The NDP Opposition says the provincial budget is “making life more expensive” for rural Alberta.
NDP MLA Heather Sweet says many rural municipalities will have difficulties in maintaining their infrastructure.
“The rural municipalities association came out and said that they don’t believe they’re going to have the revenue to maintain the road work that we need to be able to maintain. We’ve got heavy harvesting equipment travelling on many of those roads and we need to make sure that those roads are safe. The government really needs to do an analysis on our network to make sure that we’re funding that infrastructure for those municipalities.”
Sweet says the budget being reliant on oil prices means the provincial government should put more focus on diversification.
One area that Sweet says the province should look more into having “value-added” production taking place in agriculture.
“There’s many opportunities that are being explored by many of our commodity groups that really want to look at that value-add and they’re just hoping that the government will step up and help them with it. The other piece that needs to acknowledged too is for us to invest to attract into rural Alberta, the municipalities need that infrastructure.”
Sweet adds that more money needs to be put towards rural infrastructure so that some of those processing plants can get built.
You can listen to the full interview below.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
