledges the provincial budget is likely to be “a tough one.”

While the Premier is ruling out major cuts to public services, it’s anticipated this will come at the cost of multi-billion-dollar deficits over the coming fiscal years. New spending will, predictably, be restrained to nearly non-existent.

Seneca opined that luck is where preparation meets opportunity, and Alberta, though it seems to have avoided some of the worst fallout of 2025’s trade conflict, could sure use a bit of good fortune at the moment.

I’ve written before on the policies that will allow Alberta researchers, founders, and firms to retain more of their own patents, trade secrets, data, utility models, and other intangible assets. These, in addition to the other recommendations in CCI’s 2026 pre-budget submission to Finance Minister Nate Horner, represent several low-cost options for the province to continue to champion the growing pool of maturing Alberta tech companies, retain top talent, and commercialize big ideas here at home.

Our team talks a lot about these types of policy levers, but, as with so many things, real-world examples are the most compelling. In 1984, Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist at the University of Toronto, identified glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) in the human gut, a discovery that paved the way for Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as later generic diabetes and weight-loss drugs. Over the ensuing years, a number of researchers, scientists, physicians, and pharmacists from Denmark and the US worked to bring these drugs to market.

The economic benefits for Denmark, where the drugs were patented – thanks to, among other things, a robust intellectual property policy regime – have been nothing short of astounding. Two thirds of the country’s 2025 GDP growth came from the four boroughs that house Novo Nordisk’s Danish facilities. Some economists peg the company’s direct contributions to the national GDP at 1.9% in 2023 alone, to say nothing of the knock-on impacts on consumer spending, job creation, and infrastructure investment. Denmark’s overall GDP grew by a staggering 13.4% in 2023, far outpacing its Scandinavian peers.

It would be an over-simplification to assert that Denmark’s patent regime is solely responsible for the huge windfalls the country has captured from its pharmaceutical industry. However, the GLP-1 example highlights what’s possible when a new idea or invention meets a jurisdiction that has stood up smart innovation industrial policy.

Alberta has historically led the country in this sort of common-sense focus on building economic value through standing up the organizations and policy to harness great ideas. The province established the country’s first provincial research and development agency — the Scientific and Industrial Research Council of Alberta in 1921 to explore and commercialize ways of exploiting the province’s energy resources. This type of proactive planning paved the way for developing and commercializing the Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage that would unlock the world’s fourth largest proven oil reserve, and billions in resource revenues.

Over the past thirty years, most Canadian jurisdictions (including Alberta) have placed an outsize focus on foreign direct investment. In doing so, they’ve lost sight of the value-added marketplace frameworks needed to build economies with the depth and breadth to weather volatile resource prices and geopolitical unrest.

Refocussing our efforts on creating the conditions that will harness prosperity in the 21st century isn’t cost-intensive, but it’s increasingly imperative. I’ll be looking for some of these critical themes to be woven into what promises to be a difficult budget later this week.

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Jess Sinclair leads CCI’s advocacy efforts in the prairies, and can be reached at jsinclair@canadianinnovators.org.

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About the Council of Canadian Innovators

The Council of Canadian Innovators is a national member-based organization reshaping how governments across Canada think about innovation policy, and supporting homegrown scale-ups to drive prosperity. Established in 2015, CCI represents and works with over 175 of Canada’s fastest-growing technology companies. Our members are the CEOs, founders, and top senior executives behind some of Canada’s most successful ‘scale-up’ companies. All our members are job and wealth creators, investors, philanthropists, and experts in their fields of health tech, cleantech, fintech, cybersecurity, AI and digital transformation. Companies in our portfolio are market leaders in their verticals, commercialize their technologies in over 190 countries, and generate between $10M-$750M in annual recurring revenue. We advocate on their behalf for government strategies that increase their access to skilled talent, strategic capital, and new customers, as well as expanded freedom to operate for their global pursuits of scale.